Writing Home: Men’s Letters from the Front

Abstract

On 8 September 1917, Cyril Newman, a lance corporal with the 9th Battalion The London Regiment wrote to his fiancée, Winnie, of his emotions on receiving two letters from her. ‘I feel a different person,’ he wrote, ‘ten years younger — a hundred times lighter at heart. We all feel like this. The arrival of mail is vital to our happiness ….“No post” gives us a kind of malaise.’1 Newman was expressing the feelings of the majority of British soldiers who, throughout the First World War, were delighted to receive mail from home. As an on-going source of contact with the home front, letters served as a reminder of what men were fighting for, a conduit for news from home and an important emotional outlet for soldiers.]