The Great War: The People's Story

- Season 1

(2014)

1914:-Newly married lieutenant Alan Lloyd writes to his wife Dorothy from the trenches whilst Oxford undergraduate James Butlin, having obtained a commission also as a lieutenant, sends letters to fellow student Basil Burnett-Hall. Cockney Reg Evans, an early volunteer, writes to his religious mother, including an account of how he heroically undertook a dangerous mission though two years later a shell will explode in his face. All three men initially write in positive tones which turn to disillusion as the war progresses. Emancipated would-be journalist Dorothy ...

With half his jaw blown away Reg undergoes reconstructive surgery from pioneering doctor Harold Gillies, writing to his mother that he is now uglier than ever. Reg will go through the war, winning a distinguished conduct medal, marrying and surviving until 1943. Alan Lloyd is less fortunate for whilst he gets home leave to see his new born son in 1915 the next year he will be killed at the battle of the Somme, being awarded a posthumous Military Cross. On the home front Hallie Miles, a vegetarian restaurateur ,ironically derives a positive from the war as meat ...

1917: Hallie Miles publishes her book Health Without Meat and is one of many expressing their fears about Zeppelin raids. Also in London Helen Bentwich, a barrister's wife whose family has long denied her any vocation, comes to work at the Woolwich arsenal. She is shocked by the conditions of the working class and is instrumental in union activity. In the Essex country side Scots parson Andrew Clark, in his memoirs Echoes of the Great War shares Hallie's horror of the Zeppelin bombing raids and concern that so many young men are being sent to the trenches to be ...

1918 sees meat rationing being introduced so that Hallie and her husband Eustace, employed by the Ministry of Food, have considerable success with their vegetarian fare. Helen Bentrich, sacked from the arsenal for her socialist viewpoint, throws herself into the organization of the Women's Land Army. She will later become a social worker in the Middle East and the Labour leader of London County Council, surviving to age eighty. Alfred Duff Cooper's post at the Foreign Office has protected him from conscription but in 1918 he joins the Grenadier Guards as a lieutenant ...