The Armistice in 1918 might have brought an end to the violence. But for many families it did not mean the end of the story. In 1918 the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers alone remained unknown. These were often very young people, drawn from all walks of life, right across Britain.
They were people who had simply vanished into the battlefields.
In this episode Robert Sackville-West takes us back to the desperate days of the First World War a century ago. He shows us how Britons – from Rudyard Kipling to E.M. Forster – confronted the distressing situations they found themselves in, and how the bereaved attempted to come to terms with their loss.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Robert Sackville-West is a writer and he runs the Sackville family’s interests at Knole, the house in Kent where his family have lived for the past 400 years.
Click here to order Robert’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
Show notesScene One: 2 October 1915, a distressing telegram arrives at Bateman’s, the home of Rudyard Kipling.
Scene Two: 15 September 1915, Sir Oliver Lodge is playing golf at Gullane, on the east coast of Scotland.
Scene Three: November 1915, The novelist E.M. Forster arrives in Egypt as a Red Cross ‘searcher’.
Memento: An identity tag.
People/SocialPresenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Robert Sackville-West
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
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See where 1915 fits on our Timeline
Stuart Clark: The Space Age (1957)
Michèle Mendelssohn: Making Oscar Wilde (1882)
Catherine Fletcher: The Beauty and the Terror (1492)
Selma van de Perre: Liberation (1945)
Hugh Aldersey-Williams: Christiaan Huygens (1655)
Jonathan Schneer: The Lockhart Plot (1918)
Alan Mikhail: The Ottomans (1517)
Rebecca Wragg Sykes: Neanderthals (Eemian)
Simon Hall: Fidel Castro in Harlem (1960)
Thomas Levenson: The South Sea Bubble (1720)
Ken Follett: The Evening and the Morning (1002)
Prof. David Abulafia: Wolfson Prize Special (1415)
Justin Marozzi: Seizure of Constantinople (1453)
Prof. Greg Woolf: Rise of the Romans (146 BCE)
Craig Brown: Beatlemania (1963)
Luke Pepera: Mansa Musa (1325)
Prof. James Shapiro: Manifest Destiny (1845)
Season Three Trailer
Owen Matthews: Richard Sorge (1941)
Kelcey Wilson-Lee: Daughters of Chivalry (1297)
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