Comrades in Arms all in a Row - Sepia Saturday

Sports teams all in a row  feature in this week's Sepia Saturday prompt photograph.   I have only two such images so instead show a different set of teams here - comrades in arms.

 

This World War One photograph in my  Danson family collection  was unfortunately not identified, but I think my great uncle Frank  Danson could be on the right of the front row.   He as one of five Danson brothers serving.  Frank was wounded in action and hospitalized in Malta. 

Wounded soldiers, fit enough to go out and about, wore a distinctive uniform of blue flannel suits with white revers and a red tie. 

********* 

 

 I  must admit I know nothing at all about this photograph which was in my Great Aunt Jennie  Danson's  collection.  She was usually good at labeling the photos on the reverse, but there was nothing here to indicate who it was or where it was taken.   I am presuming they are First World War soldiers and might include one of Jennie's five brothers who served - William Danson  (my grandfather), John who died in army training,  Tom, Frank and George, killed on the Somme a week after his 22nd birthday.     

Was it a group of new recruits in training?  Can anyone identify the cap badge?  How many I wonder survived the conflict.  The background looks very like the many terraced rows of of bed & breakfasts houses you find in the seaside resort of Blackpool, Lancashire.    

*********  

 

 

My cousin's grandfather Edward Stewart Ingram Smith is  on the back row, far right with his regiment the Liverpool Scottish.  An older man at 44, he standing rather apart from his much younger  colleagues. His is a sad story , in that he did survive the  war, but was a broken man  whose marriage also failed in the aftermath of war.  

*********  

 

A  Photograph from my husband's family collection with  this group of young sailors,  obviously relaxing!  The postcard franked 15th December 1909 from Beverley (Yorkshire?) was addressed to my husband's great grandmother, Mrs S. A. Hibbert, 169 Maxwell Street, South Shields, with the message:

"Dear Mother, I write these lines hoping you are keeping well, and to ask if you can pick me out  in this group." 

  

********

Not comrades in arms - but rather Comrades with Spades!

 

Land Girls gathering in Earlston for work on local farms  during the Second World War. 

 The Women's Land Army  was a  civilian organisation,  created during the First and Second World Wars,  to recruit  women to  work in agriculture, replacing men called up to the armed forces.  At first volunteers were sought. but  numbers  were increased by conscription.   By 1944 the Women's Land Army  had over 80,000 members across Britain.   It was officially disbanded in 1949 

 Take a look HERE for a vivid  first hand account of what life was like as a land girl on Georgefield Farm, Earlston, Scottish Borders  in the 1940s.   Barbara began her story:

 

"I was living in Edinburgh, left school at 14 and was   working in a lawyer's office as a junior clerk when I was called up in 1944.  I was given the choice of becoming a FANY - joining the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry or the Land Army.  I chose the Land Army as it was always the one organization that appealed to me.  I was delighted to be given the choice, as my sister was just conscripted into  Munitions with no alternative offered." 

 

*********  

 

 Sepia Saturday gives bloggers an opportunity to share 
their family history and memories through photograps.

 

 

 

  

 Click  HERE to see more posts from the team 

of Sepia Saturday bloggers.

 

 

***************