The Great War
General writing, object biographies and visual content on the Western Front and the Great War.
The Wilderspins
Suffolk regiment - Thiepval memorial. I just thought it was worth recording this little collection of grief, rolled down through 100 years, a whole family and one friend all commemorated at Thiepval, under the Suffolk Regiment's Panel. Whenever you go to any of the...
Cambridge – persistence of memory
Persistence of memory My mum grew up here. Her and therefore my ancestors were here for hundreds of years working as maids and cleaners, labourers, cartmen, and brickies, laying the railways, further back pulling the root veg through the surface of the peaty soils to...
Trench Ghosts part 4
Langemark A few trench ghosts I did last week then got distracted and forgot about. One of Langemark and one of the Sugarloaf salient at Fromelles. The Langemark rephoto leaps out straight away. It's also familiar to anyone that's ever visited the German cemetery...
Aerial ghosts: Messines updated
I had a very interesting email today from Gil Bossuyt of frontaaltours.com which has prompted this post. Gil has been looking at the image I originally colourised in this piece. It goes thus: "I went searching on trench maps to recognize some road structures, and...
WW1: Aerial Trench Ghosts Part 3 – Lens
Someone asked if I'd done any Loos aerials, I hadn't, it's not an area I'm hugely familiar with, it does tend to get forgotten in between all the noise about the Battle of the Somme and The Ypres Salient. There's plenty of front in between and some of it was very hard...
Great War: Verdun in postcards
Fort Vaux - Artillery observation post. A century on from events. These are in fact a post-war set of tourist cards I bought as part of an album at a flea market in France. These are basically Verdun through a lens from some time after everything had been tidied up....
Great War postcards: Blinded
Blinded A set of six postcards produced by the National Institute of the Blind, now RNIB for St Dunstans in Regent's Park. These were fundraisers for the trust. A slightly mawkish view of something fairly horrific, but then how do you honestly portray being blinded,...
Join hands: Poppy day
I am afraid I am heartily sick of poppies. I was in Ypres in the late summer of 2014 and started to write something about what the centenary of the war meant and how it was making me feel. It was the week the commemoration started for real, the end of the phoney war....
Lost in a landscape: Ditchingham & Francis Derwent Wood
An eye for an eye Ditchingham sits just North of the Norfolk Suffolk Border. It is to all intents and purposes a suburb of Bungay albeit in a different county and on the other side of a main road. The town and its satellite village sit on the edge of the gentle...
Jagger Swagger
All cities are full of nexus points, the crossings of networks of roads that run the city. Because most of our major ant colonies grow irregularly, they form and coalesce around point sin the landscape and those points shift and change over time, one centre can...
Mystery: Albert and the returning troops 1916
A mystery photo. Last week Bethan Holdridge who works for the Museums service in Norwich invited me to have a look through her Great Grandfather – Oliver Isaac Brown's collection of photos. He was a Suffolk man but lived in Great Yarmouth. A sapper in the Royal...
Found photos: The lost boys of Cromer
I go through people's leftovers, their old clothes, the maps of lines on their faces, sit in their seats and eat from their plates; strangers' stuff. They are people I can't know nor ever will in the vast majority of cases, nearly all of them are unreachable; dead,...