Client Case Study: Legasee Educational Trust

We first began working with Legasee Educational Trust in 2025, supporting the charity across major heritage projects preserving the experiences of British military veterans and bringing their stories to wider audiences. Legasee has built an archive of more than 700 filmed interviews, capturing first-hand testimony and making it freely accessible to the public, families, schools and future generations.

Sharon Broderick MBE - Legasee Educational Trust

Our work has spanned campaign strategy, media relations, story development, content, spokesperson preparation, stakeholder engagement and wider communications support. A central part of our approach has been identifying the individual stories within Legasee’s projects that can make significant periods of military and social history accessible to people who might never otherwise encounter them.

Our first work together focused on The Trailblazers Project, produced with the WRAC Association and supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. The project preserved the stories of 30 women who served in the Women’s Royal Army Corps, documenting their experiences as the role of women in the British Army changed dramatically during the second half of the twentieth century.

We developed communications around the project itself and the individual women whose experiences brought that history to life. Stories included Sharon Broderick MBE, who survived a bombing while serving in Northern Ireland, became the first female chef to serve in officer residences at Sandhurst and later received an MBE for her work in community policing. Other veterans spoke about serving in the Royal Military Police, commanding hundreds of servicewomen, working across Germany and Iraq and breaking barriers in roles previously dominated by men.

Alongside Trailblazers, we supported the launch and promotion of The Veterans’ Voice: Berlin Airlift, a podcast series using Legasee’s archive to introduce a new generation to the men and women involved in one of the defining humanitarian operations of the early Cold War. Our communications went beyond promoting the podcast itself, using the archive as the starting point for new stories about the veterans and the families preserving their legacies.

That included Dick Arscott, an RAF veteran whose family were introduced to his recorded testimony after Legasee approached them about bringing his story to new audiences five years after his death. We developed the story around what it meant for his family to hear him speak in detail about experiences he had rarely discussed during his lifetime.

We also worked with the family of Sir John Curtiss, whose remarkable career included more than 260 Berlin Airlift missions before he went on to oversee British air operations during the Falklands War and become the first navigator in RAF history to reach the rank of Air Marshal. His son Peter shared memories of his father publicly, adding a personal dimension to the story of one of the RAF’s most distinguished senior officers.

Across the Trailblazers and Berlin Airlift projects, our work generated more than 40 pieces of coverage across television, radio, newspapers, magazines, digital and specialist media. This included BBC radio, My Weekly and major regional newspapers, alongside military, history and podcast media. The combination of project-level communications and individual human stories helped Legasee reach audiences well beyond the traditional heritage sector.

Following the success of that work, we renewed our partnership with Legasee to support a major National Lottery Heritage Fund-backed project preserving the experiences of veterans who served during the Aden Emergency between 1963 and 1967.

Often described as one of Britain’s forgotten conflicts, Aden remains unfamiliar to much of the public despite the thousands of British servicemen and women who served there. With veterans now in their late seventies and eighties and the Aden Veterans Association preparing to close in 2027, the project is working to record their testimony while there is still time. Alongside filmed interviews, it will preserve photographs, newsletters and memorabilia and bring the history into schools, libraries and communities through podcasts, exhibitions and educational activity.

Our communications support has been designed around the full lifespan of the project rather than a single launch. We have worked on PR and communications positioning and messaging, media strategy, veteran and human-interest stories and stakeholder engagement, helping connect the project with veterans, families, communities and wider public audiences.

One of the first individual stories has been Captain Stephen Weall, who served with 45 Commando in the Radfan mountains and was involved in the British withdrawal from Aden in 1967. We developed his testimony into a wider media story, using his first-hand memories to help audiences understand both the realities of the conflict and why preserving these accounts now matters.

Stephen’s story generated television, radio, print and digital coverage, including BBC radio, alongside extensive regional coverage and further broadcast interest. It continued the approach established through our earlier work with Legasee, connecting a much larger historical subject with the experiences of the people who were actually there.

Across our work with Legasee, the focus has been much broader than securing individual pieces of media coverage. We have helped build communications around major funded heritage programmes, identify new narratives within existing archives, develop veterans and family members as contributors, prepare spokespeople and create stories capable of reaching consumer, broadcast, regional and specialist audiences.

Together, the Trailblazers, Berlin Airlift and Aden projects demonstrate how strategic communications can help heritage organisations make history relevant to contemporary audiences without losing the integrity of the people and experiences at its centre. For Legasee, that has meant bringing veteran stories to new audiences, strengthening awareness of its work and helping ensure voices that could otherwise disappear from public memory continue to be heard.

If your organisation is looking for strategic communications support to strengthen its profile, develop campaigns and bring important stories to wider audiences, please get in touch to discuss how we can work together.