Need to try and watch this programme. "BRITISH Tommies stare into the camera in a lull in the fighting on the Western Front - just one of several remarkable photographs to have survived the carnage. They were taken by Captain Harry Colver in the front line in France and Belgium in 1915 and show the cramped squalid nature of life in the trenches. In one photograph two soldiers from 1/5 (Territorial Force) York & Lancaster regiment hold up the remnants of uniforms shredded by shrapnel. In another Captain Hugh Parry-Smith uses a periscope to check No Man's Land for enemy raids . After weeks in the front line the formality of proper uniforms has given way to battle-hardened practicality. Men at work in the fire trenches in the stretch of the line held by Harry Colver's own A Company [PH] In another photo an exhausted young Lieutenant grabs a few moments of shuteye in a dug-out in the middle of the day. Capt Colver, who had state of the art cameras for the time, sent the pictures home to his family. But they survive today only because long after the war an old comrade stopped the album being thrown on a bonfire. The images - found by historian Jon Cooksey and aired on BBC4 this week - should never have been taken as soldiers were banned from carrying cameras. They show Capt Colver's comrades becoming steadily drained as the casualties mount." http://www.express.co.uk/news/world-war-1/464060/Forbidden-World-War-1-images-saved-from-a-bonfire
Well, it was a damned good show. Started off relating how cameras sold in their thousands as men went off to war determined to capture the "BIg Adventure", especially with new cameras like the VPK (Vest Pocket Kodak)- http://camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Vest_Pocket_Kodak It then interviewed a former binman who, over a 35 year career, rescued thousands of WW1 photos, memorabilia and even a gallantry medal from people's dustbins. In the era of galvanised metal bins with no plastic liners, these guys could actually see what was being thrown out. The guy had an amazing collection, but that was only one area of the UK, so how much else was lost? Because the British banned the press from the frontline, a blind eye was usually turned to soldier's photos until some started to appear in the press, notably one of a British artillery column being hit by shrapnel shells which appeared in The War Illustrated. The final straw were the pics of the Christmas day truce which led to all unofficial photography by British troops being banned. Previously most shots had been of troops resting, or sitting on the cross-Channel transport ships like they were on a cruise; by 1916 however, men had started recording the landscape and even the aftermath of battles, causing men to become sickened by what they saw and thus the amateur aspect of war photography died away leaving only the official photographers to record propaganda shots. The grandson of a Tommy who had taken frontline pics appeared, and at one point a battlefield guide showed him more or less the exact spot where he thought his grandfather had photographed a cousin's grave at Wedge Wood on the Somme. By contrast the Germans positively encouraged photography. The son of a German vet who had taken hundreds of pictures of the front, including one of a dead soldier underneath a roadside Calvary, then started a photography business postwar. As with British pics, the change from group shots of off-duty troops gradually changed to starker ones of casualties and even combat. It finished by arranging a meeting between the Tommy's grandson and the German vets son, where they compared pictures and tried to imagine the stories behind them. The German then went to a war cemetery where he believed his father had originally taken the shot of the dead man under a Calvary in the war's early days, but couldn't find a direct comparison. Very, very moving programme.
Sounds good, Gordon. I wonder if it will be shown on BBC America? I'll look for it. Meanwhile, do you have a Youtube link for the program?
