How history is recorded and its importance

There are several ways in which a historian can reconstruct history. These involve the careful piecing together of information from official archives, war diaries, photographs, personal diaries and papers. The journey can often include an unexpected discovery of papers or materials which the historian was unaware existed. The work is very much like a detective story: the slow and careful sourcing and collating of relevant material.

Sometimes a historian learns that material has already been destroyed. This is always heart-breaking, because vital pieces of the jigsaw may have been lost, which makes the task of reconstructing history less successful. It is perhaps unrealistic to expect that we can know every detail from the past.

Sometimes history disappears before our eyes. Since the construction of this learning resource, Shean Block at Wilton Park has been demolished swiftly by a developer without Planning Consent, to make way for a large housing development. The M Room resource probably contains the only film footage of the site in existence.

The M Room is a good example of how official archives have been used alongside oral testimonies to reconstruct the story of the secret war.