Troopers and Snoopers

We explored stories of women during the civil war with a group of young people from the Army Welfare Service in Blandford.

Young people at Old Wardour

We began with a visit to Old Wardour Castle as we were especially interested in the story of Lady Blanche Arundell, who in 1643 defended Old Wardour during a siege whilst her husband was away. This was an unusual role for a woman to take on, but actually became more common during the civil war whilst many of the men were away fighting. During the visit we had a guided tour and explored the castle, thinking about the lives of the people who lived at the castle and noticing lots of the stone carvings.

Stone carving

Inspired by Lady Blanche Arundell’s story, we then began to think about other women who took on interesting roles during the civil war. Some defended their castles (like Lady Blanche), or joined the fighting, others became spies, such as Jane Whorwood and Lady d’Aubigny, who attempted to help King Charles I escape whilst he was imprisoned at Carisbrooke Castle.

To help explore and tell these stories further, we took part in an illustration session where we had a go at drawing faces and figures and then used our new skills to tell the women’s stories through art. Here are some of our finished illustrations:
Poster created by young people

As a group we wanted to continue to explore these stories creatively and learned to make cloaks inspired by a cloak that Lady Blanche Arundell owned. The cloaks are a similar shape to Lady Arundell’s, but we personalised ours with different embellishments and hoods. It turns out even making a simple cloak can take quite a while and requires lots of sewing skills, but our finished cloaks look great.

Finally, we thought about how to bring everything we had done together and how we could share it with the rest of the community. After lots of ideas we decided to make a big poster to display in the AWS youth centre. We worked together to represent all the activities, what we had made and everyone who was involved. Here is our poster, complete with photos, drawings and lots of stickers!