Portchester exhibition

Since 2013, Kate has been working with English Heritage at Portchester Castle in Hampshire to explore the history of the French prisoner-war-theatre that was built in the keep in 1810 by some of Napoleon's conscripts who had surrendered in Spain.

Funded by two AHRC grants, Kate and her PhD student Devon Cox interpreted new archival material to show that the prisoners had not only written their own plays in the style of the leading exponent of melodrama, Guilbert de Pixerécourt, but had constructed a fully functioning theatre, including trap door, fly system for raising and lowering items on stage and the means to send a ‘cherub’ across to the boxes where the captain and his British guests sat. The archival material confirmed French prisoners’ descriptions of the theatre which had previously been thought to be fanciful boasting.

The English Heritage interpretation team began work on a new set of panels in the keep shortly after Kate and Devon started work on the prisoners' theatre and the research fed into panels on the ground floor as well as an impression of the theatre, dressing up costumes, and the guidebook. They worked alongside curator Abigail Coppins and historian Steven Brindle who were creating new interpretation panels for the upper floors of the keep to tell the story of the 2500 Black revolutionaries from the Caribbean who had been held at Portchester 14 years before the Napoleonic conscripts arrived.

Abigail's ground-breaking research into the Caribbean revolutionaries brought as prisoners of war to Portchester fed not only into the new interpretation of the keep, which opened in July 2017, but also into the site's main webpages: Black Prisoners at Portchester Castle | English Heritage

The exhibition was the first permanent exhibition on Black people in Britain at an English Heritage site and was awarded a UK Heritage special recognition award in 2018 for the exemplary research undertaken by Abigail.