News

The website for one of the Discovering Leeds First World War heritage projects funded by HLF and AHRC has gone live.

The Legacies of War team at the University of Leeds are delighted to part of an AHRC funded project ‘Gateways to the First World War’. It is one of five AHRC-funded public engagement centres established with the aim of bringing together academics and members of the public in commemorating the centenary of the First World War.

This week sees the launch of over 200 more stories for BBC’s ‘World War One at home’ series.

​A new AHRC-funded network is taking the lead in recording women’s activism after the First World War, drawing together scholars from diverse disciplines and employing a comparative and transnational perspective.

Research by students at the University of Leeds has uncovered the extraordinary story of a First World War officer who ended up marrying the nurse who condemned him as a German spy.

Alison Fell was delighted to take part in a project run by Sikander Hussain, youth workers, and the staff and pupils of Calverley Parkside School.

University of Leeds staff member Marcus Hill tells us: My Great Grandfather, Arthur Collinson, wrote his memoirs down in a book. He called them his “Reminiscences.” Amongst other great insights into life at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, he described how he worked at the Newlay Shell Factory, in Leeds, during the Great War.

Writer Peter Spafford has sent us this story and song that was inspired by his involvement with Legacies of War. He said “The Breeze is based on a story that Walter Kelsey, aged 90 at the time, told me in 1987. The soldier in his story was a man he had known in his Lincolnshire village. A little later, I heard exactly the same narrative from an elderly man in The Forest of Dean. Both men insisted their story was true, but this led me to wonder if it had also become a kind of Great War ‘urban’ (or rural in this instance) myth. The song tells the story”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gTIE3uEYCQ

Applications are invited for an AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Leeds, on the presence of anti-war sentiment in IWM collections. This is offered under the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership programme. The partner institutions are the University of Leeds and IWM. The studentship will be supervised by Ingrid Sharp of the School of Modern Languages, University of Leeds and Graham Boxer, Director of IWM North. The studentship, which is funded for three years full-time equivalent at standard AHRC rates, will begin on 1 October 2014.

A touching love letter from a young Frenchwoman to her sweetheart Tommy at the front has been unearthed by the University of Leeds. It was St Valentine’s Day, 1916. Preparations were already underway for the Battle of the Somme, which with more than a million casualties was one of bloodiest in history. In a touching mixture of faltering English and polite French, Eleonore Aneelle, a cafe owner’s daughter from a tiny Somme village, put pen to paper in a love letter to Private James Ivan “Jimmy” Menzies, a member of the King’s Own (Royal Lancaster) Regiment who had either been billeted at the cafe or was a regular visitor there.