To celebrate my forthcoming book, Postcards from the Front: 1914-1919 (due out next Spring), each day from now until Christmas, I will be posting on this blog, postcards from the First World War with their messages home. Click on the picture to be taken to an external website which will be of First World War interest. Each day, the link will take you to a different website and, hopefully, help you discover resources new to you. Just like a traditional advent calendar, you’ll not know what you’ve got until you’ve opened (or clicked) the door.
My Advent Calendar is my Christmas gift to you. Happy Christmas!
What’s behind the door?… Click on the picture above. When you’ve finished viewing the external website, come back to my blog and, in the comments, tell me what you think of the website you’ve just visited.
My dear Olive, Just a photo of my ship, dear, to you. And so glad to hear from dear old friends once again, dear. We are all happy on board and looking forward for our happy return home again, dear. God bless you. From your loving friend, Arthur
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My books
You may be interested in purchasing my local history books. They make ideal Christmas presents!
To celebrate my forthcoming book, Postcards from the Front: 1914-1919 (due out next Spring), each day from now until Christmas, I will be posting on this blog, postcards from the First World War with their messages home. Click on the picture to be taken to an external website which will be of First World War interest. Each day, the link will take you to a different website and, hopefully, help you discover resources new to you. Just like a traditional advent calendar, you’ll not know what you’ve got until you’ve opened (or clicked) the door.
My Advent Calendar is my Christmas gift to you. Happy Christmas!
What’s behind the door?… Click on the picture above. When you’ve finished viewing the external website, come back to my blog and, in the comments, tell me what you think of the website you’ve just visited.
This is the view of the “grand terre” of the different Belgium weapons. From left to right:…… 1. Carabinier, 2. Pupil of the Military School of Brussels, 3. Artillerymen, 4. Pomegranate & tree, 5. Guide (cavalry), 6. Infantry of the Line, 7. Light Infantry. Under (left) Lancer (right) Light Cavalry. Don’t forget it’s the dress of time of peace. [The central picture is of King Albert I of the Belgians]
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This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe by using the Subscribe via Email button. If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the “Like” button or Facebook button and/or leave a comment below.
Thank you for reading this post.
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My books
You may be interested in purchasing my local history books. They make ideal Christmas presents!
To celebrate my forthcoming book, Postcards from the Front: 1914-1919 (due out next Spring), each day from now until Christmas, I will be posting on this blog, postcards from the First World War with their messages home. Click on the picture to be taken to an external website which will be of First World War interest. Each day, the link will take you to a different website and, hopefully, help you discover resources new to you. Just like a traditional advent calendar, you’ll not know what you’ve got until you’ve opened (or clicked) the door.
My Advent Calendar is my Christmas gift to you. Happy Christmas!
What’s behind the door?… Click on the picture above. When you’ve finished viewing the external website, come back to my blog and, in the comments, tell me what you think of the website you’ve just visited.
On Active Service. 8694 C Company, 1 Battalion Cameronians, British Expeditionary Force. 1 July 1915:Dear Harry, just a card with best wishes for a happy birthday and many happy returns of the day. With love from Daddy xxxxxxxxx
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This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe by using the Subscribe via Email button. If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the “Like” button or Facebook button and/or leave a comment below.
Thank you for reading this post.
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My books
You may be interested in purchasing my local history books. They make ideal Christmas presents!
Firstly, an apology for lack of posts over the last couple of months. In the background, my writing has not stopped. In fact I have been frantically spending every waking hour researching and writing for my next book due out next spring Postcards from the Front: 1914-1919 (ignore Amazon’s date of publication as this is wrong).
My book is the story of a handful of men and women who went to war exactly one hundred years ago, as told through their postcards sent home to their loved ones. Many of the stories in my book come from single postcards, as single cards is all that has survived from that person. However, I have been able to thoroughly research and retell the story of three peoples’ war. A female volunteer nurse who nursed throughout the Battles of the Somme in one of the British Army’s largest military hospital in France; and two brothers, one of whom won the Military Cross for his courageous action during the opening day of the 3rd Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) and the other brother (aged only 19 years old) who was in the Royal Flying Corp/Royal Air Force in the 49 Squadron and took part in dog-fights in the skies above France in 1918. So my book is a combination of eye-witness accounts (as told through brief messages on postcards), information from War Diaries, and newspaper reports.
My book is due to be published in May of next year. As a taster for my book Postcards from the Front: 1914-1919, throughout December, I will be posting on this blog, postcards from the First World War with their messages home. Click on the picture to be taken to an external website which will be of First World War interest. Each day, the link will take you to a different website and, hopefully, help you discover resources new to you. Just like a traditional advent calendar, you’ll not know what you’ve got until you’ve opened (or clicked) the door.
My Advent Calendar is my Christmas gift to you. Happy Christmas!
What’s behind the door?… Click on the picture above. When you’ve finished viewing the external website, come back to my blog and, in the comments, tell me what you think of the website you’ve just visited.
To Mr Burley. With the best Compliments from The Front
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This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe by using the Subscribe via Email button. If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the “Like” button or Facebook button and/or leave a comment below.
Thank you for reading this post.
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My books
You may be interested in purchasing my local history books. They make ideal Christmas presents!
The Essex local paper Saffron Walden Reporter have printed a review of my local history book about the town of Saffron Walden and its surrounding villages of Audley End, Littlebury, Wendens Ambo and Little & Great Chesterford, Saffron Walden and Around Through Time.
Saffron Walden Report – 24 September 2015, page 24 Click the picture to read the review
Saffron Walden Report – 24 September 2015, page 25 Click the picture to read the review
I particularly like the reporter, Abigail Weaving’s, final line about my book “In fact, as [Kate J] Cole demonstrates, a mere window frame, memorial in a churchyard or an engraving on a wall, are not signs of an inaccessible past, but of one that is very much part of Saffron Walden today.” This, to me, absolutely sums up and clarifies local history; the past is a living, breathing organic “thing” that is all around us and just waiting for new generations of townsfolk to discover their past. And, as Abigail Weaving implies, local history is not an inaccessible past, but part of our everyday present.
Pargetting of an early nineteenth-century stage coach, on the side of a house in Gold Street, Saffron Walden. History really is all around us.
Click the picture to be taken to Amazon’s page for my book.
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This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe to it. If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do click Like button and/or leave a comment below. I read every single comment and value the thoughts of my readers. Thank you for reading this post.
I am delighted to tell you that my third local history book, Saffron Walden and Around Through Time, has now been published by Amberley Books and is available in “all good bookshops”.
Click the picture to be taken to Amazon’s page for my book.
Saffron Walden is a beautiful market town in the north west corner of Essex, and a town I knew very well from my own past, when I lived for many years in the nearby town of Great Dunmow. I have shopped many a time in the splendid shops and market within the town. But, more importantly to me, I had spent many a happy hour when my third child (now a strapping pre-teen) was just weeks old as I daily pounded the streets of Saffron Walden in the attempt to get him to sleep. It was whilst walking through the grounds of Saffron Walden’s church, St Mary the Virgin, that he first looked up at me from his push chair, laughing at his own joke that he’d managed to pull off his socks and toss them over the side of his buggy. I should have been warned then that he was to become a child full of laughter and practical jokes! Saffron Walden plays as special place in my heart for those early days of exhausted motherhood to my boy. It was also during those sleep-deprived days of endless walks that I fell in love with Saffron Walden’s ancient streets and buildings.
The beginnings of my book In the late summer of 2014, I was sitting in Amberley Publishings offices in the beautiful Cotswold town of Stroud, having just delivered the manuscript for my first book, Bishop’s Stortford Through Time. I was musing with one of the company’s Commissioning Editors over other books I could write for Amberley. It popped into my head that Saffron Walden would make a good book, and a town which I would personally like to research and photograph. Fortunately Amberley agreed with me, and thus was born my third local history book Saffron Walden and Around Through Time, to become part of Amberley Publishing’s phenomenally successfully Through Time local history book series. Foolishly I agreed with Amberley that I could write it at the same time as my second local history book, Sudbury, Long Melford and Lavenham Through Time
So there I had it. Two books to be written and delivered at the same time…
What is the “Around” of my book?
As you will see from the title of my Saffron Walden book, it is an “and Around” book, so includes other villages nearby to Saffron Walden. My brief from Amberley was to write about Saffron Walden the town, but to also include chapters on other nearby villages. They didn’t want me to wander too far from the main town, but left it totally open to me which villages I could include as my “Around” (but also dropped heavy hints that they’d like to see the Chesterfords included!). So that was my brief…Saffron Walden and Around. All to be fitted within no more and no less than 96 pages.
I would like to say that I purposely decided which villages to include. But I have to say that writing my book was very organic. It seemed to take on a life of its own and it dictated to me what villages were to be included. In the end, my “Saffron Walden and Around” comprises
Saffron Walden
Audley End
Littlebury Parish
Wendens Ambo
The Chesterfords (Little and Great)
Tales of long ago Because I use so many sources for each of my books, I write quite detailed captions to all my pages and try to tell a significant story for that street or view, or of the people who once lived in the houses and roads. So in my book on “Saffron Walden and Around”, you may read things about the town and villages which you may not have known about. For example, that Audley End (then known as Brook Walden) became infamous in 1579 as a place where the witch, Mother Staunton of Wimbish, practiced her witchcraft. That in 1601, William Newton a shepherd from Great Ambo was convicted of stealing nearly 100 sheep throughout Essex. That the infamous high wayman Dick Turpin held up the Walden and Stortford stagecoaches in Epping Forest in 1737…
There are so many stories to tell about this beautiful part of north west Essex.
Bridge Street, Saffron Walden. Near this spot, the chief constable of Saffron Walden, William Campling, was murdered in 1849.
Audley End House, with the spire of Saffron Walden’s parish church showing in the centre-left edge. In 1742, Daniel Defoe wrote that the House was in ruins and decaying.
Littlebury village. The village was on the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries stage coach routes between London and Newmarket or Norwich.
Crown House, Great Chesterford. In 1671, the diarist John Evelyn journeyed on a stage coach from London to meet King Charles II who was watching the races at Newmarket. The horses on Evelyn’s stagecoach were changed at this coaching inn.
The trials and tribulations of photographing a modern-day town In common with all books in the Through Time series, each page of my book contains:-
First World War VAD Hospital, Saffron Walden
A “then” picture. An historic photograph of a building or street dating from between the early 1900s and the 1920s, for example a vintage postcard or old photograph.
A short caption and narrative about the view, detailing the view/building and setting it in its historic context.
A “now” photograph. This had to be an (almost) exact replica of the vintage view. So I had to locate and stand in the same location as the early 20th Century photographers, and capture a replica modern-day view. This in itself caused quite a few challenges; the main one being that Edwardian photographers did not have to contend with lorries and cars hurtling through the streets, but I did! As a consequence, many of my photographs had to be shot early in the morning; more often than not, on a Sunday. But even photographing early Sunday morning didn’t stop cars taking a prominent role in some of my images. Saffron Walden’s market place and high street were particularly troublesome in getting car-less photographs. I don’t think I managed a single photograph of the market place without at least one car being ever-present. Even at 6am on Easter Sunday morning there were still cars in the area!
Ironically, my own car appears on the “now” photograph on the front cover of my book. I didn’t mean it to be in shot… It took me countless early Sunday morning trips to the top of the high street to get that famous vista of Saffron Walden. Some days, the rain was too heavy for photographs; other days there were too many cars and people for my photographs to be “good shots”; to add to my problems, the light was bad on more days then I can count. For some reason known only to my early-morning-not-totally-awake self, one time (and one time only) I parked my car right in the line of my camera’s lens. And that shot (out of countless hundreds of others) was the best view of a relatively car-less (except mine) high street….
Some of the sources I used
If you have read my blog posts about writing my other books, you will know that writing such as book is a source of great personal satisfaction and delight for me. I wrote a month or so ago on my blog a post Suffolk Voices Past: Sudbury, Long Melford and Lavenham Through Time detailing my life-long hobby of postcard collecting and combining that with being social historian. I also wrote about the sources that I use for each of my books, such as history books, newspaper reports, county archaeology/conservation reports, Victorian census returns, The National Archives.
British Newspaper Archive – click the picture to explore this rich online archive from the British Library
1881 Census return from Audley End’s almhouses for pauper women. This particular census return took me on my journey of discovery of Rebecca Law, a remarkable woman who lived in all the towns and villages described within my book and died aged 103 in 1916. The story of Mrs Law’s long life is told in my book.
Click the image to be taken to FindMyPast, a 3rd party online ancestry resource helping you to research your own family history.
1579 pamphlet “A detection of damnable driftes practized by three witches arraigned at Chelmifforde in Essex“. One of my favourite sources – it told the tale of the Mother Staunton of Wimbish who bewitched a baby’s cradle in Brook Walden (now Audley End)
Saffron Walden and Around Through Time I hope you enjoy reading my book. I would love to hear from you with your comments on any of my three local history books.
Market Hill in the early 1900s, Saffron Walden
Audley End Village in the early 1900s
Littlebury in the early 1900s, looking towards Queen’s Head Inn
A pretty spot in the 1920s – Wendens Ambo
The Vicarage in the 1920s, Great Chesterford
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About the author, Kate Cole
I have a Masters in local and regional history from Cambridge University, a BA in history from the Open University, and an Advanced Diploma in local history from Oxford University – all studied whilst a mature student. Amberley have commissioned me to write 5 books in their Through Time series, and a further book on the First World War. I also give talks about various aspects of East Anglian history (such as the English Reformation in Tudor Essex and the Essex Witches from the Tudor period) to local history societies and groups. I live in Maldon, Essex, and regularly write about the local history of Essex and East Anglia on this blog. Before starting my second career as a local historian, for over 30 years I was a business technologist and computer consultant working in the City of London.
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This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe to it. If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do click Like button and/or leave a comment below. I read every single comment and value the thoughts of my readers. Thank you for reading this post.
Where do common phrases and terms in the English language come from? I asked myself this question recently whilst I’ve been researching my two new books Sudbury, Lavenham, and Long Melford Through Time and Saffron Walden and Around Through Time (both books due out from Amberley Publishing in the next few months).
During the writing of my books, I have been avidly scouring newspaper archives for reports and articles about all the towns I am researching. I came across the newspaper report below of a riot in Saffron Walden.
The “Proclamation being read” and “timely Notice” are both referring to the fact that the Riot Act had to be read out to the crowds in Walden. This was a 1714 Act of Parliament which stopped a group of 12 or more people from being assembled. When the Riot Act was (literally) read out (normally by a local big-wig from the town), the crowd HAD to disperse otherwise face being forcibly dispersed and/or arrested. If the crowd didn’t disperse within an hour of the Act being read, then the authorities could take further action such as calling for troops and militia to be sent in. From the newspaper account, it would appear that Walden’s crowd dispersed once the Act was read to them (but still managed to carry away a trophy!).
Later on in history, the reading of the Riot Act caused the infamous Peterloo Massacre (Manchester) of 1819. One of the last times the act was used in East Anglia was in 1885 when it was read in the village of Long Melford. In this case, the reading of the Riot Act did not work and the people of Long Melford and nearby Glemsford continued to riot throughout the village of Long Melford. So the troops from nearby Bury St Edmunds came into Long Melford via the train and dispersed the rioters using brute force with fixed bayonets. (My new book Sudbury, Lavenham and Long Melford Through Time looks at Long Melford’s riot of 1885 in more detail.)
As the Act was only repealed in 1967, the term is still used today. It is where we get the phrase “I will read you the riot act” – still used today by many to control unruly children!
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My book
My local history book on the historic East Hertfordshire town of Bishop’s Stortford is still available. Please do click on the image below to buy my book.
This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe either by using the Subscribe via Email button top right of my blog, or the button at the very bottom. If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do click Like button and/or leave a comment below. Thank you for reading this post.
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