Scope and Contents Eleanor Brett, Viscountess Esher kept a typescript entry for most days during the First World War, ranging in length from a single line to a paragraph, sometimes reproducing extracts from letters, telegrams, and newspaper articles. She appears to have written her diary retrospectively. Throughout her diary, she interspersed short anecdotes from soldiers about their military experiences and character profiles of politicians, diplomats, journalists, nurses, artists, and other individuals she...

Scope and Contents This scrapbook documents how Eleanor spent the first year of the First World War. It begins as Eleanor recounts hearing about the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, from Prince Louis of Battenberg who sat at the next table to her and her family at the Savoy on 28 June 1914. During 1914, Eleanor re-commenced the running of First Aid classes for women, which she ran from the Duke of York’s Headquarters in Chelsea, London, with St John’s Ambulance. In September 1914, her scrapbook...

Scope and Contents The scrapbook opens with a description of Eleanor visiting the French Front, dining in Compiegne and being given a tour of a hospital. Eleanor and Reginald travelled back to London where Eleanor continued her work running First Aid classes at the Duke of York’s Headquarters in between seeing Sylvia [daughter], Zena [daughter-in-law], and their families and swallowing a chicken bone where she ‘thought my last moment had come’. Eleanor returned to Paris, where she comments on the heightened...

Scope and Contents The scrapbook opens with a poster ‘Taisez-Vous! Méfiez-Vous! Les Oreilles Enemies Vous Écoutent’ (translated as Shut up! Beware! Enemy Ears Are Listening To You) which Eleanor captions: ‘This notice was put up in all rail way carriages, trams, public buildings of all kinds in France’, as well as a list of battles which began in 1916. Like other scrapbooks in the series, Eleanor combines reflections on her own experiences of the war with military battles which she notes on small pieces of...