This presentation adds to the still relatively small corpus of historical studies dealing with memory's workings within specific kinds of institutional or organized community, and explores a possible territory of 'convergence' between memory studies, organizational studies and military history. 'Military memory' refers here not to the memory-afterlife of military conflicts within society at large, but to the practices and cultures of memory that take shape within military formations themselves – in this case British army regiments, c1880-1960. Organizational memory cultures may be understood as playing out across a range of mnemonic practices and communicative circuits, possessing different degrees of formality and operating at different levels of individual and collective experience. In the case of regiments, these generate at one end of a spectrum a more or less official regimental 'glory story', encapsulated in official histories, battle honours and anniversaries, focusing heavily on battlefield experience, heroic deeds, and connections to national and imperial epics; and at the other end of the spectrum, the informal, often mundane memories of individual soldiers (in peace as well as war) – memories of people, places, relationships, routines, travel, sport, humour, boredom and adventure. Mediating between these two areas are a range of cultural vehicles and practices that perform mnemonic functions among others – drill, military music, uniforms, the inscriptions and fittings of regimental chapels, the etiquette, artwork and silverware of officers' and sergeants' messes, etc. - all connecting the soldier's individual experience to ideas and practices of regimental community and tradition.
The presentation explores this complex picture through the lens of a particular historical source – the regimental journals/magazines produced within individual regiments. Although regimental journals offered regular reminders of the regimental 'glory story', they also aimed (in one editor's words) 'to establish a record of the ordinary things of the regiment': they thus allow us to explore the varied workings of memory at a mundane level. Furthermore, since a major aim of the journals was to develop and maintain connections between the different component parts of the so-called regimental 'family' – different battalions, those on home and on overseas service, regular and part-time (Territorial) soldiers, and between currently serving and retired regimental members – the journals themselves were active and self-conscious agents in the construction and maintenance of regiments as memory communities. Drawing particularly on a set of regimental magazines for regiments connected to the county of Lancashire, the paper will start by mapping the general structures of regimental memory as sketched out above. A second part of the paper will then focus more specifically on the ways in which regimental journals provided a facility for reminiscence and mnemonic exchange among past and present members of the regiment, and on the insights into the social textures of remembering at a personal and small-group level that this affords.It is hoped that this case study of military memory will also suggest analytical approaches that will be applicable to the analysis of memory in other organizational settings (e.g. businesses, religious and educational communities).
