Bodmin Keep internship students by their exhibition stand
Completing an internship offers valuable professional and personal benefits. At the University of Plymouth, a range of specialist internships provide opportunities to gain knowledge and skills in areas you might not otherwise explore. In a museum setting, you'll be able to contribute meaningfully to historical preservation and education.

Bodmin Keep is Cornwall's Army Museum.

“The building itself has been here for over 160 years and is a really important part of the townscape. We have a collection that spans some 300 years of regimental history, from the Cornish militia and volunteers through to the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry, to The Light Infantry and the modern-day Rifles.
The museum has an opportunity to tell stories of conflict and soldiering and how those experiences have changed over time. We tell the very important national story of World War One and World War Two for example.
We have a responsibility to look after historical collections, to compile research and create exhibitions, as we've a large collection of documents and artefacts, around 20,000 different items in all, which is an ever-expanding record of the history of the army in Cornwall.
We also run an extensive schools programme - we engaged with over a thousand young people last year alone - plus we also have a large role to play in the community. We provide a remembrance service and other commemorations for the Town of Bodmin and are actively involved in the civic life of the town and the veteran community in Cornwall and beyond.”
—Bodmin Keep
Photo of soldiers playing football from Bodmin Keep's army museum exhibition
Beret from Bodmin Keep's army museum exhibition
Berlin newspaper from Bodmin Keep's army museum exhibition

In 2024, three students participated in paid internships at Bodmin Keep:

Read about their individual projects, along with insights into the internships from Helen Bishop-Stephens, Museum Director and James Inglis, Assistant Curator below.
Brandon Coyle
BA (Hons) History
Brandon's task was looking at the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry active from 1959 to 1968. Bodmin Keep have veterans that are associated with them that either served in the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry, or knew people that did.
Milly looked at applications for aid from veterans of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. She was guided by Nigel James, Chairman of the Cornish branch of the veterans’ association, on the differences between welfare for veterans then and now.
Emily Brown
BA (Hons) History
Emily’s project focused St Austell born soldier William Kent who served as a commando during the Second World War. Emily researched objects donated to Bodmin Keep by Kent’s relatives and produced an exhibition based on her findings.

The experience of working with interns

“There was a terrific amount of enthusiasm from all three of the students that we worked with. They brought their own particular interests to the projects.
One thing that impressed us with all of them was how they worked with a variety of staff and volunteers at Bodmin Keep. And I know the people working here really enjoyed their input and enthusiasm.
It became a nice leap into a real-life environment where the students can make a difference. And it's mutually beneficial. I think that it's a nice simple step for them to take, in a sense. All the challenges are the right ones – challenges of organizing themselves, the challenges of being here, being consistent, committing to something, and seeing something through.”
Leah Mason, Darren Aoki; Daniel Brinson, Phil Wrixon, Helen Bishop-Stephens, Brandon Coyle, James Inglis, Emily Brown, Milly Thompson.
(R-L) Leah Mason, Darren Aoki; Daniel Brinson, Phil Wrixon, Helen Bishop-Stephens, Brandon Coyle, James Inglis, Emily Brown, Milly Thompson.

One of the big things these internships enable is the time to focus on on a topic in-depth.

For Milly's project, on veterans’ applications for aid, she looked at records which had gone untouched basically since their creation and storage in our archive. They provide an interesting piece of social history, so the ability to look at these materials in detail is very important. 
Equally with Brandon’s project, looking in detail at the history of the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry, is something we hadn’t been able to do much of until last year. 
And then again with Emily, while working on a relatively small collection, she had the chance to go in such depth, particularly with the letters that she was transcribing. This enabled Emily to get a feel for who this person was, and make discoveries that only someone who's reading through those letters in detail can do. Emily’s research into William Kent was taken forward into an exhibition. So that whole process, is just something that you don't often have the opportunity to do with limited time and resources.
At Bodmin Keep, we hope to work with University of Plymouth students again in 2025. 
Photo of newspaper cuttings from Bodmin Keep's army museum exhibition
A photo of soldier William Kent from Bodmin Keep's army museum exhibition William Kent
A display stand from the Bodmin Keep army museum exhibition

Looking to the future

We are working very hard at the moment to pull together our big renewal and renovation project – our vision for the future. We want to create a modern museum that's fit for the 21st century, that does all the things that a modern museum needs to do: producing interesting and engaging exhibitions that talk about history in ways that are relevant to contemporary audiences, and reaching out to its communities and providing a space that can be shared by all.
We also currently have an exhibition in the Charles Seale-Hayne library. This came at a good time for us because the museum had a sudden closure in August 2024, because of structural problems with the building that needed resolving. We were looking for a nice public engagement opportunity, somewhere we could show the collection and what we're about.
That's actually quite hard to find at short notice, I'm sure you can imagine, so it was very timely that the University of Plymouth was able to take the exhibition. It celebrates the work of our three student interns.
 

( Visit the exhibit

The Charles Seale-Hayne Library is hosting the exhibition on behalf of Bodmin Keep, featuring a display of artefacts and documents created in collaboration with internship students Brandon, Emily, and Milly.
We invite staff and students to visit and explore the impressive projects you've been reading about.
 
 

Student perspectives

My favourite part was probably finding out about Percy Griffiths. Following the details from his application I was able to find pictures of him in Bodmin Keep’s archive. This included information about his time as a footballer for a successful team drawn from soldiers in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry in the 1930s. This was a nice find – I got to dive a bit deeper and take the initiative.

The internship experience has made me more interested in research and I've definitely put it on my CV, it's first-hand experience within the heritage sector. It's given me a taste of what might be involved in working as a curator, for example.
Milly Thompson

For me the most challenging part was having to be decisive, as I would have liked to display everything in the collection, and having to pick and choose what actually went into the display case. Because there's only a limited amount of space, you want to avoid overwhelming the person who's looking at it.

My project was going through the letters of William Kent and transcribing them, learning about what he was doing and how his family updated him. And the letter which is in the display case, is the last letter that he ever wrote to his family. It did make me feel quite sad, because it's a very personal letter in which they're updating each other on their lives. Also, there was the first letter from his girlfriend, who he met on one of his breaks on his return to home. Through this research project, I’ve come to know them, but obviously they don't know me – it's an interesting position to be in and an interesting experience. 
Emily Brown

My project was created to use the archives at Bodmin Keep – particularly the regimental history book, a scrapbook that was written to record the operations and activities of the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry Regiment from their formation in 1959 to their merger into the Light Infantry in 1968. I researched the regiment to provide Bodmin Keep with material for displays and exhibitions going forward.

The most challenging part was going through the sheer amount of archival material, because it wasn't only the scrapbook, there were loads of regimental journals, magazines and photographs covering a 10-year period. There were new acquisitions donated while I was there, that I also utilised. This included a collection of photos of the regiment during their time in Berlin in the 1960s, I had to sort all of these photos out and try and trace why they were relevant, what events were going on around the time the photographs were taken. It was challenging, but that was also one of the most interesting parts. And I could delve quite deep with my research; I found footage of one of the military tattoos in Berlin, and the regiment was stationed there. So it was, it gave me a lot of opportunities to really deepen the research, and I thought it was good that I had the opportunity to shed a bit of light on that period of time. 
Brandon Coyle