Spurred on by this apparent gap, Wesley curated a small exhibition about the British nuclear testing programme, called Over the Fence…To the Other Side of the World, at the Peace Museum in Bradford in 2019. Wesley took himself on a tour of museums, including the Imperial War Museum, Royal Air Force Museum Midlands in Cosforth and The York Cold War Bunker, but said: “I was disappointed just how little there was about the social history. In a lot of museums, you don’t see this period, or if you do see it, you see things like the Korean War, Vietnam, other key Cold War battles going on.” He said: “I started going around some of the other museums and noticed that there’s this massive, huge gap in history. It was while doing his masters in Curation Practices at Leeds Arts University in 2018 that Wesley discovered that this era of nuclear testing was poorly represented in British museums. He died from a rare form of cancer in 1989 when Wesley was just six-years-old. The exhibition is being curated by Wesley Perriman, whose late father was a veteran of the Maralinga tests in 1963. The bomb cloud from a test for Operation Hurricane in 1952Ĭalled Plym to Pamlico, the exhibition has been organised by the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association (BNTVA) and documents around 20 years of nuclear tests and radiation clean-ups, from Operation Hurricane in 1952 up to the minor and oft-forgotten trials in Maralinga in the early 1960s. Now a new exhibition is offering a glimpse into this forgotten period of British history, including rare and unseen photographs, artefacts from the testing programme and first hand accounts of some of the 30,000 men who were there. Many would go on to suffer from rare cancers and disease, with their descendants also blighted by ill health.

Often the servicemen who witnessed these tests were not given adequate safety equipment and were exposed to high levels of radiation. October 3rd marks the 70th anniversary of Britain’s first atomic test, codenamed Operation Hurricane, which saw the country become the third nuclear power behind the US and Russia.ĭuring the 1950s and into the 1960s, the UK continued to show off its nuclear capabilities with further tests on mainland Australia, the Montebello Islands off the coast of Western Australia and Christmas Island in the South Pacific. A much darker episode, that may pass many by. An exhibition of Britain’s nuclear bomb testing, ‘Plym to Pamlico’, will display memorabilia of Britain’s little-known nuclear bomb testing off the coast of Australia 70 years ago: Operation Hurricane.Ībove: Scientist William Penney (centre) at Operation Totemīack in June, you couldn’t move for Union Flags, street parties and national pride as everyone gathered together to celebrate the late Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee.īut 2022 also marks 70 years since another defining moment in British history.

Glimpses forgotten