Stories of Manchester and the Great War

Now I have set myself the task of collecting stories about Manchester and the Great War.

And given that this event has all but passed from living memory I am indebted to people like David who has a vast collection of material from the conflict.

He is one of those rare people who collect the post cards, letters and photographs of the period not for monetary gain but out of a sense of that they must be preserved.

And these collections are an important source for any historian and a link that allows all of us to better understand the experiences of those that lived through the war.

David and I have often talked about how those experiences can best be presented and the great strength of his material is that it is so ordinary and mundane.

Here are the everyday objects which in a different time and place will be familiar to us, ranging from the saucy postcard, and souvenir to the letters home and much more.

And armed with these the serious business of telling the stories can begin, setting them in the context of the period and using them to explore the big events.

So over the next few months I shall return to David’s collection and record the progress I have made in using them to tell those stories of Manchester and the Great War.

Pictures; from the collection of David Harrop