Author: Michael Sharpe
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473856256
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Get Book Here
Book Description
Birmingham, the cradle of the industrial revolution and the world's first manufacturing town, is an important focus for many family historians who will find that their trail leads through it. Rural migrants, Quakers, Jews, Irish, Italians, and more recently people from the Caribbean, South-Asia and China have all made Birmingham their home. This vibrant history is reflected in the city's rich collections of records, and Michael Sharpe's handbook is the ideal guide to them. He introduces readers to the wealth of information available, providing an essential guide for anyone researching the history of the city or the life of an individual ancestor. His work addresses novices and experienced researchers alike and offers a compendium of sources from legal and ecclesiastical archives, to the records of local government, employers, institutions, clubs, societies and schools. Accessible, informative and extensively referenced, it is the perfect companion for research in Britain's second city.
Author: Robert J. Rider
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9780853238973
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172
Get Book Here
Book Description
When Robert J. Rider died in 1961, he left to his descendants a typescript text, tentatively entitled Flashbacks, which would eventually become Reflections on the Battlefield. Broadly autobiographical, this text offers a unique account of its author who fought as an infantryman while also serving as a chaplain, thus exposing himself in peculiar directness to the ambiguities of chaplaincy service on the battlefield. A further particularity is that Rider was in a minority among chaplains, being a Methodist chaplain. In August 1914, Rider, aged twenty-five, was about to begin his third year of training for the ministry of the Wesleyan Methodist church, at Handsworth Theological College in Birmingham. Two months later he had enlisted with the First Birmingham Battalion, later termed the 14th Battalion, of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Rider's first-hand accounts of Ypres, the Somme and Arras reveal a man morally opposed to war and yet adamant that Germany and her allies needed to be defeated. Reflections on the Battlefield provides us with a personal and valuable contribution to the present-day debate about the contemporary understanding of the ethics of war, as expressed on the World War I battlefield.
Author: Peter Hughes
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473825563
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Get Book Here
Book Description
Like Ypres, Arras was a front line town throughout the Great War. From March 1916 it became home to the British Army and it remained so until the Advance to Victory was well under way. In 1917 the Battle of Arras came and went. It occupied barely half a season, but was then largely forgotten; the periods before and after it have been virtually ignored, and yet the Arras sector was always important and holding it was never easy or without incident; death, of course, was never far away. The area around Arras is as rich in Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries as anywhere else on the Western Front, including the Somme and Ypres, and yet these quiet redoubts with their headstones proudly on parade still remain largely unvisited. This book is the story of the men who fell and who are now buried in those cemeteries; and the telling of their story is the telling of what it was like to be a soldier on the Western Front. ??'Arras-North' is the first of three books by the same author. This volume contains in depth coverage of almost sixty Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries and is a veritable 'Who's Who' of officers and other ranks who fell on this part of the Western Front. It provides comprehensive details of gallantry awards and citations and describes many minor operations, raids and other actions, as well as the events that took place in April and May 1917. It is the story of warfare on the Western Front as illustrated through the lives of those who fought and died on the battlefields of Arras.??There are many unsung heroes and personal tragedies, including a young man who went out into no man's land to rescue his brother, an uncle and nephew killed by the same shell, a suicide in the trenches and a young soldier killed by a random shell whilst celebrating his birthday with his comrades. There is an unexpected connection to Ulster dating back to the days of Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange, a link to Sinn Fein and an assassination, a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton, as well as a conjuror, a friend of P.G. Wodehouse, a young officer said to have been 'thrilled' to lead his platoon into the trenches for the first time, only to be killed three hours later, and a man whose headstone still awaits the addition of his Military Medal after almost a century, despite having been involved in one of the most daring rescues of the war. This is a superb reference guide for anyone visiting Arras and its battlefields.
Author: Peter Hughes
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473874319
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418
Get Book Here
Book Description
This companion volume to Visiting the Fallen: Arras North provides in-depth information of the WWI battlefield, its significance, and its cemeteries. Arras, France, was a frontline town throughout the Great War. In 1916, it became home to the British Army and it remained so until the Advance to Victory. The area around Arras is as rich in Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries as anywhere on the Western Front, yet they remain largely unvisited. This book explores those cemeteries, and tells the story of the men who are buried there. Visiting the Front: Arras-South contains comprehensive coverage of over 60 Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries to be found in Arras and to the south of the town. It has a wealth of gallantry awards, including their citations, and features hundreds of officers and other ranks who fell during the war. Many small actions, raids and operations are described in a book that tells the story of warfare on the Western Front through the lives of those who fought and died on the battlefields of Arras. This is an essential reference guide for anyone visiting Arras and its battlefields.
Author: Kevin Linch
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783276029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Get Book Here
Book Description
An examination of the lifecycle of soldiers, including enlistment, experiences of military life, the soldier's place in society and in politics, and military identity, memory and representation.
Author: Tonie Holt
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1783035099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 589
Get Book Here
Book Description
Major and Mrs. Holt's Battlefield Guide to the Somme is, without doubt, one of the best-selling guide books to the battlefields of the Somme. This latest updated edition, includes four recommended, timed itineraries representing one day's traveling. Every stop on route has an accompanying description and often a tale of heroic or tragic action.Memorials, private and official, sites of memorable conflict, the resting places of personalities of note are all drawn together with sympathetic and understanding commentary that gives the reader a sensitivity towards the events of 1916.
Author: Richard Van Emden
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1473891892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Get Book Here
Book Description
What greater pride might a young man feel than to serve shoulder to shoulder with his friends in time of war? To enlist into the army with his pals, chums, mates, filling the ranks of battalions that drew their strength from the local community, from amongst factory workers, miners, shop-workers and tradesmen. In August 1914, what more fitting role was there to play than to answer the country’s call to arms? The past is another country, of course: the world in which these men grew up and the mores that took them to the Western Front might appear innocent and naive today. The Somme battle eviscerated many of these free-spirited battalions. But the raising of this New Army – a purely volunteer army – lives on in the public consciousness, their collective story part of our heritage. Who were these volunteers who poured into recruiting offices, overwhelming the staff? What motivated these men – too often just boys - to join up? How did they feel about one another and the new military regime into which so many ran with enthusiasm, without much thought as to the future? After the success of his previous books, The Somme, The Road to Passchendaele, and 1918, best-selling Great War historian Richard van Emden returns to the beginning of the War with this, his latest volume, including an unparalleled collection of soldiers’ own photographs taken on their privately-held cameras. Drawing on long-forgotten memoirs, diaries and letters written by the men who enlisted, Richard tells the riveting story of Kitchener’s volunteers, before they went to fight.
Author: Steve Corbett
Publisher: Helion and Company
ISBN: 1911096850
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Get Book Here
Book Description
September 1914, and the whole of Europe was at war following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his beloved wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28th June 1914. In France and Belgium, the British Expeditionary Force were struggling to hold back the German hoards as their casualties began to mount. Back in Britain the call went out for volunteers to join the ‘Pals’ battalions which were springing up in the northern towns of England, and one of the first to volunteer was young Jack Smallshaw of Accrington. On 15th September 1914, Jack became an ‘Accrington Pal,’ a member of a battalion of men who are remembered more than any other of the Pals battalions because of the appalling tragedy which befell them on the killing fields of the Somme. On that fateful day on 1st July 1916, the battalion attacked the fortified village of Serre and were virtually wiped out on the slopes in front of the village. Jack was one of the very few who survived. He continued to serve on the front throughout the remainder of 1916 and into 1917, where he took part in the battle at Oppy wood in May of that year. Shortly afterwards he was struck down by a second bout of trench fever and spent the rest of the year recovering in England. By February 1918 he was back in France serving on the front line, but Jack was never the same man. He was in the thick of the action again in March when the Germans launched their spring offensive against the allied lines. He weathered that too, and stuck it out to the bitter end. This then, is the story of a quite remarkable survivor of the ‘war to end all wars’, whose diaries have lain unpublished, in the possession of his family, since 1919.
Author: Peter Doyle
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752479210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Get Book Here
Book Description
The First World War largely directed the course of the twentieth century. Fought on three continents, the war saw 14 million killed and 34 million wounded. Its impact shaped the world we live in today, and the language of the trenches continues to live in the modern consciousness. One of the enduring myths of the First World War is that the experience of the trenches was not talked about. Yet dozens of words entered or became familiar in the English language as a direct result of the soldiers' experiences. This book looks at how the experience of the First World War changed the English language, adding words that were both in slang and standard military use, and modifying the usage and connotations of existing words and phrases. Illustrated with material from the authors' collections and photographs of the objects of the war, the book will look at how the words emerged into everyday language.
Author: Norman Ferguson
Publisher: Summersdale
ISBN: 1783720638
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167
Get Book Here
Book Description
Telling the stories of the battles, the aircraft, the weapons, the soldiers, the poets, and the many heroes, Norman Ferguson delves deep into the history of the 'Great War'. Through anecdotes and statistics, and drawing on letters, speeches and official reports, this comprehensive miscellany is a compelling guide to the ‘Great War’.
