Mother Why doesn’t Daddy come Home? Postcards from the Great War

Now as I work through the large amount of material that David Harrop has lent me for the new book, I thought it was only right to share some of it.

So over the next few weeks I will be dipping into the collection.*

The material will cover all the years of the conflict, focus on those who fought and those who stayed at home and will track the fate of individual families during the four years.The first of the collection was sent in the May of 1915 and judging by the message, Will had yet to go overseas.

Today we may find the picture a tad uncomfortable but I guess it chimed in with the growing feeling as the war dragged into its tenth month with no sign of an early end.

By then the war of movement was over, the trenches had become permanent and the military strategy was based on mass frontal attacks across No Man’s Land and the realisation that both sides were pretty evenly matched.

Not that I shall just be featuring the Western Front.

What is particularly moving about the collection is that David has been able to follow particular families, starting with a young man’s enlistment to the letters home and his discharge or more sadly the news of his death and the correspondence about the posthumous medals and war pension.

And in the way these things work it will be impossible to draw a strict line between Manchester, and Salford, Stockport and the nearby towns of Ashton and Oldham and Rochdale, if only because some of those in the collection came from one, lived in another and worked across another municipal border.**

It is an important collection and I am immensely grateful to David for providing me with so much from it.

That said the pressure is on both because I need to make progress but also because some of the items will appear in two exhibitions David is mounting.***

Picture; from the collection of David Harrop

*David Harrop, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/David%20Harrop

**The Great War, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20Great%20War

***The Atkinson, Lord Street, Southport from July 28 and Oldham Archives, Union Street, Oldham, from August 4