The Carillon Museum attracts a lot of younger visitors and many of them are intrigued by our stereoscope. When you consider the quality and realism of the video games and streaming content children are used to today, it’s surprising that they take so much interest in this old-fashioned object.
However, it’s not a toy but a little-known propaganda tool that was used widely in WW1. The one in our care is a lightweight version developed in 1861. It uses prismatic lenses which enable two images of the same scene taken from slightly different angles to fuse, producing a 3D effect. Because everyone’s faces are different, you can slide the picture along to produce the perfect focus.
Getting the news home
The stereoscope was originally sold for entertainment purposes but during WW1 it came into its own as a way of relaying propaganda from the battle front to those at home. Newspaper reports and personal letters were heavily censored, but servicemen’s families naturally wanted to visualise what their loved ones were going through. The stereoscope, sold door-to-door with sets of cards depicting war scenes, partly satisfied this hunger to know.
Not quite the real thing
The cards we hold were made by Realistic Travels, a company founded by Hilton De Witt Girdwood, a rather unscrupulous Canadian businessman and journalist who continued to sell stereoscopes and cards well into the 1920s. Very few photographers were allowed on the front lines and their output was strictly controlled, so most of the scenes on the cards are staged versions of the real war experience.
Not surprisingly, the War Office was not willing to show British troops being defeated or being less than heroic, and destruction was presented solely as being caused by the enemy. Hilton Girdwood ingeniously used this situation to his advantage, to create impressions which satisfied the War Office and no doubt reassured British civilians that things were going well and only the bad guys were suffering.
Fake news or valuable record?
The photos are not reportage. Girdwood created and photographed most of his battle scenes in training camps in France, where the action was only posed for the camera. He was not averse to using photos from previous wars or to appropriating other photographers’ work, and his captions were often inaccurate or misleading. Some of the photos were taken after the war had ended, for example those taken at Neuville in 1919 in the old trenches, with British soldiers wearing German uniforms. One wonders how they felt about that. He had no access to the Royal Navy or Royal Flying Corps, and downplayed their role, making the photo cards heavily Army-centred.
A few of the photos do have historical value, however. Some of the fake battle scenes feature troops of the 2nd Battalion of the Leicestershire Regiment; no doubt some Loughborough men were amongst them. How many survived the carnage can only be guessed at. Unusually for the time, Indian troops were also depicted. One is only known photo of the British Model 2 trench mortar.
And a photo of a graveyard on the Somme shows the hundreds of temporary wooden crosses which were put into place before the Imperial War Graves Commission built the vast cemeteries we know today. With its makeshift appearance and desolate muddy setting, it is somehow just as moving as the well-tended war graves with their marble headstones.
Many thanks to Carillon researcher Neil Hardie and Paul Bond of the Western Front Association
A young visitor is fascinated by the stereoscope
