With special thanks to Jane Dix, great-granddaughter of Ernest Couzens. At the start of this year, I was fortunate to be contacted by the family of Ernest James Couzens (1883 — 1955), who provided much of the information below, as well as the pictures, which are reproduced here with their permission. Fig. 1. Ernest …

The Wipers Times — its story and humour immortalised in a 2013 BBC film of the same name, based on the stage play by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman — is one of the most famous of trench journals to appear during the First World War.1 However, there exists a mania around these publications, that began as soon as they first …