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From The Times
January 4, 2008

Soldier’s ‘blog’ from WW1 trenches is internet hit

Will Pavia

It is a conflict that is fading from living memory, but a “blog” from the trenches of the First World War has become a surprise hit on the internet.

In the past year, the writings of Private Harry Lamin from the Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment have come to compete with the diaries of call girls, policemen and politicos. The travails of this soldier, set down on the front line in France and Italy in letters to his family, are being posted online 90 years to the day after they were written.

Like the family who anxiously awaited his letters in 1918, thousands of readers keenly await his next post. In the comments section, readers worry over whether he will make it home alive, as he passes through the battles of Messines Ridge and Passchendaele.

His fate has been kept a secret by Bill Lamin, his 59-year-old grandson, who runs the blog and adds photographs and maps he has found while researching the path that his grandfather took through the war. The idea for the blog came to Private Lamin’s grandson, a maths and IT teacher, in 2006.

Harry Lamin, who was born in 1887, worked in Nottingham’s lace industry before being conscripted in 1917 at the age of 29. The first post is in February of that year, from an army training camp in Staffordshire. On May 13, he arrived in France.

In letters to his older brother Jack, a clergyman in Leeds, he writes of being “buried and knocked about” on Messines Ridge and of “rough, rough times” on the front line.

To his sister Kate, a midwife, he is more elliptical. “We had an exciting time up the line,” he wrote to her from the Menin Road in November. “But we beat them back. They lost a good many men.”

The latest word from Private Lamin is on the day before New Year’s Eve, from Italy. He is waiting for his Christmas parcels and news of his wife, Ethel, and Willie, their baby son. To read it, visit www.wwar1.blogspot.com.

In all the years I studied history at school I was never, ever, taught anything about the Great War, or The Second World War and I feel this is a sad omission.

RW, Leeds, UK

Passchendale, the menin road and Ypres are places in Belgium, not in France.
Thousands of young men of several nations are buried here and the traces of the war are still visible in the landscape (after 90 years!) .
This is one of the biggest tragedies of our time and cannot be forgotten.

Luc De Bondt, brussels, belgium

Our grandfather was killed in the Great War in 1918, just before the war ended. He also sent letters and cards to his love ones. He was private Norman Waghorn L/8112. 7th Bn. The Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment). He is remembered with honour at Vis-En-Artois Memorial. We decided as a family to gather together all the letters, cards etc and place them in the Imperial War Museum in London for everyone to see.

Christine, Nottingham, UK

We don't really have enough information/history of the people who fought during the great war. Having visited the battlefields around Ypres just recently, it's great to see somebody bring their history alive in this way.

LG, London,

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