It's a tough life at the end of the queue

Dentistry on the frontline, 1917

My previous post about teeth and toothache appears to have stirred a few memories. My mother has been in touch to tell me that it brought to mind one of the rare stories her father used to tell about his time on the Western Front.
As a private with the Gloucestershire Regiment he often had grumbling teeth, as did thousands of others, but for him there was no quick remedy. When he took himself off to the Army dentist, his wait was always one of the longest. Why? Because his name was Wood and that not only came at the end of the alphabet ... it also meant the end of the queue!

My grandfather hardly ever mentioned the war, but one other memory that slipped out from time to time concerned moonshine. No, not that moonshine, but the sort that reflected on tin plates and mugs on a clear night in the trenches. He recalled that soldiers would keep their utensils well covered while eating becaue they were terrified that any reflection could make them a target for snipers. For the same reason he also held his lit cigarette inwards towards the palm of his hand - a habit that lasted his whole life.

The agony of toothache in the trenches

'My teeth have been troubling me this last couple of weeks, and I can't get them extracted as we don't possess any forceps.' So wrote one poor soldier from Northern France in 1918, whose letters I'm reading at the moment. As if life in the trenches wasn't bad enough, many servicemen were forced to endure grinding toothache too.

There were people who could help - officers attached to the Royal Army Medical Corps carried out the duties of dentists during the First World War, but they weren't always around when you needed them. 'I had to walk to Poperinghe in great misery to have a tooth put to rest or die in the attempt,' wrote the poet Edward Blunden. A similar tale was told by Robert Graves in his famous memoir Goodbye To All That: 'I got toothache which forced me to take a horse and ride twenty miles to the nearest army dental station at corps headquarters. I found the dentist under the weather, like everyone else ... After half an hour he dug the tooth out in sections. The local anaesthetic supplied by the Government seemed as ineffective as the forceps. I rode home with lacerated gums.'

My soldier, however, discovered that help was nearer at hand. Shortly after complaining about the lack of forceps, he wrote to his wife: 'Sgt Small came to tell me he had got a set that day, so last night I went to him and had two of the brutes out'!

Lack of proper dental care caused 'an extensive wastage of soldier manpower' during the Great War, according to the National Archives. 'This state of affairs could not be allowed to carry on.' By Royal Warrant on 4th January 1921, the Army Dental Corps was formed as a component of the Army Medical Services. Too late, unfortunately, for the gallant troops who fought between 1914-18, but one less thing to worry about for those who were called upon to defend their country 20 years later.

Sidetracked by a trio of enterprising brothers

Canadian picnic: Art, Fred and Ern are the three hatless men on the left

Self-discipline is something I've needed a lot of this week, not only to ensure that Olympic-viewing doesn't take over everything (although, goodness knows, that's been hard enough) but also to make sure that I keep my eyes firmly on the title of my book. With so many fascinating characters writing First World War letters, it's very easy to wander off course and spend time becoming interested in their lives rather than sticking to the letters they wrote. I'm not saying that background information isn't valuable, but recently I've had to remind myself that my aim is to write about the First World War rather than individual families!

The enterprising Stride brothers, for example, caught my imagination and were a case in point. The trio set off for Canada in 1909 in order to find work in the building trade. They came from a Somerset family which had run a successful building business since the 1800s, developing housing and shops in the Shirehampton and Avonmouth areas of Bristol. But by the early 1900s the business couldn't support the whole family, so the brothers set off for Canada in search of pastures new.

Ern, 27, was the eldest and drove the business forward; Fred, 26, was the easy-going one; and Art, 25, was the youngest, elegant and dapper. They found work in Vancouver and all three lived off Fred's wages while saving money earned by the other two, and in time they set up their own business. The brothers lived a lively social life which centred around the local methodist church. They were musical and played viola and cello, and there were plenty of outings, as pictured above.

For some years Fred and Art remained settled in Canada, both marrying Canadian women, but Ern's life took a less happy turn when became ill with tuberculosis. In the early stages he was nursed by Fred, however the Stride family was close and didn't want to bury one of their own in a foreign land. So Ern came back to England (and in the end he lived until he was 45).

Where do First World War letters come into this story? When Ern returned to England, conscription was in full swing and the Army lost no time in calling him up. Although he resisted, he was put on light duties at home. 'Well or ill everyone seems to be caught in the net,' he wrote. 'We are caught in the military machine alright, no escape.' There followed regular letters from Ern to his brothers in which he wrote about everything from his duties at an anti-aircraft station to the mood of the country.

Ern's letters give a fascinating insight into England at a time when trench warfare had started wear down public enthusiasm for the conflict and will provide valuable material for my project. But the enterprising Stride brothers deserve a book of their own!

"You can't imagine what I've gone through"

Letterhead of one of Rifleman Fake's letters

How many of those who went to fight on the Western Front were cut out for life as a soldier? Not many, I'm sure, despite their British stoicism. Certainly not Rifleman Tom Fake of Bristol, whose letters from 1917 I've been reading this week. Judging from what he wrote, he would have been far happier at home tending his garden, keeping a proud eye on his young son, and chatting with his wife about the comings and goings of neighbours and friends.

The letters Private Fake received from his wife were his lifeline: 'Shouldn't I just like to come up for the weekend and have a peep at you,' he wrote wistfully. Far from complaining, though, he got on with what he was told to do - but not always with happy consequences. Here he describes one nightmarish episode when his battalion was sent 'up the line':

'We had to go up to the front digging trenches and after we had gone cross country and through woods for about 3 miles I had to give up, absolutely lost and done up, didn't know which way to go and there was no one about. I wandered about for a couple of hours and then I came across an officer, he put me on the right way and I got back to the batt at six o'clock that night.

'The next day we went up to the trenches ... A couple of days after I went with a party to a village to fetch water. I kept up alright going, but coming back with the water I was completely done up. Any rate I stuck to the water and carried it to the trenches, when I got there I found that our men had advanced further on, so I had to stay in those trenches all night on my own as I did not know where to go. Next day I found them again and I am glad to say that night we were relieved. The next day I could not walk at all, so I have finished up in hospital.'

Private Fake was diagnosed with myalgia or, as he called it, rheumatics. 'You can't imagine what I've gone through,' he wrote.

His letters are full of stories like the one above, as well as amusing little asides. For example, he tells his wife that the biscuits she has sent him have ended up in crumbs, the chocolate has been crushed, and the French nougat was 'like some sausages that had been stepped on'. 'Try and persuade yourself it is no use sending them,' he writes in exasperation!

I'm pleased to say that this endearing man survived the war and lived well into old age. His great-niece has a holly bush planted in his memory in her garden and she has kept all his letters beautifully. I had the pleasure of meeting her at a recent meeting of Thornbury U3A's Family History Group in South Gloucestershire, a thriving get-together where she and several other members brought their wartime letters for me to read. They will be invaluable for my book and I'll be quoting more snippets from servicemen's letters in the months to come.

The search is on for servicemen's letters

The Ball brothers with their parents
and sister - my grandmother

I’ve been quite taken aback by the response to my letter in the Bristol Evening Post, appealing for readers to get in touch if they had correspondence from the Great War. A number of people replied with tales that painted a vivid and varied story.

One told me about his grandfather who had fought in the Battle of Jutland and was one of the last men alive to have witnessed the scuttling of the German Fleet in 1919. Another reader's grandfather spent the entire war as a prisoner in Germany, captured in 1914 and not repatriated until 1918.

There were some very sad tales, like the soldier who joined up in 1914 as a healthy young man, but was discharged in 1919 with shell shock, to spend the rest of his life in an institution.

Other readers told me about brothers who had joined up and gone to fight - with only one coming back. This happened in my own family; my maternal grandfather managed to survive both Gallipoli and the Western Front, but his younger brother was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. On the other side of my family, three great-uncles went to war and, mercifully, all came back. They're pictured above, in uniform, with their parents' and younger sister - my grandmother.

Readers were also kind enough to send me copies of some marvellous postcards which were a real Edwardian feature of correspondence during the First World War.

Such an encouraging response to my letter in The Post made me realise that there was plenty of correspondence to fill the pages of my book, and I look forward to discovering a lot more.

It’s also reassuring to know that all over this country there are huge archives full of historical correspondence, so if my own enquiries hit a barren patch, I can always fall back on these. Museums are the most obvious repositories, among them the Imperial War Museums and the National Army Museum, both in London, where vast numbers of letters from the First World War (and many other wars) are held. These documents are available for the public to view, and helpfully they are catalogued online. The RAF and the Royal Navy also have their own archives. And a network of regimental army museums spread all over the UK is a veritable treasure trove of information. Click the Useful links tab at the top of this page for details of all of these.

If you have any letters from the First World War tucked away in old suitcases or at the back of drawers, I'd be very please to hear from you. Get in touch at jacwadsworth@hotmail.com .

There in my inbox, an offer I couldn't refuse!

For some time I'd been thinking how nice it would be to write a book of my own, without the limits of feature-writing. As a freelance writer for magazines I was lucky to be able to choose the subjects I wrote about without having to labour through articles which bored me, as was often the case when I worked for newspapers in my youth.

But there were always two drawbacks. First, I was limited to a fairly standard feature length of 1,500 words or less, which isn't very long when you're writing about something you find fascinating. And second, it's hard work trawling your ideas around magazine editors to find a buyer, especially when you've got one you consider brilliant and nobody's interested!

So when I opened my inbox one day and saw an email asking if I would be interested in writing a book based on First World War letters, I couldn't believe my luck. It came from the former editor of a magazine I had contributed to in the past who was kind enough to remember me when she became a commissioning editor at the publishers Pen and Sword. The sort of book she had in mind would tell the human story of the war using the letters of servicemen - would I consider it? I jumped at the chance.

Some basic research showed me there was a wealth of documents I could use, and to test the water further I wrote a letter to my local paper, the Bristol Evening Post, asking if readers could help. There was a marvellous response and I received some really fascinating (and moving) stories which will be the subject of a future post.

My deadline is January 31st, 2014, which leaves me around 18 months to research and write the book. You'll be able to follow my progress on this blog. First though, I've gone into organisational overdrive to ensure that when my letter-collecting begins everything is filed in an orderly fashion to make writing my first book a pleasure.

Jacqueline Wadsworth