ABC Wednesday: "H" is for the horrors of war

Dunham dusted: It's circa 1917 and young Roger Grey, a Lieutenant in World War I and 10th Earl of Stamford and inheritor of the Massey Manor, reflects on the horrors of it all.

Mancunian Wave is today taking part in the "H" round of ABC Wednesday.

In World War I, Cheshire stately home Dunham Massey gave up some of its vast space to become a military hospital for the wounded. The current exhibition on there is both moving and in places highly innovative. A ward of beds is seemingly devoid of patients but looking closer, beds appear to have invisible breathing soldiers in them.  An empty plaster cast lay on top of a bed, with notes about gangrene, emitting an appropriate stench. An operating theatre has life-size medics and a patient, all somehow body-less but wearing clothes.

Short vignettes are acted out, as if by ghosts from 100 years ago; a nurse is harangued by a shell-shocked bed-ridden patient; another soldier sits forlornly in a chair, his eyesight ruined, urging a nurse to take time out to re-read him a letter from home which also tells of the death of his brother, killed in action. The Stamford family are there too, a teenager daughter is a nurse at the hospital, while eldest son Roger* is back on leave. 

Record players and sheet music play and evoke the music of the era, signs from the time and tomes of history - along with information boards and children’s interactivity - all give the whole exhibition a sense.

* Roger Grey became a recluse, and was a Christian Socialist who never married or fathered children. On his death in 1976 he left Dunham Massey to the National Trust.

Footnote 1: Newspapers of the era are also laid out along the way, which should have been a powerful tool into the history of the day- although this is where my one gripe lays- they were all copies of the Daily Mail. It spoilt an otherwise memorable walk into history, cleverly done- copies of other newspapers would have given a better balance, and considering the location of Dunham Massey, the Manchester Guardian should be displayed in place of some of the London-based Daily Mail. Even more so when you consider Roger Grey's politics. It’s not too late for that to be rectified by the National Trust at Dunham Massey. ~the exhibition runs until 11 November, open Sats to Weds and also when the hall reopens next year (2015 dates tbc).