Things They Knew and Saw: An Introduction

To use an appropriate idiom for the era, I am currently 'knee-deep' into my PhD, and one casualty from this undertaking has been updating my website. I want to get back into the habit of writing articles for this site regularly, but — as I am sure many a PhD student before has discovered — writing academically all the time creates some strange (to anyone outside the field) habits — such as not being able to write a sentence without writing a follow-up sentence to defend the first — which does not make for great reading.

I therefore want to kick off with some shorter articles. I've been reviewing my notebooks that I've used both for this website and for my Master's. Having extracted all the useful information, what's left are a few scribbles in the margins, a random sentence here and there, and the odd crossed-out paragraph. While most of this is fallout and fodder, there are some nuggets and gems to be found in this marginalia wasteland; some informative, some amusing, some tongue-in-cheek, and some a combination of all three. What they all have in common is that they are short, random, and, in the grand scale of things, trivial. In the past, I would have used them as topics for tweets — 180 characters being the perfect length for many examples. But I am no longer on Twitter/X, and Bluesky can be a tough crowd to crack. So, I want to write them up here for no other reason than to allow them to come up for air from the dusts of time.

To start with, I am just going to explain where the title 'Things They Knew and Saw' comes from. It derives from two features that were commonly found in trench journals and unit magazines: 'Things We Want to Know' and 'Things We See in Camp''

Things We Want to Know

This was a formulaic column with the purpose of spreading gossip and rumour, using short blurbs that posed such conundrums as 'Who was the officer who used to go around the wardroom, finishing off other people's drinks'.¹ This feature was extremely common across not only trench journals but within popular publications of the period, going back to at least the 1880s, such as the Illustrated Sporting News.²

Things We See in Camp

This title was taken directly from a regular feature in the Pennington Press, a journal for the A.S.C. M.T. Bromley, illustrated by Oliver Beaconsfield Hill (service no M2/181369) and showing everyday scenes. However, many journals had their own take on this: the Summerdown Camp journal for the Military Convalescent Hospital, Eastbourne had a feature called 'Wheat and Chaff', while the Growler, a journal for the 16th Service Battalion, had 'Camp Cackle', which described 'Camp concerns, curious customs, commonplace conversations, cookhouse complaints, crime, criminals, contemptuous collared civilians, comical complications, considered caustically'.³

Together, these features inform what this series of titbits intends to be: a celebration of triviality.