RSS

Honey still for tea

30 Dec

Not all the letters are grim.

I am surprised how much time some of them spent in England. Not Paul, at sea in the Navy, but Richard was a doctor and was posted in troop hospitals on the English coast during 1915. I am not sure what Jim was doing in England at this time (few of his letters survive) and Ted was either on leave or training troops during this day trip straight out of Betjeman:

Bournemouth.

Wednesday.

My dear Mother. I expect you’ve heard of Ted’s & my trip to see Mrs Hughes Hewett. We enjoyed it awfully & it was a pity Ted had to come away so soon. He missed so much of the motor part. It was so nice seeing Blanche again, & Diana is a dear little girl.

I motored back here & found nothing doing. No wounded & the place empty. I wonder whatever they will do with us. I must try & get up to see you all again soon. I miss Ben, she has not written yet, but I suspect she is busy with her new job. Please tell her I have been to Swanage today. Quite a nice little place & such a good tea. Honey – cream – lovely bread & butter & gorgeous cakes! I took Miss Twining.

I am wiring to Jim tonight to get him over for a dance tomorrow. He’s been here on Sunday. Lovely weather nowadays. I bathed today and enjoyed it.

Best love to all

Yr loving son

Richard.

Wherever he is outside the trenches, Richard stays in the best hotels and his letters are full of pretty girls, dances, motorcars, race-horses and occasional tallies of figures as he works out how to pay for them all.

 
1 Comment

Posted by on 30 December, '13 in Benedicta Berryman, Dick Berryman, Jim Berryman, Ted Berryman

 

About this Project: Cold pigs and the time-traveller’s paradox

28 Sep

With The royal Garhwal RiflesIt’s surely no surprise that I am acutely aware of the Time-Traveller’s Paradox – what happens if you go back in time and shoot your own grandfather?  I keep on thinking that if a particular bullet had hit a bit higher then my grandparents would never have met, my mother would not have been born, and neither I nor my siblings would be here today. It’s something we all know, of course, but it’s odd to think about so much. Some years ago I was in a building which had a mirrored floor and ceiling so you appeared to stand on top of an infinite precipice. Thinking about this feels a little like that.

In other news, I have bought a copy of the regimental history of the war, written by my grandfather’s commanding officer, D H Drake-Brockman.  It’s fascinating.  Writing after the war, Drake-Brockman has the time and the leisure for descriptions.

I kept our Battalion headquarters in the vicinity of the ruined farm in a sort of dugout. In reality it was one of those brick pits in which they store beetroots. [Oh, yes, of course, one of those brick pits]. … The farm house, or what remained of it, formed a too conspicuous object, and though the dug-out was shallow, it did us for the time very well. The cellar in the house had evidently been occupied by the headquarters signallers of the relieved regiment, and apparently a heavy howitzer had made a direct hit, for the walls were covered with the poor fellows’ brains and blood. There were still the owner’s cows and other live stock at the farm roaming about the ruins. The owner turned out to be a woman, who came daily to feed them. I had to get our interpreter to tell her to take them away and not come up again as the farm was only about 80 yards from the front line. One of her fine cows was lying dead in the stall, killed by a shell. She took the cows away at night, but left the pigs, which roamed about disconsolately. Eventually they were all killed one by one by shell and rifle fire. At night, even when it was bitterly cold and a heavy frost on, the pigs were happy as long as their snouts were covered up. They poked them under the straw at the bottom of a stack in the yard. they did not mind their bodies being exposed to the frost and cold!

 

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on 28 September, '13 in About, Col Drake Brockman

 

About this Project: The proof of the pudding

01 Sep

It’s less than a year until the centenary of the start of WWI, and ten months until the first of the letters is scheduled for publication on the 6th July.  The last 10 months have been busy for me, but it’s time to pick this project up again.

A friend of mine has agreed to proof-read the letters for me. His name is Chris Miller and, appropriately for this project, he is the great-great-nephew of the Winslow Boy who was killed at Ypres on the 31st October 1914 aged 19.  If you want proof-reading done, just drop Chris a line.  His work is sorely needed on this project.

The OCR software I’m using is Abbyy FineReader and it’s fussy.  Like all powerful software you have to know how to configure it in order to get the best out of it.

The three screenshots below show just what a difference it made when I managed to re-tune the settings in the OCR software.  Here is one of the original letters, typed in a crazy 1970s typeface.

RCPBtoGFB19140804

Here is the Word version with the software sorting stuff out automatically. I’ve set MS Word to show a dot wherever there is a wordspace, to bring out just how impossible the results are.  As you can see it reads My dear Mother as M y d e a r M o t b c r.  With results this bad, retyping looked like the only option.

RCPBtoGFB19140804poor

Fiddling around with the settings has produced this; a change in quality so dramatic that it makes the project doable.

RCPBtoGFB19140804good

There is still plenty of proof-reading for Chris to do in order for the text to be postable here.  But the project is exciting again, rather than a heart-sink.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on 1 September, '13 in About

 

Tags:

About this project: Email vs Letters

13 Jan

I want each of the letters to show under the name of the person who wrote it, so all Ted’s letters will have “Ted Berryman” as their author, and so on.  This has been a minor scutter to set up. To do this, I must set each of them up an author on the website, which means they each need their own email address.

I’ve been creating email accounts for dead relatives.

This felt decidedly odd, especially when I realised I want to quote from my mother’s book directly. I simply cannot bring myself to create an email using her name (she died in 2001).

It’s been awkward in practice too. Google’s Google Apps service seemed a straightforward way to manage the email addresses, but it turns out that Google discontinued the free service without warning on the 6th December, a week before I opened the trial account on the 13th.  At least it was a clear week, and not a day before. If I continued with the service, these changed goalposts would cost me a couple of hundred quid I didn’t plan to spend, all for no real benefit.

In the end, I set up email addresses with the company that hosts the website. The downside is it will be harder to move the site if I need to, but at least there’s no additional cost.

It’s bizarre though; so often in the letters Ted, Ben, Richard and Paul write about problems with sending and receiving mail.  They all write their letters in time to catch the weekly mail service to England, Paul takes his letters to neighbouring ships for posting and a lot of them get lost as a result. All the siblings make sure their mother has a reliable address to write to, so her letters will wait safely until they can be picked up. They often mention mail that’s gone missing (gone down with ships sunk by the Germans in some cases). I guess it’s no surprise that letters should be about letters.

Email is more reliable and it’s certainly quicker (less than a second compared with a couple of months).  But in other respects it’s far more fragile.  I’m just about to blast the emails in the Google Apps account into their constituent ones and zeros.  I am entirely dependent on my mail host doing back-ups and not going bankrupt.  But the letters themselves are 100 years old; they are physical letters sitting in boxes in the Imperial War Museum, they have stamps and postmarks, some are marked with scribbled notes about their contents (“letters from my shipwrecked sons”) others are written in pencil and smeared with mud from the trenches.  They’ve come from India, from Iraq, from France, they were stored in the tin box for more than 50 years, and they sat for months on my mother’s dining room table in the 1980s.

There’s a poem in there somewhere.  Maybe I’ll write it when I need a change from setting up dummy email accounts in the names of people who no longer exist.

 
2 Comments

Posted by on 13 January, '13 in About, Imperial War Museum

 

About this Project: Typo Woes

08 Jan

When I convert the scans into a format which I can edit the end results are still full of typos.  The software is not as self-learning as the brochure would have you believe, it can’t cope with the type face, and correcting the errors is too time-consuming to be practial.

Back in 2011 when I first got the scans I opted for Abbyy PDF Transformer.  I’d have looked at the options at the time, so it must have seemed the best choice for some reason.  However, it struggled with the strange 1970s typeface and so I upgraded it to Abbyy Finereader in December.  For a while that looked as if it was up to the job.

The letters from Paul were all typed on a normal typewriter in Courier and Finereader can cope with that. But now I’m working on the letters from Ted and Ben, I’m discovering that Finereader really cannot cope. There are four problems with the text it produces

  1. it mistakes letters, substituting b for h for example
  2. sometimes it inserts bizzare characters instead of letters, so like becomes 1;|<e,
  3. it flags up a lot of correct guesses as problems for checking so even clean text involves a lot ot checking
  4. i t  o f t e n  p u ts in e x t r a  spaces b e tw e e n letters, which is insanely time-consuming to correct

The unforgivable thing is that it does not learn from all these run of the mill corections, only when it is in a special letter-by-letter learning mode.

As a result, I’m back to looking for OCR software. I’m going download a trial version of OmniPage, which will be £80 if I opt for a single user licence.  The reviews also recomend Presto! but I can’t find a price for that.  I’m annoyed about spending money on FineReader and then having to ditch it, but it’s really proved to be unusable.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on 8 January, '13 in About

 

About this Project: Pepys Diary published online daily

03 Jan

I’ve listed all the letters and other items in date order in a spreadsheet – there are a total of 640 of them, so two a day or 14 at a weekend, and I can get them posted this year, and spend next year on bells and whistles, like maps and references. I’ve also found a second Christmas Day truce letter which I’ll publish on Christmas 2013; this one is from Ted to his sister Jane.  

Elsewhere on the interwebs, I’m really pleased to find out that the Diary of Samuel Pepys is being published one day at a time over the next 10 years at http://www.pepysdiary.com/

Pepys Diary

www.pepysdiary.com

There are so many reasons why I’m thrilled about this.  It’s on my “to read” list and has been for decades, it’s available via email updates which require two clicks to set up (an obvious idea I’d not thought of), it’ll be a treat to read each day on the train, and there has to be so much I can learn from this project.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on 3 January, '13 in About

 

About this Project: Remind me again why I thought it was a good idea

31 Dec

I’m feeling daunted by the scale of the task. I’m also enjoying finding out who my grandfather and his siblings were, by reading their letters, and I am planning trips to raid the family photo albums.

I think I mentioned that there are 1000 pages of typescript; that’s two reams of paper.  I’ve managed to “teach” the OCR software better character recognition, but it still confuses hs and bs so every letter must be corrected by hand. And I rather foolishly decided to tag each letter with the names of people and places mentioned in it; this is already very fiddly.

I think it takes about 20 minutes to do each letter on average. I don’t know how many there are altogether, but I estimate 700. I’ve listed the 1914 letters on a spreadsheet (a task and a half in itself) and from July to December 1914 there are 82 of them. If my estimate’s right, and there are 700 or so, then just posting them is about 233 hours’ work.  On the other hand, if I can manage three letters every day, I can get them all loaded this year and ready to go.  I hope.

I've made a spreadsheet

I’ve made a spreadsheet

I am enjoying it though; you can hear each of their voices coming through the letter. Ted’s letters show how much he misses the rest of the family, Richard’s are full of replies to letters from their mother (she pickled 400 walnuts in the summer of 1914, he mentions them in at least three of his letters to her), and Benedicta’s are one long stream of gossippy consciousness. They all mention a visit their mother made to her family home in the late summer, and interestingly they all mention how she is likely to leave the property in her will.

It’s good to see the letters building up in the admin pages of the website:

Post List Screenshot

Here’s some I posted earlier

I am going to get in touch with my sister and the remaining relatives of my mother’s generation, and ask if I can raid their boxes and photograph albums. It would be good to get more pictures up on the site. The trip should be fun, and I’ll enjoy working on the project but not sitting at a laptop.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on 31 December, '12 in About, WWI

 

31 December 1914 – Ted to Gertrude (Christmas day truce)

24 Dec

Dec 31 / 1914

Dear Mother

Thanks most awfully for your last few letters. I’m afraid I’ve been very remiss in answering them, but I have’nt had a moment really. We came out of those old trenches on the night of the 27th, after doing 25 days & nights there, pretty long time was’nt it. We were glad to be relieved as you may imagine, the men were all absolutely doggo, as they had to work day & night to keep the trenches for from falling in, because the weather was so wet & beastly that the earthy all got sodden & soaked & had to be simply propped up, & our trenches were simply lined with boards & old doors & anything we could get hold of. I am writing this in nice comfortable billets miles away from the firing line where the whole Indian Army Corps has come for a rest for 3 weeks or so.

I have’nt much news to tell you except an extraordinary thing which happened on Christmas day. To begin with on Christmas eve all the German trenches were lined with little lights, which we afterwards discovered were Christmas trees. Well next morning we heard them singing & shouting in their trenches, and about midday they began lifting up hats on sticks and shewing them above the trenches, then they shewed their heads, & then bodies & finally they climbed out of their trenches into the open! Of course one could’nt shoot them in cold blood like that, tho’ one or two shots were fired; and after a bit we also scrambled out of our trenches, & for an hour both sides walked about in the space between the two lines of trenches, talking & laughing, swapping baccy & cigarettes, biscuits etc. They were quite friendly & genuine, & our Col: who talks German had a long conversation with them, & asked them how they were & everything, & you would never believe that we had been fighting for weeks. After about an hour their officers shooed them back to their trenches, and we came back to ours, but for the rest of Christmas day & night, & all next day, 26th, I dont suppose 2 shots were fired hardly by either side! Was’nt it weird?

By the way, leave is now open, & 3 of our fellows have gone on leave. I am, I hope, arriving in London about 3 o’clock on the 8th, if all goes well, as my turn is next; so you can expect me home, with a fair amount of certainty, on evening of the 8th, probably by a train leaving Waterloo about 5-6 o’clock. So if anyone likes to hang about Waterloo anytime about then they are fairly sure to meet me. Is’nt it GORGEOUS!!

Happy New Year to all

yr loving son

Ted

Ted’s CO, Colonel Drake-Brockman, gives a more detailed account of the Christmas Truce in his memoirs.

The cartoon below comes from Ted’s letter to his sister Jane, also about the Christmas Truce. It shows a Garhwali soldier saying ‘Bonjour Fritz’ to a German who’s wearing his pickelhaube and saying ‘Salaam Salaam’ back.

Christmas Truce Cartoon

Christmas Truce Cartoon

 
12 Comments

Posted by on 24 December, '12 in About, France, Primary source, Waterloo

 

Tags:

About this Project: Who’s Who?

23 Dec

I’ve just updated the page About the Berrymans explaining who is who in this photograph taken in 1896, and where they all were almost 20 years later at the start of the First World War.

The Berryman Family 1896

The Berryman Family 1896

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on 23 December, '12 in About

 

About this project: typing letters and cleaning images

22 Dec

Ted’s letter of the 30th September 1914 is 1250 words, 1100 of them in a single paragraph.  He writes mainly about the voyage from Karachi (then in India) to… well, he’s not sure where.  He’s on one ship in a convoy taking troops from India to the theatre of war in Europe, and his sister Ben is in another ship on her way home to England.  Ben had been living in India with Ted as part of what was called “the fishing fleet”, the middle and upper class women who went out to the colonies to catch husbands.  (Their working class sisters were called “camp followers”).

Ted spends most of the letter talking about the journey, but part way through he commissions his mother to buy him a field lantern.  The typescript includes a photocopy of the sketch in the letter, presumably made in the 1970s. 

Typescript showing photocopy of illustration

Typescript showing photocopy of illustration

I am delighted the illustrations are included in what I’ve been sent, but the question is what to do with them. Do I include them in the blog in this rather messy format, or do I clean up the palimpsest that’s showing through from the other side of the paper (an artefact of the photocopying). With this one, I have cleaned it up.

Field lantern with talc sidesIt’s a rather charming image for Christmas, now that I look at it.  I hope to get in touch with the IWM and ask for permission to see and photograph the line drawings in the letters and to include some pictures of the manuscripts in the website. 

In the meantime, this will have to do.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on 22 December, '12 in About, Imperial War Museum, WWI

 
← Older posts
Newer posts →