Valentine Cards from Flanders Field: Sepia Saturday

A loving couple, (the girl saying goodbye to her sailor boyfriend?)  features on this week's Sepia Saturday prompt.  

 As we mark Valentine's Day, I like to look back again  on the cards my grandfather William Danson (1885-1962) sent  from the Battlefields of World War One to his wife Alice, at home with their four young children in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire. 

This first card below was posted  on 7th ebruary 1918,    and I like to think it was sent to Alice for Valentine’s Day.

 I never knew my grandmother who died when I was a baby.  Grandad was a taciturn countryman, who was working as a cattle man at the local auction mart when he was called up in 1916.  He was not given to flowery language, so the emotions expressed through these cards seemed out of character, but revealed his closeness to Alice.  In contrast the pencilled messages on the back were very prosaic. 

 

Field Post Office - Feb. 7th 1918    

Dear Alice, received your letter allright.  I have landed back at the Batt. and am in the pink.  I have had a letter from Jennie  [sister] and am glad they have  heard from Tom [brother].  Your loving husband, Billy   XXX.

 

 

The "In the pink" phrase seemed to be a favourite term that William used in other messages as well.

"Batt" - I take it to mean the battalion.

"Blighty" in the address was used as   a nickname for Britain, or often specifically England.  It was first used by soldiers in the Indian army in the 19th century and was popularised in the First World War.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word derives from "bilayati", a regional variant of the Urdu word " meaning "foreign", "British", "English" or "European." or "Anglo-Indian".

A "blighty wound" was a wound serious enough to  require recuperation away from the trenches, but not serious enough to kill or maim the victim - it was hoped for by many, and sometimes self-inflicted.

 

Field Post Office 29 April 1918

Dear Alice, just a line to let you know I am in the pink and hope all at home is the same. There is nothing that I want.  Will write again shortly.  Your loving Billy, xxxx.

 

My aunt thought this was a very "risque" card, and totally unlike her father!  

More cards to his children:  

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

My grandmother Alice with her daughters Edith and my mother Kathleen, young Harry and baby Billy - taken 1916/ 

 

I don't know when the card below was sent, but it was in the family collection and again the love my grandparents shared shines through. 

 

Inside verse 

"Oh, Can you read the secret of my heart?

You surely must, dear wife  

 

??? of myself, you are the better part, 

Companion for my life.

The secret is, wherever you may be,  

No power on earth can change my love for thee,

Your loving Billy XXXX

William and Alice, c.1916 

 

          William and Alice, 1938 at my own parents' wedding 

 

 

 

The Danson family, c.1941 - Edith, Peggy, William & Alice, Harry and Kathleenwith son Billy, serving in he navy,  absent.  Youngest daughter Peggy was born after the First World War. 

  

Like many of those who had experienced the horrors of the First World War, Grandad would never talk about this time.  He lost two brothers  during the war - John and George. 

 The cards, kept for over  100 years stand out as a symbol of love and remain amongst my family treasures. 

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A happy ending 23 years later in 1941,   when my uncle,   William's youngest son, namesake Billy, a sailor in World War Two,  married   Louisa Cerrone.    

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 Image courtesy of Pixabay 

 

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Sepia Saturday give bloggers an opportunity 

to share their family history through photographs.

 

 

 Look HERE to see more contributions 

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Poignant Tales from WW1 - Week 3 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.

This week's prompt from "52 Ancestors" asks  me to consider what this story means to  me. 

We are at a dangerous point in our world history   with so much war and conflict dominating our news headlines.    

I take a look back at  my ancestors, who  fought  in World War 1 to remind us what war entails with suffering of those fighting  and and the anguish those families back home. 

    "I had to assist the wounded at a dressing station and stuck to     it for about 40 hours. It's blooming hard work being a            stretcher bearer in the field."  

These were the words of my great uncle George Danson (1894-1916),  written three weeks before he was killed on the Somme 

One of the many embroidered cards sent from Flanders by her sons to my widowed great grandmother, Maria Danson, nee Rawcliffe.  

George Danson was the youngest of eight sons (surviving infancy) of James Danson and Maria Rawcliffe of Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire.  Born in 1894, he was followed three years later by the birth of an only daughter Jennie.  The photographs and memorabilia here come from my great aunts coillection.  

Young George 

George (above) was the favourite uncle of my mother and aunt,  and they had fond memories of him, perhaps because he was nearest to them in age and took on the role of the big brother. I can see why in the photograph of him above.  George worked on W.H. Smith bookstalls at different railway stations in Lancashire and West Yorkshire.

George joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1916 and I was lucky enough to trace his service record on www.ancestry.co.uk  as many were destroyed  in the Second World War.  On his enlistment,  George's  medical report stated he was 5'3" tall,  weighed 109 lbs. (under 8 stone), with size  34 1/2 chest and he wore glasses - so a slight figure to be a stretcher bearer in the turmoil of war, carrying men who were badly wounded or dead.   

Also amongst the family papers were two letters written on  headed paper of the British Expeditionary Force.  A letter of 19th March 1916 to his eldest brother Robert said:

 

     "I will tell you one thing it is no easy job the army life today         and I am of the opinion as most of the chaps are here they         won't be sorry when it is all over."

The second letter of 23rd August 1916 was to Frank, the brother nearest to him in age:

     "At present we are about  8 miles behind the firing line. I had       to assist the wounded at a dressing station and stuck to it for     about 40 hours. It's blooming hard work being a stretcher             bearer in the field. On Friday I was in a big bombardment and     will say it was like a continual thunder and lightening going         off. As I write there are blooming big guns going off abut 50         yards away every few minutes. 

 

    Don't I wish that all of us could get home. Wouldn't that be           great, lad, there's a good time coming and I hope we shall all         be there to join in." 

 

Sadly it was not to be.  

 

 Three weeks later, and a week after his 22nd birthday,  George was killed on 16th September 1916 at the Battle of the Somme, and buried in the Guards Cemetery, Les Boeufs, near Albert.

 

 

 

A report in the local paper  



 A photograph, sent to his widowed mother,  of George's initial grave.  It conveys in a stark way the reality of war amid the mud and blood that George must have experienced - and contrasts with the pristine white of the more lasting memorials that we recognise today. 

 

George remembered on Poulton War Memoral  along with his brother John who died in 1917.

 I have written about George before on my blog,  but it is such a poignant tale, that  I make no apologies for telling it again.

 

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This is just one story in my family history but there is much more  to tell another time - 

• My great uncle John Danson who in 1917 committed suicide whilst in army  training,  leaving  his young daughter an orphan.
  
  
•  My great uncle Arthur  Weston killed at Gallipoli in 1915, aged 35,  leaving a wife and two young children with her  expecting their third child.  
   
• My cousin's grandfather Edward Stuart Ingram Smith - a broken man  following his war experiences  which led to his broken marriage.  
   
• My husband's great uncle ~ Fredrick Donaldson  killed the very same day as George above.  He is remembered on the Thiepval  Monument in France -  the- largest British battle memorial in the world. On Portland stone, piers are engraved the names of over 72,000 men who have no known grave and who were lost in the Somme battles between July 1916 and March 1918.
• 
  

Just five member from  one extended family   an experiences  mirrored in millions of other  families - this is what war is all about!

     

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My Christmas Card Scrapbooks: Sepia Saturday

I am taking a look this week  at one of my favourite post-Christmas activities - compiling a Christmas Card scrapbook. 

Firstly vintage cards in my collection :  

The postcard above, sent in 1877, was in the collection of my third cousin,  Janet, who made contact with me through the Genes rRunited website - we went onto exchange family memorabilia. The verse on the card reflects the rather Victorian maudlin sentiment of the time, but it is still a lovely picture.

This lovely German Christmas card came from the my husband's family.   His uncle Mattie married a German girl in the 1950's.   

 Another continental card - this time from France, courtesy of cousin Stuart.  

 

A charming little card I picked up in an antique shop.  

 

 

And below two of the many cards sent  back from Flanders Field in World WAr One by my grandfather to his family 1917 and 1918.

 

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My Scrapbook Project

It  seems  a shame to bin so many lovely images on Christmas Cards  that I have come up with my own way of retaining tmy favourite  cards for future pleasure. 

I  began doing this years ago when my daughter was small, with  "Gillian's Christmas Scrapbook" was a way of conveying the Christmas story and traditions in a strong visual style and displaying  cards that had been especially sent to her.  I hand-wrote the words as this was long before the days of computers. The scrapbook came out of the cupboard every Christmas to look through and reminiscence over  and  it became part of  our family tradition, one continued with my granddaughter. 

 

 

Many  years down the line, I had a growing  pile   of cards that I had refused to throw out, so I created something similar in a more adult version calling it "Christmas Kaleidoscope"- annotated this time by the computer, which of course made a huge difference to the style of presentation. 

 

 

 

By then I had the bug, so the next year it was "A Christmas Anthology",  using the cards to illustrate poems, songs and literature relating to Christmas.     

 

 

 

My next project, spread over two scrapbook,  was "A Christmas A-Z"   focusing on a  wide range of aspects of the Christmas story.  What would I do without the internet to help with history and definitions!

 I  do mean to stop - but already my mind is on the next edition  - perhaps looking at the stories behind Christmas carols.  

Since I began, scrapbooking, it  has become  a sophisticated hobby, but I have kept to  a very simple style with  the focus on the illustrations.

So to anyone who sent me a card, it continues to give pleasure long after the 12 days of Christmas have past. You never know, I might have created a family heirloom collection. 

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Sepia Saturday gives an opportunity for genealogy bloggers 
to share their family history through photographs

 

Click HERE to read more Christmas memories

from other Sepia Saturday bloggers. 

 

 

 

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