Out and About with…Raksha and Lisa

It’s two for the price of one again this week, as Raksha gets to boss Lisa around the trenches!

Raksha and Lisa on a recent Time Team shoot. It rained. A lot. Matt Williams can be seen in the background, muttering to himself about how much he wishes he was digging a nice, easy Roman villa. Wimp!

Last week I was out and about in Grantham, Lincolnshire.  Grantham is notorious for its strong women, notably – ahem – Lady Thatcher, and as the home of the first women’s police force, recruited during the First World War.

We were there to excavate the WWI remains of the Machine Gun Corps training ground and unravel the story of the men that were trained there.  As with most of the Great Wars’ soldiers, most of those that fought sadly never returned home.  Post -Medieval archaeology is either loved or hated

The Grantham Smiler.

by your run-of-the-mill archaeologist.  It can be a divider amongst the profession, but personally – I think its great.

Matt Williams, for example, cannot stand Post-Med archaeology.  He would be happiest stuck in the middle of a Roman villa, where everything is nice and easy.  Throughout the three days he made sure he was quite vocal about his general disdain, and could be overheard chuntering to himself quite rudely!  To be fair, the archaeology was fairly ephemeral, in some cases just the plumbing of the buildings or patchy stains in the ground. However, we still have a duty to understand how to curate this for future generations and to assess how this is preserved in- situ.

Apart from the archaeology there was no getting away with the immense social story behind what we were excavating.  The training camp had quadrupled in size after 1915, when it was evident the war would not be over by Christmas. The main cut and thrust of the camp was to train as many soldiers as they could muster.

Many of the troops were from the four corners of the Empire, trained quickly and swiftly deposited onto the madness of the Western Front.  During my first morning, I stumbled upon a vast collection of postcards.  I had forgotten what it was like to correspond with someone on such a personal and intimate level, especially now that letter writing is a lost art.

Lisa soaks up the sunshine in the wheelbarrow, prior to using it to dump Raksha on the spoilheap!

The majority are snapshots of the training camp, personal individual portraits of soldiers or, my favourite, a pop-out postcard called the ‘Grantham Smiler’.  The ‘Smiler’ comprises a picture of a smiling soldier with little holiday-esque shots of Grantham that pull out from his beaming smile.  These little tableaus into the lives of the troops allows a small glimpse of their existence before their world was irreversibly swamped by the utter horror of the trenches.

Coming back to the theme of strong women in Grantham, DVs own Lisa Westcott Wilkins joined me for the last day on site. This was quite a trip down memory lane as we had originally met on a Time Team shoot, where we had become fast friends.  These days, though, it is quite novel being able to tell Lisa what she needs to do!

The past few months have mainly been about Lisa cracking the DV whip: in MY trench, the worm had finally turned. This was my domain, and she had become the fateful victim of my OCD trench ways. ‘The sections aren’t straight’, ‘you’re leaving crumbs when you trowel,’ etc, I definitely took advantage of having her at my mercy! It didn’t last very long, however, and the balance of power soon shifted back when Lisa unceremoniously picked me up in a wheelbarrow and then dumped me on the ground.  I may still have had the last laugh, though, as the next day I received a tweet: “@Raksha_digs BTW I pulled a muscle in my bum dumping you out of the wheelbarrow – it hurts….”