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Letters home

Posted in This months highlight on 06 Dec 2024

The Royal Berkshire Archives houses many documents, maps, photographs, and other items that contain a wealth of historical information. However, we can sometimes be guilty of purely focusing on what a document can tell us and forget that the items themselves have a history and value of their own. This was bought home to one archivist recently when cataloguing some letters written during the First World War, both from the Gallipoli campaign and on the Western Front (D/EX2894/1/13).

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These letters were written by Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Orme Wilson, D.S.O., MP, to his close friend, Frederick Adolphus Simonds (known as Eric) of the Simonds Brewery dynasty. The two men had been friends for years and Wilson was best man at Eric’s wedding in 1909. They were both involved politically, and Wilson was the MP for Reading when war was declared in 1914.

Wilson was one of the 264 MPs who served in the First World War. He commanded the Hawke Battalion of the Royal Naval Division, and later British Expeditionary Force.

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His letters to Eric start in May 1915 when on the Steamship Ascania on the way to Gallipoli. His letters throughout the year describe the fighting and harsh conditions of trench warfare in a campaign that today is often overshadowed by the Western Front. These writings present a valuable source of information for someone researching the period and campaign.

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However, the physical letters themselves can also tell us something. One letter from August 1915 is on paper originally headed Pensdell, Wokingham, Berks, the home of Eric Simonds. Wilson had complained about the lack of writing equipment to be had, so his friend had clearly sought to remedy this by sending some of his own notepaper.

In October 1915, Wilson was sent to hospital in Ras-el-Tin, Alexandria, Egypt, due to a case of dysentery, and his convalescence lasted over a month. He eventually returned to Gallipoli, just before the evacuations of Sulva Bay and Anzac Cove. The Hawke battalion were one of the last to leave but eventually they too were withdrawn and spent a few months waiting for new orders on the island of Imbros, Turkey. They created their own entertainment such as a Grand Concert put on at Stone Hut, Hospital Valley, on 25 March 1916.

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They eventually received new orders stating that the Battalion would become part of the army and be sent to France. The battalion travelled home on the H.M.T. Franconia where again the men made their own entertainment, this time by creating a newspaper “Franconia Flashes”.

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Wilson’s letters to his friend continued during his time in the trenches on the Western Front describing the horrors he had to endure there. The letters end in December 1916 when he returned home after being severely wounded at the Battle of the Ancre, the last of the big attacks of the Battle of the Somme.

It can be awe-inspiring to think about the number of different hands these letters and papers have passed through to get here: Wilson writing them, the censor checking them, being transported on ships from the Mediterranean or France back to Britain where they would pass through more hands before being finally received by Eric. The letters then stayed with the Simonds family, passing through two more generations before coming to the archives where they can be read by even more people.

A poignant and valuable resource, but also a reminder to consider the history of the document itself along with the information contained within it.