John Beales

Netted hats on poles stand on top of Mount Longdon, Falkland Islands. In the distance is a view of Port Stanley.

Mount Longdon, June 1982. On the top of the ridge looking east towards Port Stanley. This is the area where many of B Company became casualties.

Dr John Beales completed his AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD Studentship War Stories: composure and discomposure in British veterans’ communication of their experiences of the Falklands War, 1982 in 2022.

A partnership between IWM and Keele University, this project sought to examine the experiences of British armed forces personnel during the Falklands Campaign. The project offered the opportunity for John to apply existing theories and methodologies to a wide range of sources in order to investigate how British veterans of the Falklands War have formed, or ‘composed’, their memories, how this affected how they narrate their experiences, and the gaps between the public memory of the conflict, veterans’ personal narratives and the reality of the war.

War and the Mind

IWM

Transcript

Dr John Beales, researcher: “I suppose my goal in looking at, at the Falklands War was that very early on my perception was that it was a little understood and misunderstood conflict. And so, I wanted to, to try and try and establish what is the, what is the truth?

And there’s always these conflicting versions. There are obviously lots of different versions of events. I was very, very keen to basically interview veterans myself, as well as accessing the very substantial archive repository here at the Imperial War Museum, but also within other museums.

Your memory is not a literal recall of everything. You are always selective in that process. And so, by looking at interviews with people in archives that I’d done over a number of years, you see slight changes in the stories that they tell. If you're in, in one of the land battles which are predominantly fought at night, there's a sensory element to it. Not only is it, is it dark, the veterans talk about how incredibly noisy it is, how confusing it is, how they can hear things happening, they can't see, how they are hearing various things that have happened. Who's been killed, about what's happening here. Things are taking much, much longer than they expected from their training for them to achieve their objectives. They're all exhausted by the time they get to the start line of the battle. Eating very little. They're drinking very little. They are cold, wet, dirty. And it's absolutely gruelling. So, there's an element of sleep deprivation experienced by pretty much everyone at this time which affects what they can remember.

There's not a clear timeline of events in most people's memories. They remember certain events, not when they happened. Maybe in the land campaign it’s whether it happened at daytime, whether it happened at nighttime, but that's pretty much it.

So, part of the development of their story is about bringing in other people's stories and piecing together what actually happened when. And then they then absorbed all that information and they then build up their own, their own memory of that event, which is actually not necessarily their own memory, but is also their memory intermingled with other people’s memories.

Composure is basically the idea that people create a story of their life experiences and that story changes over time. It changes, not only because of how they reflect on things through age, but also their exposure to dominant ideas about what happened during the war. One of the key learnings is, one of the most salutary experiences, it doesn't matter how good you are, there's so much ammunition flying around, at some point you’re likely to be hit. And it doesn't matter how good a soldier you are, death is random. It wasn't an overall, a good experience and I think that many of the veterans recognise now that there was very poor, poor preparation for their return in terms of their psychological needs.”

IWM's War and the Mind exhibition ran from 27 September 2024 - 27 April 2025.

The exhibition explored the many psychological dimensions of war and featured ground-breaking research projects funded by UK Research and Innovation, in particular the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

A film featuring John's project was part of the Fighting Wars section of the exhibition. In this video, John talks about how soldiers remembered and coped with their experiences.