WWI “Blog” is Stunning History Brought to Life

Bill Lamin is a pretty normal sort of fellow, a 59-year-old IT teacher in Praa Sands, near Penzance, Cornwall, at the western tip of England. His grandfather, William Henry Bonser Lamin (just call him “Harry”), seems to have been a pretty regular guy, too, except that he fought in the second half of WWI. Private Lamin’s letters home have turned up in a rather original blog his grandson operates that are posted 90 years to the day after they were written. The younger Mr. Lamin has brought a most awful piece of history alive, and thousands are stopping by to see how his grandfather was doing.

The blog has gained no small measure of media attention. The BBC East Midlands, Radio 4 and others have covered it. Indeed, this journal discovered it by way of a report from Reuters. The key to its success seems to be that Bill Lamin hasn’t let on to anyone how it ends. Harry Lamin left England to fight in Flanders’ fields with an infant son back home – it isn’t necessary for Harry Lamin to survive for Bill Lamin to be born.

Private Lamin’s letters are those of a literate working-class guy who is off to do what King and Country demand of him. But he misses home, his family and a decent meal. His grandson has left the letters’ spelling and punctuation (usually a lack thereof) as his granddad wrote them. What comes through is a picture of a human being doing his best to get through an inhuman situation, a war that saw the invention of the tank, the first use of aircraft in war as well as poison gas, and trench warfare.

There is some levity, one might say black humor, in a few of the letters. “"It is a rum job waiting for the time to come to go over the top without any rum too,” puns the older Mr. Lamin. Yet in the next sentence, he brings the reader back to reality, “The C.O. got killed and our captain, marvelous how we escaped.”

In describing the Battle of Messines Ridge, Private Lamin writes, “The men here say it was worst than the Somme advance last July. We lost a lot of men but we got where we were asked to take. It was awful I am alright got buried and knocked about but quite well now and hope to remain so.” From there, he went on to fight in and survive the 3rd Battle of Ypres, the battle that poet Siegfried Sasson immortalized with the simple words, “I died in Hell (they called it Passchendaele).”

Private Lamin’s unit moved to Italy for 1918, and he managed to find a Christmas card to send home. There is no white bread, and the men have been eating Italian rations. According to the blog, Private Lamin’s unit went into the front lines January 7, 1918. By November 11, it will be over, but what of Harry? And all the other Harry’s in 2008?

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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