‘The Bridge Across the Stream’ was originally published in the 1917 Blighty Christmas Special. The lyrics were written by J.E. MacManus (1862-1921) — Blighty's editor, who, before the war, had written lyrics for several music hall songs, often in collaboration with the actor and singer Leo Stormont (1860-1923). They …

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This was originally one of my essays written as part of my master's degree at the University of Wolverhampton, and I am posting it here for two reasons: First, the subject of propaganda during the First World War has arisen in previous articles on this site, and I have several future articles in the pipeline that will …

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I mentioned in the last entry in this series that I had been experimenting with a photography set-up. I chose this book from my collection next, which is considerably larger than a typical autograph book, to see if the set-up would still work. The result was so-so, with a bit of rejigging needed. I have been unable to …

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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 …

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Figure 1. Blighty, 14 June 1916, p.1 Blighty: A Budget of Humour from Home was a charitable soldiers’ newspaper that ran between May 1916 and March 1919 (and later became a short-lived mainstream publication until its bankruptcy in 1921). In the foreword for the first issue, the origin of the magazine was attributed to …

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From my search to track down First World War soldier-drawn cartoons for my dissertation, and the route through which I acquired items, I ended up with quite a collection of war-related ephemera (which is still growing). It seems a shame for it to just sit in boxes so I thought I would try and do something interesting — …

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