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...

Scope and Contents Eleanor opens this scrapbook with a photograph of the Queen of Spain and dates of key military battles in 1916 and 1917, the period covered by the scrapbook. Like other scrapbooks in the series, Eleanor combines reflections on her own experiences of the war in typed diary entries, with military battles which she notes on small pieces of paper on the right-hand side of her volume. She illustrates her scrapbook with postcards, photographs, newspaper clippings, illustrations, and signatures of...

Scope and Contents This is the final scrapbook made by Eleanor Brett, Viscountess Esher, and is the most sparsely populated out of all the volumes. She notes at the beginning of the volume how she did not keep a detailed diary after 1918, so the dates included ‘are only a few dates of interest’. The book largely revolves around recording her social and travel arrangements from 1919-1920. Contents include: a letter addressed to Miss Hackett [Norah Desmond Hackett] on 29 January 1919, co-founder of the...

Scope and Contents Unlike other scrapbooks in the series, this volume opens with a series of photographs showing warfare on the front lines. These photographs capture prisoners, refugees, soldiers, tanks, and ammunition mules in various locations across France, including Ham, Arras, Peronne, Roye, Aveluy, Bapume, Mailly-Maillet, Hénencourt, Bouzincourt, Albert and Doullens. Like other scrapbooks in the series, Eleanor goes on to combine reflections on her own experiences of the war with military battles which...

Scope and Contents

Album Amicorum compiled by Sister E. B. Tayloe during the First World War, while serving at the First General Hospital, Cambridge, and at the 16th General Hospital, Le Treport.