World War I - An Eye Witness Account

The Journal of William Brazear

The first World War started in 1914 and I still have no idea what it was all about. I only know we were at war with Kaiser Wilhelm, who was a grandson of Queen Victoria.

It seems our royal family were eager to go to war with each other. Kaiser Bill, as the British liked to call him, lost that war but in the process millions of lives were also lost. Mostly these were innocent young men, barely old enough to drive, who thought they were helping their country.

If you are interested in this period, you might be interest in the book above. It is an eye witness account of the Battle of Mons (at least I think that's the one).

It was a journal written by my late husband's grandfather, an account of his time in a German prisoner of war camp during World War I.

When his father passed away, at the end of the nineteenth century, his mother took to drink. Her younger children were taken away and put into care, while William, being the eldest, tried to find work. There was no work to be had in London, so he and his friend walked, all the way to Wales, where they found work in the coal mines.

They had no money, no food to sustain them on their way, and they survived by waiting outside factories at closing time and scrounging leftover sandwiches from the workers.

There is an account of one night when William slept in a ditch while his friend went to the local workhouse for the night. It seemed he would rather have the ditch, but he turned out to be the luckier of the two. A police officer found him and locked him up for vagrancy. He got a bed, a meal and a decent breakfast. He probably did better than his friend, who would have shared a hard bed with strangers and been given watery porridge in the morning, but not before being made to work.

This is an example of how it was a greater crime to be poor than it was to go against the law.

There is also a fine example of the way doctors used to think about women's ailments back then. After the war, when William came home to his girlfriend, Florrie, her doctor told him that if she didn't get married she would die.

Apart from the breach of privilege of speaking to a non relative about his patient, there was a belief among most doctors that all women's ailments were caused by them not having sex. Of course, unmarried girls did not have sex and mostly didn't even know what it was.

They even had some sort of disgusting instrument to help women's hysteria, as they called it, if they were in no position to marry any time soon. I suppose it was an early example of a vibrator! 

Anyway, just click on the picture and you'll be able to buy the book, either in paperback or e-book format. William would be thrilled to know how many people would be reading his journal.

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Copyright 2022 by Margaret Brazear