"Forgotten Victims of First World War"

[Derek Black]

An interesting article about the often uncommemorated women who died in the service of their country during the Great War.

Independent Article

Derek.

[Bardess]

I wonder if there has ever been a thread regarding these females? Pity Dr Hughes' email address wasn't included. Thanks for the link.

[Rockdoc]

Diane, a search of the University of Manchester web-site reveals that Dr Hughes is working on a self-funded, part-time project on this topic for Professor Penny Summerfield. Prof. Summerfield's personal page is HERE and she can no doubt put people in contact with Dr Hughes if she can't answer the question herself.

Keith

[Pighills]

Hmmm, 'interesting' comments beneath the article itself!

[Bardess]

Ah! Well done Keith, thanks

[kenf48]

An interesting project, but probably doomed in all but a few cases. It recalls Malcolm Brown's introduction to '12 Days on the Somme' where he says in the years immediately after the war there was a feeling in the UK that we, the British and her allies had won a great victory. His point being by the time Rogerson published his memoir there had been a change, explicitly expressed in 2005 by American historian Janet S. K. Watson,

"In 1914-1918. you were recognised in many social venues as a worthy (if not necessarily equal) participant in the war - whether you were a soldier, a VAD, a munitions worker or a bandage roller. By the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the conflict, however, the popular definition of culturally legitimate war experience had narrowed to that of the soldier in the trenches; young junior officers or possibly men in the ranks, preferably serving in France and Belgium and almost certainly disillusioned."

Janet S. K. Watson (Fighting different wars; Experience Memory and the First World War in Britain) quoted in Malcolm Brown's introduction to 12 Days on the Somme Sidney Rogerson (Greenhill Books 2006 ed)

A recent thread of photographs from the Home Front showed just how far the Great War touched everyone's lives in the UK.

http://1914-1918.inv...howtopic=155063

By the 1960's Alan Clark in his foreword to 'Donkeys' describes while researching the book visiting a large cemetery at Loos where in 1959 there were a mere 3 entries from British visitors in the visitors book for the whole year. I doubt there is such isolation fifty years on from then.

Now the topic is on the school curriculum and as we seem to be looking at new ways to look at the conflict perhaps there will be more balance in the study of the impact of the war, and it's aftermath beyond the Western Front.

It's fascinating how each generation places a different perspective on this war, it may happen for WW2 as it recedes from living memory, but for now it seems to be the only war where memory and remembrance has gone through so many changes. It seems with the internet it is now the turn of the previously excluded 'minority' to move more to centre stage, and no better time to discuss it than this week.

Ken