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Other Voices

There are occasionally other voices here in these letters.

Modern voices – posting as Family Letters

There’s mine of course. I am Ted’s grand-daughter which makes me Gertrude’s great-granddaughter. There’s Chris Miller’s. He has transcribed the letters from 1915 onwards and done a significant amount of research and posted a couple of commentaries on his work. I have occasionally quoted my mother, when she edited the letters into a book Socks, Cigarettes and Shipwrecks in the 1980s.

Contemporary voices  – posting as Others

There are several people we only hear from once; people writing to Gertrude after seeing one of her son’s name in the casualty lists, the sisters, fiancées, more distant relatives, quotations from newspapers or other contemporary accounts.

Indian voices

Indian voices barely echo in the Berryman letters but David Omissi has edited a collection of Indian letters home. His book is available here. And here is an extract of some of those letters. And here is the Indian experience, mainly that of the women left behind, relayed in folksongs.

The Indian experience of the First World War was told by Mulk Raj Anand in his book Across the Black Waters which is re-published in London by Shalimar Books in the autumn of 2014.

Subterranean Sepoys is a radio play about life in the trenches for the Indian Army on the Western Front, based partly on the Garhwarli’s experience in France.

India and the First World War: Their Name Liveth Forevermore is published as “If I Die Here who Will Remember Me?” in India. Using first-hand accounts such as letters home and rare photographs, the author documents India’s contribution to the first world war and examines the unsettling encounters the Indian soldiers had with foreign, especially European, culture and how it impacted the way they viewed life and living back home.

Race, Empire and First World War Writing by Santanu Das – Drawing upon archival, literary and visual material, the book provides a compelling account of the conflict’s reverberations in Europe and its empires and reclaims the multiracial dimensions of war memory.

Books, exhibitions, videos, and other resources

 

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