Photographs: Indian Army on flickr.com from British Library

[MaureenE]

A set of 335 photographs by American photographer HD Girdwood held by the British Library is available on flick.com

http://scroll.in/article/668737/Photos-show-Indian-soldiers'-lives-behind-World-War-I-trenches (edit: this link does not seem to work,-I used the link symbol, but that doesn't seem to work either, so you will need to copy and paste the entire link //scroll.in/article/668737/Photos-show-Indian-soldiers'-lives-behind-World-War-I-trenches and then add http: at the beginning. Sorry, I cannot work out how to post this link in an unbroken form. The unlink button did not enable me to do this.)

"The son of an American minister from Ontario, HD Girdwood was something of a veteran India hand. He had first visited the country in 1903 for the Delhi Durbar and returned several times afterwards for more photo assignments. He was in India when the war broke out.
After he pestered officials and promised to contribute his photographs for propaganda, the India Office allowed him to travel to France. He arrived in France on July 22, 1915, having received permission to shoot only for 15 days. He later got permission to photograph Indian soldiers as they recovered from injuries at Bournemouth and Brighton… The India Office restricted Girdwood to the rear, which is why so many of his photographs depict soldiers at leisure. They cook, wrestle, play music or football. While it later emerged that several of his combat photographs were staged, we don't know whether this was true of the rest of his images".

Cheers

Maureen

[Sepoy]

Maureen

Thank you for posting the flickr link - I have not seen those Indian Army related photos before and I found them fascinating. Unfortunately, I could not get your second link to work.

Sepoy

[MaureenE]

Sepoy, if you amalgamate the two sections of the URL, as per my edit above, it should give you the correct URL, or google the partial URL

scroll.in/article/668737/Photos-show-Indian-soldiers'-lives-behind-World-War-I-trenches

For some reason this URL will not work on the GWF

Cheers

Maureen