The Short

I am a historian pursuing a PhD at Exeter University, focusing on the image of Tommy Atkins c.1896-1926. Tommy Atkins was the nickname for the British soldier that came into popular use around the 1870s, but which fell out of popularity in the 1920s. At the most basic level, I am trying to answer the question: if you were to ask someone from any point along that timeline — including Atkins himself — what is the first thing that comes to mind when hearing the term ‘Tommy Atkins’? On a more in-depth level, I am tracking how this image changed over time, how and by whom it was manipulated, to ultimately answer: would the post First World Tommy be recognisable to his pre-war counterpart?

My interest in this avenue of enquiry stems from my Master’s Degree, which I undertook in 2023 at the university of Wolverhampton. I examined 820 cartoons drawn by soldiers during the First World War to try and understand not only how they saw and processed the world around them, but what these drawings revealed about popular culture and the collective image of Tommy Atkins during the war.

One of the conclusions I drew was that Atkins was a polyonymous figure, but I was left with two unresolved threads. There was a stark dichotomy between his self-perception and the varied, often idealised, perceptions held by others, especially concerning the 'Stoic Tommy' portrayed in hospital journals — an image I suspect is steeped in class dynamics. The second thread was that while Tommy Atkins’s image during the First World War has been scrutinised, there is a notable omission in contextualising these portrayals within a broader historical narrative.

Articles elsewhere

'Budding Bairnsfathers', Blighty Magazine, and 'Cheery Tommy Atkins', Stand To!, The Western Front Association, February 2023.

Talks

Writing and Working on the Wipers Times, Great War Huts, June 2024

On this site

Since starting my PhD, I have not been able to update this site as regularly as I would like, but as of 2025, plenty of articles are being chipped away at in the background, and infrequent updates are planned. However, you can find on this site, among other things:

The Wipers Times Exposé: A series of articles examining this trench journal in-depth, including the identity of the only female contributor – Dorothy Violet Hall

Budding Bairnsfathers: Documenting soldier-cartoonists who contributed to Blighty Magazine during the First World War

Things they Knew and Saw: Short articles celebrating the trivial

Contact Me

The Long

My route to academia is a non-traditional one. I originally intended to take a year out when studying A-levels, as I was unsure at the time what I wanted to do. This year out turned into 25 years as I found success early within the banking industry, which led to quite a dry corporate career as a consultant. Not wishing to send anyone to sleep, what I did can be best described as working with and around data and processes. In parallel to this, whenever the opportunity presented itself, I worked in more creative fields such as the film industry, wearing a number of different caps behind the scenes, in other ventures. One of my claims to fame is that I had a top 500 chart hit in Finland with the song ‘I Shot a Frenchman at Agincourt’ — cruelly denied the coveted 480 spot by Kate Bush’s ‘Deeper Understanding’.

Over the years, the balance between ‘dry corporate’ and creative led more into the latter’s favour, and up until 2019, I was running a jewellery company specialising in cufflinks made from unusual materials — such as the hull of the Cutty Sark or engine blades from the Avro-Vulcan Bomber, as well as undertaking private label work. At its height, we had customers in over 30 countries and were a finalist in a national business competition run by FedEx.

For a number of personal reasons, my plan for 2020 was to take a year out from running the business, spend the year being sensibly poor, and devote my time to a neglected passion — painting. And then Covid struck. Fortunately, having planned to take that year off, I dodged a bullet. As the crisis unfolded, I came to the realisation that I don’t, for the foreseeable future, want to go back to running a business, nor do I want to don a corporate cape again.

I had always yearned to undertake a form of academic study, with the caveat that I wanted to do it for the pleasure and pursuit of knowledge alone, without having to worry about any constraints or external pressures. So, with circumstances as they were, and being in the fortunate position to do so, I decided this was the ideal time to do something about it and enrolled on my Master’s course in 2020.

I have been interested in history from a young age, and my interest in the First World War began when I was little, when I picked up a copy of A.J.P. Taylor’s The First World War: An Illustrated History. I wasn’t able to understand the text at the time, but I became fascinated with the pictures of the machinery, the uniforms, and the scale. As I entered my teens, that interest expanded towards battles and then trying to understand the logistics, movement, and the reasoning behind them. As I got older, I became more interested in the events leading up to the war, as well as its aftermath. As well as the FWW, I am interested in the Roman Empire, and European cultural history from the Belle Epoque to Weimar Germany — my longer-term plans for this site include writing about art, but not art history, from this period.

Outside of history, I spend my spare time making terrible video games and, though I am old enough to know better, I still dream of scoring a number one in Japan, as the lead singer in Chance & the Lucky Aces