Voices of War

Dr. Peter Liddle—F.R.Hist.S., former keeper of the Liddle Collection, Brotherton Library, the University of Leeds, and founder, former director, and, in retirement, life president of the Second World War Experience Centre, North Wetherby, outside Leeds—has devoted his life to the preservation of the evidence of the past. Much of that evidence is collected in the two extensive archives just mentioned. At last count, for example, materials still accumulating at the Second World War Experience Centre have already documented the personal experiences of more than 6,000 men and women who struggled through the trials of World War ii. The Liddle Collection, housed at the University of Leeds, documents the same kinds of experiences for more than 7,000 persons and includes among its mountains of evidence some 4,000 taped interviews, many of considerable length, several of which take events on record back well over 120 years from our present day. In addition to overseeing the development and preservation of these two collections, Dr. Liddle pioneered interviewing procedures that were used to build large parts of the collections and conducted hundreds of interviews himself. Subsequently he founded and edited two journals devoted to the results of his research, lectured extensively worldwide about his discoveries, and wrote innumerable articles and more than twenty books derived from his work. Captured Memories 1900–1918 contains an edited and annotated selection of twenty-nine of Liddle’s more memorable interviews taken from the Liddle Collection and features, without limiting itself to, the battles on the Western Front, the Gallipoli Campaign, and the Battle of Jutland.

“Section One: Pre-1914” contains a series of eight interviews which establish the circumstances and tone of English life prior to the commencement of the First World War. All of the subjects interviewed later went through the war, many of them in uniform; and in this regard the book’s overall organization reflects the author’s well-practiced interviewing technique—a technique in which he always begins by asking his subjects to discuss their family background, childhood, education, and prewar experience before moving into the parts of their lives that involved the war directly. Here, for example, Jimmy Hooper, who later served with both the Merchant Navy and the Royal Navy, reveals the rigors of his apprenticeship on a full-rigged sailing vessel carrying coal from Newcastle to Australia in 1904. Tom Easton, a Northumberland pit boy, recalls what it was like to go into the mines as soon as he left school for ten pence a day, while Nellie Elsdon talks about growing up amidst the working classes in Sunderland adjacent to the North Sea. Howard Cruttenden Martin paints a vivid picture of middle-class business life in London prior to the outbreak of war in an interview that will be particularly useful to social historians. Wing Commander J. N. Fletcher recalls the unusual experience of being trained to be an “air observer” from a man-lifting kite before eventually being graduated to wartime service in airships. Margery Corbell Ashby offers a revealing interview about her role as a political activist and suffragist. Donald MacDonald, later a Cameron highlander, discusses the hardships of growing up as a crofter in the Hebrides, and George Ives concludes the section by describing his experiences in the Boer War and as a colonist in Canada. Taken together and matched with Dr. Liddle’s perceptive introductions, the pre-1914 interviews offer a carefully rounded entry into the historical moment and prepare the ground well for what follows.

War is certainly hell, to recall General Sherman’s appreciation; but, as anyone who has ever served so much as a day in the armed services knows, war can also lead to absurdly hilarious high comedy, which explains, perhaps, why Dr. Liddle opens “Section Two: The First World War” (a spread of twenty-one interviews), with Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard’s interview, “Training in Balloons.” Contrary to what one might expect in a pattern of career development, Air Marshal Goddard...