My Family in the Great War

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About My Family in the Great War

A collection of photographs that explore what happened to our families in World War One. It might include images of men and women in uniform, portraits of families on the Home Front, old or new photographs of places that our families are known to have fought, lived or died, and family names on war memorials and rolls of honour.

The only rule is that each image should have a personal connection, even if this is not fully understood. Please add as much information as you can in the caption.

I hope this will become the most moving and personal of the WW1 groups on flickr. Telling our family stories gives a link right back to the events of almost a century ago. My stories are all East Anglian, of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. It's worth reading Ronald Blythe's magnificent Akenfield for an insight into how the Great War impacted on rural East Anglian communities. The first part of the book is interviews he made in the 1960s with elderly men in the village of Charsfield near Ipswich about their memories of the War. It is easy for us to imagine the grief and uncertainty. What we forget is the tremendous sense of adventure it gave the young men of the village, many of whom had never been any further from home than Ipswich or the seaside at Felixstowe.

Also, going off to War gave them an escape from the grinding poverty and helplessness of rural working class life - one man observes that In my day, a Suffolk farmworker was worked to death, and I mean that quite literally. I am not complaining about it - before the War, that's just the way it was. The War gave them dignity and purpose - ironically, under the circumstances, it gave their lives meaning.

All eight of my great grandparents' families were desperately poor, four of them rural, four of them urban. It was the first time any of them had been abroad, and off they went, not only to France, but to India, Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. They may well have had patriotic feelings, but they also went looking for adventure, for comradeship, for sun, sea, sex and a sense of freedom.

My great-grandfather Arthur Page and two great-great-uncles, Harry Anable and Herbert Page, now lie in France, and another great-great-uncle Herbert Cross is in the British War Cemetery of the Palestinian State at Gaza. Arthur Page's death left his wife and seven children, in Ely's poor Waterside district, in desperate poverty, and it is said that his poor widow went deaf with the shock of opening the chaplain's letter.

But I think if you had told the boys that they had a one in three chance of not coming back, most of them would still have gone. - Simon