Remembering Tommy has been our most ambitious project to date. Our commitment to writing this book meant that our collaboration – between artist and writer – sought to dig deeply into the very essence of what it would have been like to serve as a soldier during the Great War.
We knew that the book had to have an approach that would link people with their ancestors, with those men whose faces stare out, benignly, from the numerous cabinet photographs left as echoes of the war in family albums and drawers. We also knew that for many people it was a struggle to place their relatives into the settings that are so commonly discussed in history books and documentaries. And with so many wanting to know the simple things of a soldier’s life – what did he eat, where did he sleep, how did he wash – we accepted the challenge to try and paint a picture of ‘Tommy’s Life’ that would allow people to plot the life of the average British soldier of the Great War.
We set out to detail an average soldier’s journey, from recruitment to the return home. We took our inspiration in part from the magnificent wartime soldier cartoons of Pte Fergus McKain – so rich in detail, so accurate in presentation – in part from the writings of the average man in the trenches. We wanted our images to be in colour, as a counterbalance to the magnificent but seemingly far-removed black and white images of the day. We wanted to provide a richness of detail that would reward readers who returned to examine the book time-after-time, and who sought to place their own relatives in the same settings.
Picking appropriate wartime settings – most of them of historic importance – we used artefacts to tell the story for us. The only people present are in shadow, or represented as hints. The hand clutching a Webley revolver at Zero Hour could be the hand of any officer of the day; the recruits in shadow representative of any soldier who ‘joined up’ in 1914-15. We wanted people to make up their own minds, to populate the images with their own families and forebears without the intrusion of modern faces in early twentieth century settings.
Fortunately, it’s an approach that seems to have resonated with our reviewers. And with a project like this that is so close to our hearts, that is all the more gratifying.
‘Peter Doyle and Chris Foster chart the experiences of average soldiers from the moment they enlisted through their service in the trenches right up until their homecoming. Remembering Tommy is a book to take time over and then treasure’
Amazon, October 2013
‘…there is a curious emptiness, an absence of people in the scenario photographs, provoking the feeling that someone has just left the space. Where is the soldier who has left his rifle in position? Who is drinking the tea at the table? Perhaps it is an invitation to read ourselves into these spaces.’
Amazon, November 2013
‘I cannot imagine anyone with an interest in the Great War NOT being delighted with Remembering Tommy. Its coverage is obviously so wide-ranging and its presentation so rich and varied’
Amazon, May 2014
Peter Doyle is a military historian and geologist, specialising in military terrain. He is a familiar face as television expert on documentaries, including WW1 Tunnels of Death: The Big Dig, Battlefield Detectives and The Great Escape: Revealed on Channel 5. He is Visiting Professor at University College London and is co-secretary of the All Party Parliamentary War Heritage Group, which is actively supporting the British government’s commemorations for the centenary of the First World War.
He has co-written Beneath Flanders Fields: The Underground War 1914-18 and Grasping Gallipoli , as well as Battle Story: Gallipoli 1915 , Battle Story: Loos 1915, Trench Talk: Words of the First World War and Remembering Tommy: The British Soldier in the First World War.