Life in the Trenches at Bovington Tank Museum!

On Tuesday 8 November, Year 6 visited Bovington Tank Museum as an introduction to their WW1 learning. At the museum, the children learnt about life in the trenches and some of the difficulties soldiers faced on the front line.

Matilda B: It was very fun and interesting. We learnt that the tanks go one mile per hour; they couldn’t hear each other in the tanks so they had to use hand signals.
If they needed to go to the toilet, they would have had to go in an empty shell. We also learnt about life in the trenches. There were three main gasses, one of the gasses was called chlorine gas; it was such a dangerous gas that if you inhaled it, you would cough up your lungs! If you didn’t have your gas mask with you, one way to stop the chlorine gas is that you could dunk a cloth in a bucket of urine (the buckets were everywhere in the trenches) then put it over your mouth and nose to help stop it. We all went in a tank called the Mark IV (it still ran) and a man told us all about the tanks in WW1!

Dominic P: The tank museum was really fun and exciting because we were able to explore the inside of a Mark IV tank.

Ava C: I loved going into the trenches. They were really cool and realistic.

Savannah L: We learnt lots about the war and it was helpful to have tours of different parts of the tank museum.

Filip B: It was interesting to know more about tanks and understand there were different tanks for different uses.