When I rang my Dad to tell him that I’d been offered a job at the Royal Victoria Chapel at Netley near Southampton, he laughed out loud. “Did you know your Granddad worked there as a hospital porter during World War Two?” he chuckled “What a coincidence!” It certainly was as I grew up in Essex and Granddad was from Leicestershire so I would never have guessed.

But that’s what I love about history and archaeology, not just preserving old buildings as monuments but bringing them alive as places where real people lived and worked. Sadly, I hadn’t thought to ask Granddad before he died what life was like for him at Netley.

As a child, I guess history was all around me. Growing up near Colchester, you trip over the Romans at every turn, closely followed by Anglo-Saxons and Normans! At secondary school, my love of history was inspired further by a fantastic history teacher. He leant me a book called “The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey, which is about a modern policeman investigating what happened to the Princes in the Tower (the vanished sons of King Edward IV). I was fascinated at the thought of applying modern scientific methods and analytical thinking to historical evidence and I started exploring archaeology as a career option.

When I was about 14, we visited York and I immediately fell in love with the city. Fastforward a few years and that was where I went to study my Archaeology Degree. We were a small group of 28 students in my year and lucky enough to have the opportunity to dig on some well-known archaeological sites, like Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. It was a three-year, BA (Hons) degree and you could study just archaeology or archaeology with history. We covered topics from history and geography to technical drawing and statistics – it was really diverse. Today, there are also options to study archaeology with subjects like sciences or the environment.

Doing those excavations at Making History Some of us are lucky enough to have a ‘lightbulb’ moment, when we suddenly realise what we want to do in life. For a ten-year old Ursula Pearce, hers was watching whilst the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s famous warship, was carefully raised from the seabed. From that moment, she has built her career in history and archaeology. Ursula tells us what she has unearthed so far. 20 Make The Future Yours! Issue 3 Sutton Hoo, I realised that what I liked most about history wasn’t just digging it up but researching what we found and then sharing that with our visitors. If we found a shoe, for example, I wanted to know how it got there. Who did it belong to and why did they lose it? Was it an everyday shoe or just for special occasions? I could then use this information to help bring the site alive.

After leaving York, I went on to complete my Masters in Gallery Studies at the University of Essex. My first job was in the tourist village of Goathland in the North York Moors, setting up an exhibition about the TV series Heartbeat. I then had a chance to move to the Science Museum in London, quite a stepchange from rural Yorkshire! After a few years, I had the opportunity to work in the USA with the Institute for Learning Innovation. They research how people learn outside of formal education and I helped organise a national conference for people from zoos, parks and similar organisations about how people learn science outside of school.

Back in England, I got a job working on HMS Warrior at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, only a cannonball’s throw from the Mary Rose! Warrior was launched in 1861, the same year my great-great-grandmother had been born. I used a photo of her along with family photos right down to my own daughter to help draw the connection from 1861 to today’s visitors. After five years with Warrior, I then stepped into primary education and did my teacher training qualifications. Both my parents were teachers so I think perhaps it was inevitable that I would try it in the end, and it also fitted well around having children of my own. I did enjoy it, and the diverse skills I’d learnt studying archaeology really helped, but I did eventually return to my first love of history and archaeology – which is when I came to the Royal Victoria Chapel.

The Royal Victoria Military Hospital was commissioned by Queen Victoria, who laid the foundation stone in May 1856. The hospital opened in 1863 and was a quarter of a mile long. It could accommodate thousands of sick and wounded soldiers, and it looked after service personnel during both World Wars. After World War Two, fortunately, such a large hospital was no longer needed, and the building started to fall into disrepair. It was finally demolished in 1966, except the Chapel which you can still visit today.

My role here is Heritage and Education Officer, which can involve anything from setting up exhibitions, commissioning special story-teller performances and working alongside our lovely team of volunteers. I also work with local schools on projects to help bring stories to life of the people who lived, worked, and were treated here. One project that really stays with me was in 2016, the 100th Anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, a particularly hard battle fought during World War One. Some of the casualties were brought here to be treated and so we worked with Wildern School to research some of the servicemen buried in our cemetery to see if they were involved in that battle.

Many military records have been lost so this was a really important project, and we even managed to trace some living relatives. At the end of the project, we held a Remembrance Service with the students, who afterwards each placed their own poppy on the headstone of the soldier they had been researching. It was a really moving moment.

I’d encourage anyone with an interest in history to seriously think about making it their career. There are so many different jobs you can do – conservation, education, museums, academic, archivists or as a curator. From large organisations like the National Trust or English Heritage, to local authorities and privately run museums, to tourist information and visitor experiences, there are far more opportunities out there than you might think. It helps to work out what you enjoy about history – not just the Romans or the Tudors, but whether you are a people person or a details and numbers person. You may be drawn to the humanities side of the subject, or the sciences with conservation and archaeology, environmental archaeology, bone analysis and forensics. I don’t think it’s a question of doing either arts or sciences, history really can cross over to both.

History is also something that we can all relate to, no matter our background. We all have a personal history, whether we know much about it or not. The fact that my Granddad worked here, gives me a lovely personal connection to the Royal Victoria Chapel which makes me smile every day.