Larry Collins looks at the function of theatre entertainment during the First World War and its role as unofficial recruiter, propagandist, and fund-raiser. The usual location for entertainments was at depots and rest camps in the rear, but there was always the YMCA canteen hut situated a short distance behind the front-line trenches. At one [...]

Michael MacCallan’s grandfather Arthur was an ophthalmic surgeon. He helped convert Travelling Ophthalmic Hospitals into WWI military hospitals for the support of the sick and wounded of the Suez, Gallipoli, and Salonica campaigns. This is his story. In 1903, when Arthur MacCallan (1872-1955) had just finished his residency at Moorfields, an oculist in Egypt asked [...]

Albert Rickman was born in Milford-on-Sea and lived with his parents, Charles and Anne Rickman, at 4 Carrington Terrace. On Friday 15 September 1916, at the age of 27, he was executed following a court martial for desertion. Retired army officer and local resident John Cockram investigates the circumstances surrounding his death. In August 1914 [...]

A cut-away diagram of this WWI British destroyer, the specialised hunter-killer of German U-boats

Your country needs you – and hundreds of thousands had come forwards. So at  first, it was a war of the willing. But by late 1916, the Western Front had consumed three armies – the Regulars, the Territorials, and then the Kitchener volunteers – and it became, perforce, a war of the conscripted. Taken from [...]

UCL’s Gabe Moshenska muses on the extraordinary iconic significance of the gas mask. My particular object of interest is the ‘General Civilian Respirator’ issued to the British people in the lead up to the Second World War. This ubiquitous mass-produced object has come to symbolise life in Home Front Britain, even though it was never [...]

A new generation of historians is challenging the old perception of the First World War as pointless carnage. As against the image conjured by war poets, radical historians, and much popular literature, the ‘revisionists’ argue that battles like the Somme represent ‘a necessary sacrifice’. The revisionist argument 1. The ‘lions led by donkeys’ stereotypes of [...]