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Postcards From The Trenches

Discussion in 'Military History' started by GRW, Nov 11, 2016.

  1. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Touch of the "Old Bill" series here.
    "Light-hearted and ironic in tone they often are, but these colourful postcards chronicle real life in the trenches, too.
    And for the Tommies of World War I, they were one way of reassuring their loved ones back at home that they were all right, while sparing them the terror of what fighting on the Western Front was really like.
    They were drawn by Private Fergus Mackain, an advertising artist who enlisted in 1915 and served in France with the Royal Fusiliers.
    The funny postcards were designed for soldiers to send back to their families at home
    Then aged 29, Mackain, a married father-of-two who was born in America to a British father from Gosport, Hampshire, travelled by sea from his home in New York to join up, working his passage by feeding livestock on the two-week voyage on board the SS Lancastrian.
    After being wounded in the Somme and taken out of front-line duty in 1917, he was transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps and began producing his postcards for soldiers.
    All the surviving cards Mackain drew, the majority of which are from a series called Sketches Of Tommy’s Life, were recently collected together for the first time and published in a book ahead of Remembrance Sunday."
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3928872/Funny-poignant-defiant-Remembrance-weekend-one-Tommy-s-extraordinary-postcards-trenches-World-War.html#ixzz4Pl67NEW4
     
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  2. rkline56

    rkline56 USS Oklahoma City CG5

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    GRW likes this.
  3. rkline56

    rkline56 USS Oklahoma City CG5

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  4. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Used to love reading Punch in the early '80s, just before it went defunct. They had resorted to recycling Victorian cartoons by that point though.
     

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