Poster for Indigènes (dir Rachid Bouchareb, 2006) released in the UK as Days of Glory by Metrodome

The website Caribbean aircrew in the RAF during WW2 draws attention to the 1953 feature film Appointment in London, a story about Bomber Command starring Dirk Bogarde, and in particular to a scene showing Bogarde mixing with his peers: among the officers is one of Caribbean origin. There is no plot point hanging on this fact – it is simply a tacit recognition of the contribution made in the RAF, as in so many other ways, to the Allied effort in both world wars by people of the Empire.  What is sadly remarkable about it, however, is how rare it is to see black troops represented in this way.

One area that the Whose Remembrance? Project set out to explore was the extent to which the wartime role of the peoples of Britain’s colonies has been reflected  in the popular media. My contribution was to produce a database of relevant films, tv and radio.

A good start for my search was the Colonial Films Database the result of an earlier AHRC-funded project in which IWM was a partner.  As well as providing essays about contemporary films like With the Indian Troops at the Front (1916) and West Africa Was There (1945), this huge database also offers several dozen titles online. Trawls of various websites made it possible to add a number of retrospective documentaries, such as the 2009 Soldiers of Empire episode from Channel 4’s Not Forgotten Series, or Scottish Television’s 2004 programme Treefellers about  the work in Scotland during the Second World War of lumberjacks from British Honduras. Drama series which came immediately to mind included Granada’s 1984 adaptation of Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ as The Jewel in the Crown, and BBC2’s 1992 Black Poppies.

What the exercise made plain, however, was that candidates for such a database are actually quite thin on the ground, and some ‘obvious’ choices on closer examination hardly qualify at all.  The film The African Queen (1951) may actually be set in the First World War in Africa, but African people appear only as frightened villagers or faceless ‘native troops.’ It is sadly typical that most titles set in the colonies focus almost exclusively on the lives of white settlers, with local people relegated to the role of servant or picturesque background. Britain has yet to follow  France in welcoming a film like Indigènes (2006 – UK title Days of Glory) which tells the story of Algerians who fought for ‘the mother country’. 

The Whose Remembrance? Film, TV and Radio database is very much a work in progress, and we would welcome suggestions for its improvement.  If you spot any errors, disagree with any comments, or have any suggestions for additions, please communicate them to the Research Department at IWM.

We hope that our project may prompt some braver thinking by tv and film producers –  public interest is thankfully much higher than in earlier decades and the territory is rich.

Men of the British West Indies Regiment cleaning their rifles on the Amiens Road near Albert, September 1916. IWM Q1201

Arthur Torrington is one of three external specialist researchers on the Whose remembrance? project. Arthur’s research looked at the contribution of West Indian soldiers to the First World War which he writes about here.

Soon after war was declared, British military operations in Africa were  launched against Germany’s colonies of Cameroon and Togo.  Both the first and second battalions of the West India Regiments (WIR) participated in these attacks against German East Africa.  The WIRs  were highly commended for their service.  Formed in 1795, the West India Regiment  served the British Empire until 1927. The soldiers were mainly former African slaves.  

Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) encouraged his countrymen to volunteer to fight in order to prove their loyalty to the King and to be treated as equals. While Lord Kitchener’s personal view was that black British soldiers should not be allowed to join the forces, King George V ‘s intervention made it possible.  Over 15,000 West Indians volunteered and were included in new units called ‘British West Indies Regiments’. The recruits’ initial journey to England was perilous and hundreds of soldiers suffered from severe frostbite when their troopships were diverted via Halifax in Canada. Very many had to return home no longer fit to serve as soldiers. When the others arrived in England, they found that the fighting was to be done by white soldiers, and that West Indians  were to be assigned the dirty and dangerous work of loading ammunition and digging trenches.  Most of them went to war without guns.

Having served in the war against the Germans and the Turks, some West Indian soldiers were transferred to the British army base in Taranto, Italy, where one of the bitterest events of the war would occur – a mutiny.  The days comprised largely of manual labour such as loading ammunition, or even cleaning clothes and latrines for British soldiers.  For some of the black troops there, a pay rise was given to the white soldiers but not to them.  For many, that was the final indignity and on 6 December 1918 the men of the 9th Battalion revolted. In the following four days, the unrest spread. The mutiny was put down, and around 60 soldiers went on trial. One black soldier was executed – and several others given lengthy jail sentences. 

West Indian troops were kept away from the victory parades that marked the end of the war, and some of them were hurried home under armed guard. Their only possessions were the clothes and the uniforms they wore. There was no work for them at home. Many of the soldiers went on to become political activists, but the islands’ governments put pressure on thousands to emigrate to Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela or North America.    

Working on the Whose remembrance? project has been a pleasure for me. I got on very well with all members of the team.

India 1944: Three stokers of the Royal Indian Navy on the mess deck of the sloop HMIS SUTLEJ. IWM IB 1558

Ansar Ahmed Ullah, a member of the Swadhinata Trust, is one of three external specialist researchers on the Whose remembrance? project. Ansar writes here about his research into the experiences of South Asian seamen in the two world wars.

For my study I chose to look at South Asian seamen of Bengali origin because it was a natural progression from my last project Bengalis in London’s East End.

We know that the Bengali seamen formed the first sizable South Asian community in Britain. They settled in London’s East End, close to the Docks, and were commonly referred to as ‘lascars’. The word was once used to describe any sailor from the Indian sub-continent or any other part of Asia, but came to refer to people from West Bengal and modern-day Bangladesh.

 South Asian seamen received less pay, less food and had smaller living quarters than white sailors, and their death rate was higher. Most worked in the engine room as ‘donkeywallahs’ (after the ‘donkey engines’) while those who oiled the machinery were known as ‘telwallahs’. Others worked supplying the furnace with coal and disposing of the ashes. You can imagine my delight at discovering an image of three stokers of the Royal Indian Navy on the mess deck of the sloop HMIS Sutlej in 1944. The working conditions were harsh and hot, and many seamen died of heat stroke and exhaustion.  Lascars trapped in the engine rooms suffered a particularly high casualty rate.

Royal Indian Navy at Stamshaw, Portmouth, 1942, showing cooks with some of their specially prepared dishes on their way to the mess. IWM A 10545

Many Bengali seamen worked as cooks. I came across a photograph of the Royal Indian Navy at Stamshaw, training in Portsmouth in 1942, showing cooks with some of their specially prepared dishes on their way to the mess.

I visited Tower Hill Memorial, which commemorates British Merchant Seamen who lost their lives in the First and Second World Wars. Many of the inscriptions indicate seamen of Bengali origin, with names such as Miah, Latif, Ali, Choudhury, Ullah or Uddin. But these were the privileged few employed as British crew members. Many of lower rank had no such recognition.

Ansar Ahmed Ullah on his research visit to IWM Duxford. Courtesy: Ansar Ahmed Ullah.

The highlight of my research must be the visit I made to the collections store at IWM Duxford to read some of the output of the BBC Monitoring Service.  These transcribed broadcasts from radio stations across the world during the Second World War include several representing the Indian Independence movement.

Across the road is a huge display of aircraft including Concorde and a couple of BOACs. British Airways was formerly known as BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation). It was a household name in Bangladesh as that’s the airline people used to travel to the UK from Bangladesh. And my Dad must have travelled on a BOAC to get to England. It was a wonderful sunny hot summer’s day. I only wish I had known about the museum before my visit. I could have taken my daughter, who was on her school holiday! Perhaps next time…

Together, this poster represents the armed forces of Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, West Africa, and India fighting together in the Second World War.IWM PST 15795

As Project Manager of the AHRC sponsored Whose remembrance? project, I was responsible for drawing up the programme for the two workshops we held in the summer of 2012 – to enable both historians and museum professionals who have been researching aspects of this history to share their work.

Searching for academics in this area was one of my first tasks. Our library has a good stock of published works, and projects undertaken by our education and exhibition staff also provided a number of useful contacts and our advisory group were able to recommend academics they had come across.  It was gratifying to find that most people working in this field – if approached – gladly gave up a day or even two – to come to IWM and share their work.

The first workshop was devoted to historians working in the field, Dr Jan-Georg Deutsch, a historian of modern African history at Oxford, Professor David Killingray, author of a major work on African troops in the Second World War, and Dr Santanu Das, an English literature academic who has used IWM’s collections extensively combined to provide a thought-provoking opening to the day. They made plain how relatively under-researched colonial service is and highlighted some of the emerging studies. A memorable moment was hearing a recording of a First World War captured Indian soldier singing a song remembering the garden he had left back home – one of the extraordinary recordings made in 1915 by German anthropologists and today held by the Humboldt University in Berlin.  We then heard from Stephen Bourne who movingly told us how his interest in the Caribbean experience of the Second World War had grown from his own research into his adoptive aunt’s story – and how this led him to further work and three books.   The lack of written and oral history accounts was a constant theme and we discussed the different ways of remedying this and the difficulties of writing history when the official, coloniser’s voice is so dominant. The full programme will be available soon on our website.

Our second workshop brought together museum curators and professionals working on the theme.  Presentations were given by several community ‘brokers’, researchers with their own areas of special interest and expertise, who looked at how they had worked with museums – both local and national – in order to disseminate different histories, whilst attempting to bridge divides between museums and institutions on the one hand, and the communities they serve. We discussed ways of collecting and documentation, and looked at co-curation. The need for trust, longevity and community-led initiatives were key themes to arise from this workshop.

An important additional bonus from the two workshops was the many suggestions of books, plays, films, museum exhibitions and other projects which we have now been able to record in the two databases which support the project – these will be available online soon.

These were two very full and enlightening days providing many useful links and research and project ideas for the future.

Men of the British West Indies Regiment cleaning their rifles; Albert – Amiens Road, September 1916. IWM Q1201

For a large part of 2012 the Research Department has been working on an AHRC-sponsored scoping study called Whose Remembrance?. The study asked the IWM to identify whose stories were being included in the history of the First and Second World Wars and how this was affecting patterns of remembrance. In particular the IWM has looked at how the experiences of colonial troops have been studied by academics and displayed by museums.

Both conflicts mobilised the British Empire and its Commonwealth for war and necessitated the deployment of enlisted men and women across the world, in foreign places far from home. To take just a few instances from the First World War, this meant not only would an Englishman have served abroad in Palestine and Egypt but men of the Indian Army and British West Indies Regiment would have served on, or in support of, the Western Front in France and Belgium.

A group of wounded Indian soldiers walk across the cobbles of a French village. IWM Q53348

These wars were about great migrations of men and materials and the stories of new sights seen abroad being brought back home, discussed and recorded. Which of these stories are those now being told? How has a prevailing narrative of wars fought in defence of the British Isles impaired public understanding of the home fronts experienced in other parts of the Empire, in East Africa, India and the Caribbean?

Collectively the Research Department has drawn up databases of published literature on the topic and held two workshops for academics, museum professionals, community representatives and social scientists. It has also commissioned research reports from external scholars and attended conferences all with the aim of assessing whose stories are being told and whose lives remembered.

A number of blog posts over the coming weeks will go into different parts of the project in greater detail, for now though, here are a few links to excellent sites with information on colonial experiences of both world wars:

• The Memorial Gates Trust gives a good overview of the roles played by five million men and women from Britain’s former empire in the Armed Forces.
• The Open University’s Making Britain database is a brilliant source for the modern history of South Asians in Britain.
• The Herbert Gallery’s Empire At War project is an engaging collection of interviews with Coventry people from black and Asian backgrounds on their Second World War experiences.
• The Colonial Film database which contains information for over 6000 films showing life in the British Empire, including many from IWM’s own collections.

The remains of Surrey Lodge, an apartment building destroyed by a V2 rocket on 4 January 1945. The photograph was apparently taken on the following day and graphically shows how a 5 storey building was reduced to rubble. Courtesy of Lambeth Archives.

Barely 150 metres from Imperial War Museum London is the site of the most destructive explosion in Lambeth during the Second World War, which killed 43 people.  Just before 8.30pm on the night of Thursday 4 January 1945 a huge explosion destroyed an apartment building, Surrey Lodge, on the corner of Kennington Road and Lambeth Road.   The old Lambeth Baths and a chapel on the opposite side of Lambeth Road were also severely damaged.  The blast also extensively damaged the northern and western sides of the  Imperial War Museum as well as many surrounding buildings.

There was no warning – no air raid sirens or sounds of approaching aircraft – just the explosion.  However the initial detonation was followed by a distinctive roaring noise and a sonic boom, because the disaster was caused by a German V2 rocket – the world’s first ballistic missile – diving into the building faster than the speed of sound.

The remains of the Lambeth Baths and Washhouse, and a chapel, on the opposite side of Lambeth Road from Surrey Lodge. The dome of the Imperial War Museum can be seen in the background across the park. Courtesy of Lambeth Archives.

The scenes that followed would have been only too familiar to many Londoners after four years of war.  One survivor described the aftermath of a similar blast once the rumble of collapsing buildings died away:

‘…there was a pause and everything was absolutely quiet for several seconds.  After that all you could hear were people screaming from their terrible injuries, followed by the arrival of firemen and Army personnel …to help get us out from the debris. We looked awful with black and dust all over us, and, of course, we were still in our nighties!…’

With the grey light of dawn the full extent of the damage was revealed.  Daylight also revealed the continuing rescue operations.  But as the likelihood diminished of finding any more survivors alive, so the nature of the work changed.  The cranes, lorries and workmen were increasingly clearing up the site to make it safe, removing rubble, and helping to recover residents’ personal belongings while starting to stabilise or repair damaged buildings.  Lambeth Road was cleared and the tram service was restored.  Soon this would become just one more London bomb site.

Today Lambeth Towers occupies the site where the baths used to stand. Courtesy of Mark Whitmore.

This was one of 1,054 V2 rockets that reached Britain during a campaign that lasted from 8 September 1944 to 27 March 1945, killing 2,700 people and injuring 6,500 people.  Ironically more people died – an estimated 20,000 – working as slave labourers producing the weapons.

The Battle of the Ancre and Advance of the Tanks (1917) is a little known masterpiece of British non-fiction cinema that documents the winter stages of the Somme campaign on the Western Front. The sequel to the famous Battle of the Somme (1916), which covers the opening phase of the campaign, ‘Ancre’ should not be dismissed as Somme II. Although similar to the ‘Somme’, Battle of the Ancre is cinematically the better film  and contains haunting images of trench warfare, notably of the mud that beset the trenches in the winter, the waves of troops advancing into no-man’s land, the use of horses and the first views of the tank – the secret weapon which it was hoped would break the deadlock on the Western Front.

Restoring the film

So it was with the aim of bringing The Battle of the Ancre to a wider public that, in October 2010, the IWM embarked on a project to digitally restore the film, working closely with the film and television post-production company Prime Focus and with sponsorship from the broadcaster Discovery Networks. Curators began by trawling through various film collections, including our own, for footage of better quality or for scenes that were missing from the IWM version of the ‘Ancre’. The hunt in our holdings did not produce any new material, but we found three copies of the ‘Ancre’ in foreign archives, the one from the Library of Congress containing nearly two minutes of footage that was missing from the IWM copy. These new sequences were passed to Prime Focus along with the IWM’s Master copy, five reels of negative that are the descendants of the originals acquired in 1920. These elements were scanned into a computer and then, with great patience, special restoration software was used to remove scratches, dust marks and other imperfections from the digitised film frames. As well as producing a clearer image, digital restoration recovered detail that had been lost in darkened areas of the picture, a consequence of successive duplications to preserve the Master. The impact of this technology was particularly impressive in an extended sequence in Part 3, recording the infantry advancing on the German lines. Now we could clearly see the waves of soldiers emerging from trenches far in the distance and, most menacing, the puffs of shrapnel shells exploding above them.

A pair of stills demonstrating the effect of digital restoration on a sequence showing a tank in no-man’s land.

The Music

In 1916 and 1917, screenings of the ‘Somme’ and ‘Ancre’ were accompanied by musicians playing a selection of stirring, patriotic tunes. The ‘official medleys’ for both films have been revived by the IWM and the one for the ‘Somme’ is a sound-track option on the DVD.  Although the medleys provide insight into the way these battle films were first received, to make the films more accessible to modern audiences, new music was commissioned from Laura Rossi, and it is her intelligent and moving composition that was recorded to accompany the restored version of the ‘Ancre’, and which received its premiere at the 56^th BFI London Film Festival.

William Davey in uniform while serving with the Dragoon Guards. (Papers of W Davey, Documents 62/179/1)

As part of a major project supported by the Wellcome Trust, I catalogued some of the IWM’s medical collections which had hitherto been largely unavailable to researchers.  A major dividend from making these newly catalogued collections more accessible is that some are now on display in the new exhibition at IWM North, Saving Lives: Frontline Medicine in a Century of Conflict (13 October 2012 to 1 September 2013). 

The papers of William Davey who served in the ranks with the Dragoon Guards and the Labour Corps on the Western Front, record the effects of his service on his health.  He was awarded a War Badge in December 1917, having received an honourable discharge due to ill health.  On display are his Discharge Certificate releasing him from the Army as ‘no longer physically fit’ in November 1917; a Ministry of Pensions Notification of Final Award dated 1930, providing a full ‘a pension for life’ and a Ministry of Pensions letter dated 17 March 1933 informing his widow after his death (from the effects of gas) that she would not be eligible for a widow’s pension (but could apply for one).

Lady Zia Wernher, the Commandant of Langton Hall, a convalescent home for servicemen. (Papers of Mrs I Tomlinson, Documents 62/114/1)

Mrs Iris Tomlinson records her service as a nurse at Langton Hall, a convalescent home for soldiers, sailors and airmen during the Second World War run jointly by the Red Cross and St John’s Ambulance under the Commandant, Lady Zia Wernher (a member of the Romanov family and an aunt of Prince Philip).  Of particular interest is the Admissions and Discharge Record Book which gives details for each patient who was treated there between August 1943 and July 1945, noting their rank, unit, diagnosis, and next of kin. 

Serving as a young officer during the First World War, Sir Lionel Whitby was decorated with the Military Cross for gallantry in 1917 but his leg was amputated after he was badly wounded by shell fire in March 1918.  Despite his disability, Whitby completed his medical studies becoming a clinical pathologist and surgeon of international renown.  He treated King George V in 1928-29 and Winston Churchill in 1943-44 and was knighted and appointed as Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge University in 1945. Having joined the Territorial Army, Whitby developed along with his wife, Ethel (a ‘formidable lady’ who was also a doctor serving as an officer with the Royal Army Medical Corps), the Army Blood Transfusion Service, becoming its Director in 1939. The Service supplied over three quarters of a million donations of blood to both British and Allied armies during the Second World War.  The development of blood transfusion was one of the major medical advances of the twentieth century saving many lives and providing a model for future peacetime services. 

A cartoon from ‘The Bat’, the magazine of the Army Blood Transfusion Service, showing its Director, Colonel (later Brigadier Sir Lionel Whitby) with his wife in the centre surrounded by various members of his staff. (Papers of Brigadier Sir Lionel Whitby, Documents 62/14/1)

These collections then provide an insight not only into the personal experiences of soldiers who served on the front line and the effects of that service on them and their families, but also highlight the importance of the work carried out by medical staff which saved so many lives shattered during conflict.

A engraving from the Sumatra railway memorial. Amanda Farrell.

February this year saw the seventieth anniversary of the Fall of Singapore on 15^th of that month 1942. Between June of that year and October 1943, over 60,000 Allied troops would be forced to labour as prisoners of war (POWs) on the Burma-Thailand railway.  It is not so popularly known, however, that after this a second ‘Death Railway’ project was overseen by many of the same Japanese engineers. This second railway was built on the island of Sumatra, and its construction involved nearly 5,000 Allied POWs.

As an island rich in coal and oil, Sumatra presented a vital energy resource for the Japanese. Their intention was that the new line starting at Pakanbaroe in the east of Sumatra would connect to an existing track at the town of Moeara, and continue to the western port of Padang. By joining the new track with the old, and constructing a tributary line to connect the railway to Sumatran coal mines, the Japanese planned to transport fuel and troops by rail for shipping from Padang to Singapore.

The track between Pakanbaroe and Moeara was approximately 140 miles long, with a total of 17 camps made and lived in by prisoners. Since there was no place to which men could escape, very few were fully enclosed by the bamboo fences or barbed wire associated with typical images of POW camps. The railway was built through mountain ranges and thick jungle, and across swamp and river.

The first contingent of POWs arrived at Pakanbaroe in May 1944, and the railway was completed on the day of Japanese surrender, 15 August 1945. Just over 670 POWs lost their lives during the construction work, and two thousand others died when ships transporting them to Pakanbaroe were torpedoed by Allied submarines. As on Burma-Thailand, native forced labourers known as romusha were also conscripted: eighty thousand romusha died in appalling conditions.

The collections within IWM archives from POWs held on Sumatra range from memoirs and scrapbooks, to diaries and oral history recordings. They are illuminating, many of them sharp and vivid in detail. The memories the individual men tell are harrowing at times, whilst in other moments they are witty and self-deprecating. The creativity and inventiveness that many POWs employed in devising basic medical treatments, or to make meagre rations more palatable, serves as a poignant reminder of the spirit they needed to survive. Perhaps most importantly the stories, often edited in later years, can shed light on the different ways in which the men themselves remembered their captivity, and how the memories changed for them as they got older.

Through my PhD research I am bringing to light the story of British POWs who laboured on the Sumatra Railway. I am looking at the objects they made, the language they used and the sorts of experiences they chose to record in their writings and recordings. So many decades after repatriation many relatives of POWs are still looking for information about those experiences, and family research is undertaken with great energy and passion. In order to understand why this information is so important for families, and how younger generations remember POW history, I am undertaking interviews with the relatives of Far Eastern POWs. For further details about the interviews taking place between September 2012 and September 2013, please do leave a comment in the space provided and I can contact you directly with further information. All interviews will be lodged – subject to the interviewees’ permission – in the IWM Sound Archive.

Seventy years may have passed since the start of captivity for Allied forces across the Far East, but extraordinary new stories and artefacts are still emerging from those times and through them much can still be learned about the POW experience and its continuing remembrance.

A photograph of and letter from Nursing Sister D M L Crewdson (August 1918) about the award of her Military Medal. IWM DOCS 62/135/1

One of the most rewarding aspects of my work since I joined the Research Department has been cataloguing IWM’s medical collections.  This was part of a major project supported by the Wellcome Trust to expand our understanding and online coverage of the experiences and participation of medical personnel and their patients in various conflicts since 1900.  Working my way through boxes of diaries and letters, I wrote synopses for each of a large number of our collections which has now made it easier for researchers to locate material relevant to the history of medicine.

One of the joys of this research was discovering the personal experiences of medical staff who served during the two world wars.  One particularly moving collection contained the letters written home by Dorothea Crewdson, who as a nurse on the Western Front became one of the few women to be awarded the Military Medal for bravery.  After being wounded when her hospital at Etaples was bombed by the Germans in May 1918, Nursing Sister Crewdson refused treatment in order to continue to tend to her patients.  Tragically, she died from peritonitis just after the war had ended, on 12 March 1919 aged just 32, and is buried in Etaples Military Cemetery. 

The papers of John Sidebotham record the frustrations of trying to obtain a pension after he suffered ill-health whilst serving in the Far East during the Second World War.  His initial submission to the Ministry of Pensions was refused and his collection documents his subsequent appeal, attempting to prove a link between the various illnesses he had suffered during the war, and the TB later diagnosed after his return home.  But his case, in the end, was dismissed.

Infectious diseases continuously feature in the collections as a severe problem which the armed services and their medical staff sought to combat.   During the First World War the letters of Major Frank Steadman provide a colourful illustration of how, for some in the thick of the fighting, the battle was as much against disease as against the enemy.  In his letters, he described in detail the different types of mosquitoes encountered by the troops, pointing out the ones which transmit malaria.  Promoted in late 1917 onto the staff of 20^th Corps, he then toured Palestine, seeking out larvae and identifying the large areas of water, such as cisterns, which the insects use as their breeding grounds.  He then tried to prevent their breeding by pouring oil onto the surface of the water – in those days they didn’t have DDT.  He was also interested in the origins of trench fever, which was transmitted by lice.  He attempted to eliminate lice infestations among his soldiers by setting up bath units and laundries to clean the troops’ clothes.  At one point, in a letter home to his wife, he explained that he had gone so far as to ban all his troops from Jerusalem because he considered it such an unsanitary place where they might quickly succumb to disease. 

Photograph of Captain Robert Ware and the Christmas Card sent home to his family. IWM DOCS 62/232/1

The dangers of serving with the medical services too were very real.  One officer, Captain Robert Ware, an American doctor from Virginia serving with the 29^th US Division was killed landing with the first wave on Omaha Beach during the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 (D-Day), leaving behind a widow and baby son born while his father was serving in the army.  Reading his letters provide a vivid impression of the effects of war on England and of daily life on the Home Front – ‘everyone is in war work’, he wrote, and ‘all the women wear some sort of uniform’.  His death and that of Nurse Crewdson provide an insight not only into the ultimate sacrifice made by men and women of many nationalities during the two world wars, but also just how many other lives were saved by the commitment and skill of the medical services, which made a major contribution to victory.