Whitgift School shows old boys’ Great War artefacts
Simon Tait
The Times, 23 Jan 2016
Second Lieutenant Lionel Morris was still a schoolboy when he went to war. He was seconded from the Royal Artillery to the Royal Flying Corps 3rd Brigade, No 11 Squadron and on September 17th, 1916, he flew his Farman Experimental 2b two-seater biplane on a bombing raid on the railway station at Marcoing in Northern France. On his return he encountered a group of 20 German aircraft and in the dogfight that followed he was shot down. He managed to land his aircraft but was mortally wounded and died later that day, becoming the first victim of the German ace Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, who was to go on to record 80 “kills”. Lt Morris was 19.
Months before Morris had been a pupil at Whitgift School in South Croydon, and by a curious irony when Richthofen was himself shot down over Amiens 18 months later it was another Whitgift old boy, Lt. Col. George Barber, who supervised the autopsy.
Morris was one of 251 former pupils and staff of Whitgift who died in the First World War, and his story has inspired an exhibition at the school which will challenge major museums with what started two years ago as a school history project.
“I felt we should mark the First World War and we decided to concentrate on a particular year, 1916, and try to get under the skin of it”, said the headmaster Dr Christopher Barnett. “We started by gong through our own book of remembrance, but then, through the school and our families, we found so many collectors eager to lend objects to us, and we rather got carried away with the wealth of what came forward”.
Nearly all of the objects in the exhibition, which opens in March, have never before been displayed. They include a German light field wagon, found in a shed near the school where it had been restored by an enthusiast. The exhibition will focus on three major battles of 1916, Verdun, the Somme and Jutland, and there is a German battleship flag from the battle as well as an ensign from Rear Admiral William Goodenough’s cruiser. One of the families associated with the school has supplied the sign from Verdun station from the period, and there is fabric from the Red Baron’s triplane, signed by him. There is a letter from the son of the music hall star Harry Lauder to his sweetheart written on Christmas Eve 1916; Captain John Lauder was killed on the Somme four days later.
But this is not Whitgift School’s first venture into the realm of blockbuster exhibitions. In 2009 it mounted a display of 250 artefacts – most of which had never been on public show before – retrieved from the wreck of Henry VIII’s flagship The Mary Rose, pre-empting the opening of the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth by three years. It drew 35,000 visitors, and the exhibits even ran to the reconstruction of the head of the ship’s bosun from his skeleton, and of the ship’s dog.
There are reconstructions in the new exhibition, too: three full-size trenches are being recreated, British, French and German, using ten tons of sandbags, and there is even a computer simulation of Lt Morris’s last flight, for which Dr Barnett flew over Northern France in a light plane.
When the stricken Morris had managed to land his plane (behind enemy lines) Richthofen landed beside him to record the details of his victim. He had a silver cup made to commemorate it, and the original has long been lost, but the school is having a replica made for the exhibition, complete with details Richthofen would have had engraved on it: the date of the kill and the name of the aircraft.
Remembering 1916 – Life on the Western Front is at Whitgift School, South Croydon, March 12 th August 31st.
