The end of the KOYLI Collections Project
Just over a year ago, we published a blog talking about the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (KOYLI) Collections Project. At the time we’d been working on the project since 2023. We had secured funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and were beginning to explore new ways of using the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry collection. We were in the process of building a new Research and Collections Centre within City of Doncaster Archives on Chequer Road, and had just recruited our first team of volunteers since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
A year later we wanted to step back and take a big picture look at everything we’ve been doing and what lies ahead!
Volunteering
We started recruiting volunteers again in March 2024, and ended up with a dedicated group of volunteers. Some volunteers have given us days of their time and others hours as and when they’re able. Our volunteers have worked across sites such as the Danum Gallery, Library and Museum and the City of Doncaster Archives as well as remotely from home. We even had one volunteer attend some sessions remotely from Poland while on holiday!
We ran multiple training courses over the last year for our volunteers too. Here we see them learning to identify and research military medals. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster.
Our most popular volunteering role has been research, uncovering the stories of the soldiers who served in the KOYLI. They’ve found some truly fantastic things, contributing biographies to our new digital labels system in the medal gallery. Other volunteers have helped scan, digitise, and transcribe letters and books from our collection. These scans and transcriptions have proved invaluable to the research we and family historians have undertaken. Others have been photographing all the medals in our medal gallery, providing reference images for our collections systems. Volunteers have also been wonderfully helpful on our open days and our Veterans Cafés and Military Art Clubs.
A volunteer helping us digitise and record some Second World War-era photos and documents. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster.
So far, our volunteers have volunteered more than 1400 hours across all these different activities. Its safe to say their contributions can’t be overstated!
The Research and Collections Centre
All the work we’ve done in the museum over the last year or more has in some way centred around our new Research and Collections Centre. This is split into two halves: our new research library and collections access space, and our medal gallery. The research library is home a huge array of books on the history of the KOYLI, its ancestor regiments, and the history of the British Army as a whole. We also have personal accounts and histories of many of the KOYLI’s battalions over the centuries, and guides to researching and identifying everything from cap badges to historical firearms. These are all fantastic research tools that you can use alone or with members of staff at the museum to jump start any research you might be doing.
The real star of the show in the research library is our collection of regimental diaries, photographs, letters, and paperwork. From Christmas party photo albums to deeply emotional letters home, these objects are the heart and soul of a soldier’s experiences, and are a wonderful research resource. Some of the documents are very delicate and many are one of a kind, so while we can’t open them up to general browsing, they’re still a useful resource that we can provide if you come for a research visit or book onto one of our research surgeries.
The Medal Gallery is open on our open days and by appointment. Soon select records from the gallery will be viewable on the Heritage Doncaster website as well. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster.
The medal gallery might be familiar to those of you who remember when the Chequer Road site was Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery. It is home to thousands of medals earned by soldiers in the KOYLI and its preceding regiments. New touchscreens have been installed, which can guide you through every medal on display. Our research volunteers have dug into the personal stories of hundreds of these men, which you can read there too, together with reference photographs of each medal set. If you can’t make it to our medal gallery for a visit on one of our open days, fear not, as all biographies and photographs are in the process of being uploaded to Heritage Doncaster’s website, which you’ll be able to browse at your leisure.
The KOYLI Museum Out and About
A core part of the Collections Project has been working out new ways of using the objects in the museum with people from Doncaster and the Doncaster area. From spring 2024 onwards we ran lots of different events exploring what works best in the museum itself and out on the road. On-site in the Danum Gallery, Library and Museum (DGLAM) we’ve run two monthly events. In our Military Art Club we welcomed families with armed forces connections to sit with us for a morning each month and do something creative, making art inspired by the regiment’s history and the military history of Doncaster. These ranged from self portraits to metal embossing and were led by Mandy Keating, a local artist from Doncaster.
Our Military Art Club had visitors getting crafty, inspired by Doncaster’s military history. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster.
In our Veterans Cafés we met with retired and serving forces members to handle objects in the collection and tell stories and reminisce. Mandy was present for the cafés too, and the art everyone made and the stories told will form the core of an art piece that we’ll be putting on display in DGLAM later in the spring.
We’ve been travelling around the Doncaster area with the KOYLI collection as well. Over the summer we worked with young people with caring responsibilities from across Doncaster, who used the KOYLI collection to produce a brilliant series of audio stories they named ‘The History Report’. The group worked with Raj from Madaan Media, and they wrote and edited their own scripts, recorded their voices, selected sound effects and music, edited the episodes and designed the cover art. Have a listen to their creation on The History Report page.
One of the young carers working with Raj to record the stories. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster.
We went to Armed Forces Day on the 29 June, bringing our Moving Museum full of KOYLI objects to Elmfield Park. We met over 200 of you, and shared stories from Doncaster’s centuries of military history. It hasn’t just been Elmfield Park though. You might have seen us at other events or community hubs across Doncaster including Doncaster Armed Forces Covenant events, Woodlands Community Library, South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Veterans Network and more, as well as hosting groups including the regimental trustees and local Rifles reservists at the new research and collections centre.
Armed Forces Day 2024. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster.
Talks, Workshops and Open Days
Minden Day saw veterans of the KOYLI and their families visiting the Medal Gallery and Research Centre. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster.
On the 1 August we celebrated Minden Day, one of the most important dates on the KOYLI’s regimental calendar. As part of the celebrations, we opened the Research and Collections Centre that day, and have been running opens days twice a month ever since. We’ve had visitors from all over the country and enquiries from all over the world. Some visitors came with specific questions about the KOYLI or their own military or family history research, while others just wanted to see what we were getting up to. Both are entirely welcome!
Visitors to the medal gallery. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster.
Our curator Lynsey has run a range of public talks and workshops too, telling stories from the collection and sharing the skills and knowledge needed to best work with and care for military history. Our regular Using First World War Records workshop is a great choice if you’re looking into ancestors who fought in the Great War, and our Medal Identification workshop was very popular as well. We have drop-in research surgeries regularly, where you can book in to chat with us about specific research you’re in need of help with. We’re definitely not done with any of these either, and there are plenty of upcoming events that might interest you.
Using First World War records, 11 May 2024, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster.
May is Local and Community History Month, and we have a busy programme of activities! We have an open day of the whole City of Doncaster Archives site on Saturday 10 May, and another First World War Records workshop on 12 May. A workshop on how to access and use prisoner of war records from the First World War is running on the 17 May and another on how to care for historic objects you own is on the 31 May. All in all May is set to be a month full of events, and you can book onto all of them and more on the Heritage Doncaster website.
We’ve also developed a brand new Curator Talk ‘For Bravery: The Gallantry Medals of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry’, inspired by the many stories from the regimental medal collection. This talk will take place at the Danum Gallery, Library and Museum on Saturday 7 June at 11am. Find out more and book your ticket here.
Did you attend any of our workshops? Are there any topics you’d like us to cover? Let us know!
What is next?
So, what’s next for the KOYLI Museum? We’ve tried lots of new things over the last couple of years, both in what we run for the public and what we do behind the scenes, and we couldn’t be happier with everything we’ve learnt. We’re full of ideas and have pages and pages of data on how to make the museum better than ever. We’ve also learnt some amazing things from everyone we’ve spoken to about your own military and family histories and experiences.
Our next planned project is inspired by this, and is going to be all about military families across Doncaster, past and present. It’ll be ramping up from autumn 2025, and if it sounds like something you might want to get involved with, please share your thoughts through this survey here.
Alongside that, we’ll be continuing to improve the Research and Collections Centre, host volunteers, open days, and events. If you want to visit us, volunteer with us, join in one of our events, book us to deliver a talk or workshop for your organisation or just have a chat about military history, send us an email. We certainly won’t be slowing down any time soon, and we’re always going to want to hear from you!
Cake from a volunteer celebration event. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Museum, Heritage Doncaster.