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So many factually incorrect Christmas ‘At least you’re not in the trenches’ images knocking about. So here’s a real one from my Grandad to my Nan, a silk card, circa 1916.
It actually was his last Christmas, he didn’t spend it in the trenches, he was almost certainly with the regiment in Britain. As a reservist he didn’t go out to Belgium until the spring of 1917.
I always find if odd flicking through the cards he sent, all written in purple pencil, terribly formal. ‘To me dear wife’ or ‘for my son Tom’. A sign of the times they lived in perhaps.
They were really working class people. He joined the Cambridgeshire Militia at 15 in 1895, and then the Suffolks presumably to escape being another generation of agricultural labourers and servants.
He ended up in Khartoum with the Royal Fusiliers, watched his mates die of dysentery and typhoid according to the letters. Struck an officer and ended up inside for a bit.
Finished his service in Bermuda at the garrison, joined the reserve. Then he became a brickie, and delivered coal, met my nan. They had three children, one died at a year old. Then the war came.
Here they are, probably late 1916. That’s my mum on my nan’s Jesse’s knee. Percy at the back, Tom standing.
And here they are again in 1917. Percy had gone, lost during the first day of Messines in June.
Life went on. Jess hastily remarried in 1920 due to the unforeseen result of ‘shenanigans’. Alf was also out there. Ex QWR, Essex Regiment and Labour Corp, a wound making his time possibly less fraught towards the end. He went back to digging ditches in the fens.
My eldest brother says Alf always Gott mit uns belt on that he’d gleaned from somewhere.
Anyway, nothing is black and white, and you can’t draw a parallel between what happened then, and now. It’s a false equivalence, life experience isn’t something you can measure on a scale.
And I hope everyone has as nice a time as they can muster this Christmas whatever the circumstances.
I’d better stick another bit of coal in the brazier and get on or I’ll still be plugging things into a website on Boxing Day, Ebenezer will not be happy.
