Richard van Emden - All Quiet on the Home Front: An Oral History of Life in Britain During the First World War

All Quiet on the Home Front: An Oral History of Life in Britain During the First World War — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "All Quiet on the Home Front: An Oral History of Life in Britain During the First World War" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...78

A LL Q UIET

ON THE

H OME F RONT

Also by Richard van Emden:

Boy Soldiers of the Great War

Britains Last Tommies *

Famous 19141918 *

Gallipoli Last Man Standing *

Meeting the Enemy

Prisoners of the Kaiser *

The Last Fighting Tommy (with Harry Patch)

The Quick and the Dead

The Road to Passchendaele * (June 2017)

The Soldiers War

The Somme *

The Trench

Tickled to Death to Go

Tommys War

Tommys Ark

Sapper Martin

Veterans: The Last Survivors of the Great War *

* Denotes titles in print with Pen & Sword Books

A LL Q UIET

ON THE

H OME F RONT

A N O RAL H ISTORY OF L IFE IN B RITAIN D URING

THE FIRST WORLD WAR

RICHARD VAN EMDEN & STEVE HUMPHRIES

First published in Great Britain by Headline Book Publishing in 2003 and reprinted in this format in 2017 by

Pen & Sword M ILITARY

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street, Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Richard van Emden and Steve Humphries 2003, 2017

ISBN 978 1 47389 194 4

eISBN 978 1 47389 196 8

Mobi ISBN 978 1 47389 195 1

The right of Richard van Emden and Steve Humphries to be identified as Authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the Imprints of Pen & Sword Aviation, Pen & Sword Family History, Pen & Sword Maritime, Pen & Sword Military, Pen & Sword Discovery, Pen & Sword Politics, Pen & Sword Atlas, Pen & Sword Archaeology, Wharncliffe Local History, Leo Cooper, Wharncliffe True Crime, Wharncliffe Transport, Pen & Sword Select, Pen & Sword Military Classics, The Praetorian Press, Claymore Press, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing and Frontline Publishing

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England

E-mail:

Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

Contents

Acknowledgements

We would like to give particular thanks to Janice Hadlow, Channel 4 head of specialist factual programming, and Hamish Mykura, Channel 4 head of history, for their support for the programme, Horror on the Home Front, and this book, which is closely associated with the television project.

A special thank you to the staff at Headline, in particular to Emma Tait, the commissioning editor, for her faith in, and dedication to, this project. We are also indebted to the editor, Christine King, for the expertise and understanding she showed to the authors and their book. We are also grateful to Taff Gillingham, an acknowledged expert on the First World War, for reading and commenting on the text.

We are grateful to the Testimony Films team especially to assistant producer Mary Parsons, researcher Ellen Quinn, editor Daniel de Waal, production secretary Madge Reed, production manager Mike Humphries, and cameraman Mike Pharey. Thanks also to Jane Fish of the Imperial War Museum, Jan Faull of the BFI National Film and Television Archive and Larry McKenna of British Path for advice on archive material.

Thanks must also go to the family of Joyce Crow for their kindness in letting the authors quote from an unpublished family diary written by Letitia Sherington and to Jim Grundy for sending the story of Private Simpson, used in .

A heart-felt thanks to Joan van Emden for reading over the proofs, and her assiduous correction of small errors of grammar, before the final copy was sent to the editor. Thanks also to Anna Branch, Nick Fear, Jeremy Banning for their support and kindness throughout the project.

Unless otherwise stated the images used belong to the authors or to interviewees, who kindly gave photographs of loved ones for reproduction. However, the authors are particularly grateful to Irene Smith and Dr and Mrs Smallcombe.

Introduction

I N S EPTEMBER 2002, THE DOORBELL RANG IN A TERRACED house in Kelross Road, north London. On opening the door, the owner was surprised to find a very elderly gentleman outside, walking stick in hand to steady himself. He was with a younger man, who spoke first. Sorry to bother you, but my father lived here in 1917 when the house was hit by a bomb during a Zeppelin raid. After a brief conversation, the two men were invited to come in but, rather than heading for the sitting room, the older man walked straight to the kitchen, and looked up. Thats where it came through, he said, pointing.

The owner of the house had been aware of the scars on the ceiling, but had never thought anything of them. The house, built in 1892, had been there long enough to have had all number of minor accidents, mostly leaks from the bathroom above, and they had all made an impression over time. Yet the elderly man was in no doubt about the veracity of his recall.

His name was Jack Burton, and he was making a final nostalgic trip back to the places of his childhood. Jack was born and raised in England but had moved to South Africa many years previously and now, aged almost ninety, he had flown with his son the 7,000 miles home to see the places he once knew so well and to recall the events of late 1917.

Jack was just four years old at the time but what happened became ingrained on his memory. There had been an air-raid warning, and soon the anti-aircraft battery at Alexandra Palace had begun to pound away at an intruder. Jack remembered:

We were all supposed to go down into the cellar. Well, we were having a family party we didnt have much but what we did have were chestnuts and we were roasting them in the fire. We children didnt want to stop the fun so, when we heard the guns, we just got under a big table in the kitchen; it seemed safe enough. Then there was an almighty bang, and a bomb, which must have come through the roof and through three floors, ended up in the kitchen and on the table. Two of the leaves had broken but it was a very heavy and sturdy table and it saved our lives.

The current home owner, a friend of one of the authors of this book, knew that we were making a film about the home front as well as writing a book about it, so he took a contact number for Jack while he was staying in England, and passed it on to us. Sadly, Jack was going back to South Africa only days later and so we never met him, and only a telephone call was possible. During this, he told us:

Next page

1234567...78

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «All Quiet on the Home Front: An Oral History of Life in Britain During the First World War»

Look at similar books to All Quiet on the Home Front: An Oral History of Life in Britain During the First World War. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Susan R. Grayzel

Womens Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War

Mary Jennings Hegar

Fly Like a Girl: One Womans Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front

George Martindale

Dodging the Devil: Letters from the Front

Daniel R. Green

Front toward Enemy: War, Veterans, and the Homefront

Neil Storey

Faces of the Home Front, 1939–1945

Van Emden

Tommys war: the Western Front in soldiers words and photographs

Englund

The beauty and the sorrow: an intimate history of the First World War

Brown

A Childs War Growing up on the Home Front

Herbert-Davies

Children in the Second World War: memories from the home front

Emily Yellin

Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II

Appleton

A Little Girls War

Leo van Bergen

Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914–1918

Discussion, reviews of the book All Quiet on the Home Front: An Oral History of Life in Britain During the First World War and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.