Did you know that the poem “Pillbox” by Edmund Blunden refers to a Serjeant Hoad, and that there is only one Sjt Hoad casualty recorded in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Debt of Honour database? (There are 3 other Hoads, but all privates). He was HOAD, FRANK ALBERT. Rank: Serjeant. Service No: SD/429. Date of […]
Did you know that at the time of the First World War, the rulers of the world’s three greatest nations – King George V of Great Britain and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia on the one hand, and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany on the other – were first cousins? Their grandmother was Queen Victoria. […]
Did you know the first British soldier killed in the war was John Parr? He had been a golf caddy before joining the army. He was no older than 16 at the time of his death so almost certainly lied about his age at enlistment. Parr was killed just to the north east of Mons […]
Did you know, over 100,000 pigeons served in the British Army alone during the First World War predominantly as messengers? Given the limitations of technology at the time, pigeons were one of the swiftest ways of delivering urgent messages to and from the front. Even early tanks carried pigeon messengers which were released out of […]
Did you know that the term “front” used on modern weather maps came into use because of their resemblance to the military fronts of the First World War? The idea first emerged in Norway in the early 1900s by Jacob Bjerknes who created the notion of a “front” as a boundary between two air masses. […]
Did you know that British and French soldiers suffered a variety of cultural misunderstandings when they met? Soldiers of each nation viewed the other with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. Neither side had spent much time around the other before the war and it took time to adapt. French soldiers thought the British were obsessed with […]
Did you know that British Summer Time was first initiated in Britain during the First World War? It had first been heavily proposed by William Willet in 1907 as an argument against the ‘waste’ of daylight. Willet died in 1915 with the government still heavily resistant to his proposal. However with Germany introducing a Daylight […]
