scholarly journals ‘From Your Ever Anxious and Loving Father’: Faith, Fatherhood, and Masculinity in One Man’s Letters to His Son during the First World War

Genealogy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Robb
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Familiar World ◽  
East End ◽  
Psychosocial Perspective ◽  
First World

In the early months of 1916, Charles Robb a retired shipping clerk in the East End of London, England, wrote a series of letters to his 19-year-old son Arthur, an army private awaiting embarkation to the Western Front. Charles Robb was my great grandfather and Arthur Robb was my grandfather. The letters offer an intriguing glimpse of one man ‘doing’ fatherhood under conditions of traumatic separation and extreme anxiety. This paper presents an analysis of the letters from a psychosocial perspective, exploring the ways in which the writer exhorts his son to live up to the ideals of Christian manhood, while managing the anxiety of separation by presenting a reconstruction in language of the familiar world of home and church.

The East Wind

2018 ◽  
pp. 179-192
Author(s):  
Andrew Glazzard
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
East Wind ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Holmes’s words to Watson at the end of ‘His Last Bow’ (1917) express an idea of warfare that sits uneasily with our contemporary perception of the First World War. Today we are accustomed to associate that war with the horrors of the Western Front: the battles of the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917) loom large in our cultural memory as paradigms of unnecessary bloodshed and strategic incompetence. But this was not how Conan Doyle saw it – and he saw the Western Front at first hand, while both his brother, Brigadier-General Innes ‘Duff’ Doyle, and his son Kingsley were in the thick of the action. At the invitation of the War Office, Doyle toured the British, Italian and French Fronts in 1916, and the Australian Front in 1918, using his authority as Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey to don an improvised khaki uniform ‘which was something between that of a Colonel and Brigadier, with silver roses instead of stars or crowns upon the shoulder-states’.1

‘A Wave on to Our Shores’: The Exile and Resettlement of Refugees from the Western Front, 1914–1918

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIERRE PURSEIGLE
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Social Mobilisation ◽  
First World

AbstractIn the wake of the German invasion of Belgium and France in August 1914, four million persons went into exile. While such a displacement of population testified to a dramatic change in the character of war in western Europe, historiography and collective memory alike have so far concurred in marginalising the experience of refugees during the First World War. This article examines their unprecedented encounter with host communities in France and Great Britain. It demonstrates that the refugees' plight reveals the strengths as well as the tensions inherent in the process of social mobilisation that was inseparable from the First World War.

scholarly journals Photographic Censorship In The First World War : A Comparison Between The Realistic Travels Stereograph Set And British Personal Photograph Albums From The Collection Of The Art Gallery Of Ontario

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Leverty
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Art Gallery ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Photograph Albums ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Art Gallery Of Ontario ◽  
First World

This thesis compared a group of personal photograph albums compiled by British soldiers during the First World War to a set of stereographs produced during the war and published after by the British company Realistic Travels, both from the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. The development of British censorship restrictions during the First World War had a profound effect on who, what, where and how individuals were able to photograph the conflict. This thesis examines how these restrictions affected stereograph photographers and soldiers as they documented the war in order to ascertain how these effects shaped the construction of each type of photographic object. By comparing and analyzing both bodies of work as they were produced in three theatres of war -- the Western Front, Gallipoli and within Britain -- we see that objects created for public and private audiences are more similar than they initially appear.

scholarly journals The Portrayal of the First World War and the Development of a National Mythology in New Zealand

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur J. Pomeroy
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
First World War ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World ◽  
National Mythology

The Memorial Window in the Hunter Building at Victoria University offers interesting insights into the commemoration of the Great War in New Zealand. The Frederick Ellis design shows  strong Anglican Christian iconography, in line with dominant traditions at the College up to the war. The Gallipoli campaign also features much more prominently than the Western Front, since it could be portrayed as a holy crusade against the Turk. As time passes, the ANZAC experience becomes part of the wider New Zealand mythology, but the religious conflict is expunged.

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