A treasure trove of wartime memories at the archive

A rolling exhibition of archive material from 100 years ago is shedding new light on how Orcadians experienced, thought and felt about World War One.

The Orkney at War – in the Orkney Archive exhibition showcases archive items created 100 years ago, to give an insight into how Orkney and ordinary Orcadians were affected by the conflict.

Organised in three-to-six month “windows” over the wartime period (August 2014 – June 1919), putting together the exhibition has involved looking in depth at the archive’s collection from those years for any mentions of the First World War.

Admiral Jellicoe’s signature in a visitor book is the latest nugget revealed by the team’s trawl through archive material.

Archivist Lucy Gibbon says: “I opened up this innocuous looking visitor book – the YMCA Longhope visitor book – and out fell a note saying ‘some interesting signatures in here’.

“I was so pleased when I saw Jellicoe’s signature, I told all my colleagues instantly.”

Jellicoe had visited the Longhope YMCA on August 1, 1916, with his wife and her sister.

Lucy says archive items range from the extremely poignant to the comical: “We have uncovered moving accounts from survivors of naval battles, and eyewitness accounts of a German who tried to smuggle himself from America to Germany concealed in his wife’s clothes trunk, but was discovered when the boat they were travelling on together was stopped in Kirkwall for inspection.

“The newspaper report at the time comments on how nobody had suspected anything, though some passengers had ‘expressed surprise at the lady’s huge appetite’.”

The exhibition is spread on boards and cases throughout the Orkney Library and Archive building in Kirkwall, with the current starting point upstairs and just to the right of the Archive Searchroom doorway. Visitors can arrange a short tour of the exhibition with Lucy.