Letters from the front

[Kate Wills]

Dear Clive,

I hate to interrupt, because this has become Kenneth and Marjorie's world; but I would like to thank you for sharing their letters here with us, and to ask if you could give us some background information about them please?

[Clive Temple]

I can't really Kate, only what I've typed above. I bought these letters off ebay. If anyone else can contribute though please chip in.

If Joe (from the excellent XXth LF site) is reading this he may know more about the life and death of Captain Spafford being as Arthur was a career LF soldier.

[FuManchu18]

A very delayed reply to this post! I've just arrived here via Google, and I'm immensely grateful to see Captain Spafford's letters transcribed - he's cropped up in some family history research I'm doing, and I was interested to find out more about him. Many thanks for posting them!

 

I was researching my family members in the 42nd Division, and I found a newspaper report that one of them - a chaplain with the Lancashire Fusiliers - had married Captain Spafford and his wife in Egypt between the outbreak of war and Gallipoli. I then checked to see Captain Spafford's fate, and of course found that he had been killed the following year, so sadly the honeymoon would have been the first and only time spent with his wife. My great-great-uncle went on to be a strong pacifist in later life, and no doubt one of the causes was the sheer futility of marrying a friend in 1914 and burying him in 1915.

 

A curious coincidence - 70 years later, my grandmother interviewed Captain Spafford's sister as research for a book on women's physical education. I can't imagine either of them knew that the families had already crossed paths before then.

[Guest]

Hello,

 

These are fascinating to me: Arthur Langworthy Spafford was my great uncle. He had a brother Kenneth Edward Alexander who also fought in with the Lancashire Fusiliers in WW I, though at a different time and place. Kenneth was my grandfather. Both of them are remembered on the WW I memorial at Chapel-en-le-Frith in Derbyshire. Arthur was considerably older (Kenneth was the youngest of eleven) and had fought in the Boer War and perhaps remained in the army the whole time. Kenneth was attending Charterhouse when the war broke out and I think attended Sandringham before joining up. He fought in Belgium, where he was wounded.