Who am I?
I’m George Simmers, just retired from teaching English in comprehensive schools for many years. Not wanting to drift into intellectual mouldiness during my retirement, I decided to do what I should have done thirty years ago, and am now enrolled on PhD research at Brookes University in Oxford. My subject is the fiction of the Great War (That’s the fiction they were writing at the time and just after, not modern novels about the war).
This means that I spend a lot of my time reading novels (and memoirs and magazines and comics) of the period 1914-1928, gathering insights into the way that soldiers and ex-soldiers were portrayed. I’m lucky to live near Oxford, and once or twice a week I spend a day in the astonishing Bodleian Library, whose dedicated staff (I think of them as myopic gnomes scurrying through vast dark subterranean book-stacks, just for me) dig out the most astonishing material. Sometimes I order a book and am presented a cardboard box. I open it to find a ninety-year old book nestling inside, in its pristine dust-jacket. I wonder if I’m the first to open the book since 1915.
So why blog?
Reading this extraordinary material, I find a lot of interesting stuff that won’t find a place in my thesis or anything else that I’m likely to publish or share in other ways. On the off-chance that someone else might be interested in the things that catch my eye, and the ideas that strike me, I thought I’d put some of them online and see what happens.
Where else am I online?
I also edit Snakeskin Poetry Webzine, which I think is the longest-running poetry zine on the web.
12 Comments
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWW.htm
I don’t know if this could be of any interest in your studies. And maybe you already have been to this site. But, if not, here it is. As you know, sometimes in the most elementary places, one can find fresh material.
JD
Wonderful! This is exactly what blogging is for and I’m so glad to have found you. I’m looking forward to seeing what you turn up in your Bodleian browsing. Best, BL
Mr. Simmers:
Congratulations on doing what you always wanted to do. I’ve run across your blog a few times during my own research for Great War related topics. I’m an ex-USAF pilot, currently employed as an engineer in the San Frncisco Bay Area. I am so intrigued with the infinite fascinating tales of the Great War that I wrote a novel (An Ace Minus One) with the western front as a backdrop. The website (constructed by my wife) gives a glimspe of my novel. Interesting article about the “white feathers”. I actually had included a scene in my book. Best of luck in your research!
Hello, George,
I wonder if you’ve looked at my 1999 Oxford D.Phil., Gender and the Great War; British combatants, masculinity and perceptions of women, 1918-1939 ? It is based on Great War writing between 1918 and 1939, written by British combatants. It might be useful.
Yours,
Stephen Cullen.
Hi George,
Have you come across “The Setons” by ‘O. Douglas’ [i.e. Anna Buchan, John's sister]. First published 1917. The family set-up is basically that of the Buchans themselves.
Her “Penny plain” and “Pink sugar” also fall within your timespan but I can’t remember off the top of my head whether they have such specific reference to the war.
Thanks for the suggestions.
Hi George – I enjoyed your website. Thank you for sharing. Have you read the Maisie Dobbs novels that have been written more recently? They are haunting in their descriptions.
Mr. Simmons,
I was just curious what you think of “war literature.” The use of it as a plot device, and whehter or not its a good or bad thing in literature.
Thanks so much.
Joe -
You ask what I think of “war literature”.
I think it’s enormously varied, and difficult to generalise about.
You ask what I think of it as a plot device.
Great books have been written about men and women whose lives have been changed by war. So have many bad books.
The worst books have been written by those who neither have any experience of war, nor have the willingness to research past the obvious.
If you’re asking whether you should write a war story – my answer would be yes, but only if you’ve done your homework very thoroughly.
Hi
Have just come across your blog whilst persuing my own obsession with WW1. I know it is not directly relevant (having been written in 1971) but what do you think of Goshawk Squadron?
Siobhan
‘Goshawk Squadron’ is one that I haven’t got round to yet (My interest is mostly in fiction written between 1914 and 1930). It sounds interesting – but – so many books, so little time.
My widowed grandmother and 5 children (including my future mother) lived in Walthamstow, London, during the First World War. Each night a soldier was on guard duty at the corner of their road, and it was through my grandmother befriending him that my mother met my father — hence without that soldier I’d not be here! I’ve never been able to find out (a) what the soldier was guarding; (b) whether every street in Walthamstow was similarly guarded during the War; (c) whether every street in London was similarly guarded. There was no military site, not even a barracks, marked on the street maps of the time. (In which case, where was the soldier stationed?)Can anyone solve this mystery?