My uncle – Geoffrey Nicolls – served with the 16th West Yorkshire Regiment in WW1 and in the same week that he was attached to his battalion this line appears in the official War Diary: July the 14th 1916 – less that a fortnight after the first day of the Somme offensive that had devastated the battalion and put the…
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. Before the advent of motorways in the UK (first section of the first – the M1 opened in 1959) it was true that almost any straight road you found in England was built by the Romans. The burst of road building during the industrial revolution meant generations of British schoolchildren introduced…
This post was updated on March 9th 2019 with the addition of a postscript: A film about Hamilton’s life and work via ht @LucyLondon7 This is one of those “nevertheless she persisted” stories. The Canadian artist Mary Riter Hamilton had studied in Europe before having to return to Canada to care for her ailing mother. At the outbreak of the…
When Norah Neilson Gray (1882 -1931) taught at St. Columba’s School for Girls in Kilmacolm her students called her “Purple Patch” because she was always urging them to look for the color in the shadows. You can see that she took her own advice in this painting Hôpital Auxilaire 1918. It shows the reception area of the Royaumont Abbaye Hospital as it was…
There isn’t much to learn about Nellie Elizabeth Isaac online and some of it’s inaccurate. But as always with the string of magic beads that is the internet – there is always something to discover. Isaac was born in 1886 and grew up in respectable middle-class Hampstead (not West Ham). Her father Percy Lewis Isaac was a naval architect and marine…
Some paintings are made to pair with a poem. Read Edward Thomas’s As the Team’s Head Brass and then take another look at A Winter Landscape, 1926 by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889–1946) As the Team’s Head Brass As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn The lovers disappeared into the wood. I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm That…
In 1918 Australia appointed sixteen official war artists. All were men. Iso Rae – who had lived in France throughout the war – was not included. The Australian impressionist painter Isobel Rae (1860-1940) moved with her mother and sister Alison – also an artist – from Melbourne to Paris in 1887. Three years later they settled in Étaples in northern France.…
All agreed that 1917 had been a sad offender. All observed that 1918 did not look promising at its birth. At midnight on New Year’s Eve 1918 the poet Edmund Blunden looked out over the whole Ypres battlefield: It was bitterly cold, and the deep snow all round lay frozen. We drank healths, and stared out across the snowy miles…
Time for some seasonal greetings from the front. The traditional Christmas message of charity, reconciliation, and peace on earth now ensured through violence and exploding Christmas puddings. These first are from Fergus Mackain – an advertising illustrator who grew up in Canada and the USA. In 1915 – leaving his wife and children – he worked his passage across the Atlantic…
Literary reputations come and go, rise and fall like food fads and fashion. Marjorie Pickthall – once so highly regarded that she was considered the best Canadian poet of her generation – is now mostly forgotten. Pickthall was something of a child prodigy. At 15, she sold her short story “Two-Ears” – about an Iroquois boy who wants to prove himself a…
“You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October afternoon,” said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened on to a lawn. “It is quite warm for the time of the year,” said Framton; “but has that window got anything to do with the tragedy?” Framton Nuttel is in the county for a nerve…
We had just evacuated all the students to the playground, lined them up and done a head count. It wasn’t a fire drill but a bomb threat. We didn’t take it very seriously although bombs were regularly going off all over London. I think this must have been November 1973 because I seem to recall there had been a recent…
Some strolls have a destination. And so it was on the day we crossed the park by Harlem Meer at 110th Street, wandered by the chrysanthemums in glorious bloom in the Conservatory Garden and on to the Met Museum for its “World War I and the Visual Arts” exhibit. It’s a great exhibit. So much to see and so much to wonder…
He went to school in Marlborough and loved to take long and sometimes solitary walks across the Wilshire downs. So – here is Charles Sorley.. October 13th is the anniversary of his death in 1915. All the hills and vales along All the hills and vales along Earth is bursting into song, And the singers are the chaps Who are…
Some authors are blessed with illustrators who enhance their work with the distinction of their own. So it was in 1919 with Richard Aldington. When Images of War was first published it was with a cover design and eleven colored woodcut illustrations by Paul Nash. They are matched with poems and depict scenes from the western front – trenches, bombardment, ruins, barbed wire,…