Short walk over to the museum. There's a World War I exhibit on, which proves to be lmore comprehensive and better than we'd expected. Starts with a bit of a profile of pre-war Britain. The average wage was £1.40 a week, with a pint costing 2p. Well, inflation hits everything, but that means a pint costing 1/70 of a weekly income, so you can calculate from there. Some of the other stats require no conversion. Legal school leaving age was 12, and by 16 only 6% of students were still attending. In the west end of London the average age at death was 55 - in the poorer east end it was 30. So going back to the England that used to be looks a little less attractive than Brexiteers would have it. Some things don't change for the better though - one percent of the population controlled 70% of the wealth. Which in those pre-war days left one person in 20 emigrating in search of a better life. When war broke out, the minimum height for men joining up was 5'3, raised to 5'6 by October as overwhelming numbers volunteered but dropped to 5'2" by July 2015 as the war took its toll.
The display includes weapons, uniforms, battle information, home front social changes. And it stresses the tragic pointlessness as much as the courage and dedication. Over a million killed at the Somme, nearly 20,000 of them on the first day. A battle that was eventually, after about five months, abandoned as hopeless on both sides. Pretty thorough, although, as J points out, one would scarcely have thought Canada was there. Then, after we leave, we see what appears at first to be a modern abstract sculpture. Turns out to be the remains of a car, a vehicle that had not survived an explosion in 2007 Iraq that killed 32 people. Not much progress.
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