Postcard from... A Rest Camp, 1918

By: JP Robinson

Feb 22 Friday
Dear loving wife just a short line to let you know… just… hoping you are… we are on our way to our destination. We are also at a rest camp and the weather is fine. … another long journey … we will … as soon as possible … your loving husband X X X This is the camp X X X

Most of the text on the postcard that James, my great-grandfather, sent to Lucy, my great-grandmother, is faded now, but the address and the censor’s counter-signature are still clear. Although he had no Scottish heritage, he was a private in the Liverpool Scottish, and he wore his battalion kilt as he wrote, from Le Preol, in northern France. There wasn’t much at Le Preol, aside from the well-established rest camp, with the corrugated iron buildings pictured on the postcard. Another Liverpool Scottish man remembered “a pretty little village set in low-lying wooded country close to the Aire-La Bassee Canal”, which “showed none of those jagged stumps of shell-riven trees that betoken counter-battery work”. The men didn’t stay for long. James wrote the card on a Friday, knowing they were leaving soon. On the Monday, they walked the two miles to the trenches, just as they had at the Somme and Ypres. 

There were vast craters at the front line, around the ruined villages of Givenchy and Festubert. One crater, known as Red Dragon, was one hundred yards long and fifty feet deep. A soldier who relieved the Liverpool Scottish recalled that, as he arrived, “dead men lay about”. There were “bloated trench rats”, he said, and scared soldiers in need of rum. The communication trench “was sickeningly yielding underfoot with the bodies of the buried men. Here and there a leg or an arm protruded from the trench side”. 

James’s life had been haunted by death. He was born in 1882, and was named after his six year old brother, who had died the year earlier. The family lived at 75 Cemetery Road, in Southport, Lancashire. Apart from his time in France, he lived all of his life within a hundred yards of the cemetery. There was a monument there, built when James was six, for the twenty seven men who’d died in the Great Lifeboat Disaster. Two of the dead were James’s cousins, who lived around the corner, on Boundary Street. 

Following the disaster, James’s grandfather took over as coxswain of the new lifeboat. There was a second, less famous, lifeboat disaster ten years later; James’s grandfather, his father and an uncle drowned when they were working on the lifeboat moorings off the pier. James’s mother died sixteen months later, when he was eighteen. They were living at 28 Warwick Street then, perpendicular to Cemetery Road. James became a market porter, and then drove a bread van, before going to war. He was the first man in his family not to make his living on the fishing boats.

When he married Lucy, after a short stay at Matlock Road, parallel to Cemetery Road, they moved back to Warwick Street, to a two-bedroom end terrace at number 5. They had two children: Eliza, named for James’ mother, and James, my grandfather, born the year before war was declared. They could see the tower of the cemetery chapel from their back bedroom window. Lucy would have first read the postcard from Le Preol in their dark front room. 

Lucy kept the postcard safe, of course. When she died, in 1979, thirty years after her husband, the children gathered the few pictures she’d had of him, the postcard, and James’ burial record. She’d been living in the nursing home that my grandmother ran, on the far side of the cemetery. One photograph had James in middle-age, standing proudly with his crown green bowling trophies in the back yard. Another had them both in front of their small bay window at Warwick Street. One, from the thirties, had them laughing as my grandfather acted up for the camera. There were two from a day out to Chester, with James in a smart suit. There were two others of him, from the war, in his Liverpool Scottish kilt. He posed formally in one, stiff-backed. In the other, he was with some friends beside a wooden hut, in the mud, smiling.

James had died in 1949, after his son had returned from fighting in Egypt in the Second World War. He was sixty seven, and had overdosed on barbiturates. Some in the family thought it was suicide. He was buried under a low headstone, in the cemetery behind his home, close to the lifeboat monument and the graves of the ninety seven men who had died in the Great War.

Kowloon Walled City: An extract from 'Fallen Glory', by James Crawford

Photo credit:  ‘Inside the Walled City’, 1998 , © Patrick Zachmann / Magnum Photos

We are extremely pleased and proud to publish on the Elsewhere blog an extract from the fascinating new book Fallen Glory by James Crawford. In it, he uncovers the biographies of some of the world’s most fascinating lost and ruined buildings in a unique guide to a world of vanished architecture. In this extract, James takes us to the Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong – Born 1843, died 1994:

In the aftermath of the Second World War, refugees flooded south to the Kowloon Peninsula. The only trace of the old city was the derelict shell of the Mandarin’s house. Yet people gravitated almost instinctively to this rough rectangle of ground. Perhaps it was the feng shui. The Walled City had originally been laid out according to the ancient principles of Chinese philosophy: facing south and overlooking water, with hills and mountains to the north. This ideal alignment, it was said, brought harmony to a ll citizens. In their desperate plight some refugees may have believed that Kowloon would be a much-needed source of luck and prosperity. Others, however, recalled that this had once been a Chinese exclave in British colonial territory. The stone walls of the ‘Walled City’ had gone, but the refugees were convinced the diplomatic ones remained. 

By 1947 there were over 2,000 squatters camped in Kowloon, their ramshackle huts arranged in almost the exact footprint of the original city. No one wanted to find themselves outside the borders – those on the wrong side of the line risked losing the protection of the Chinese government. The people kept coming, and the camp grew ever more squalid and overcrowded. 

READ THE REST OF THE EXTRACT...

Postcard from... Jinja, Uganda

By Tim Woods:

For one of the country’s leading tourist sites, it’s a little unremarkable … a few gentle ripples in the middle an otherwise benign river. But this is not a place to gawp at nature’s splendour, rather somewhere to say you’ve been: this is the source of the Nile, where Lake Victoria becomes one of the world’s great rivers. This water will, perhaps, spill out into the Mediterranean, 6,500 km away. 
    
A wooden boat takes us from the western bank, near the town of Jinja, out to a small wooden sign that marks the ‘official’ start of the river. But first, we meander via the eastern shore, our guide perhaps trying to draw out the trip a little and give us our money’s worth. Fishermen paddle over and offer freshly caught tilapia for sale; egrets and cormorants swoop noisily overhead. There’s even a souvenir stall built on a wooden raft in the middle of the river – something you don’t see everywhere.

Our visit continues with a leisurely beer back on the shore, admiring the views – and with Uganda’s famously lush greenery framing this proud giant, it’s one to linger over – before returning to the main road back to Kampala and the bridge over the Nile.

And it’s near this bridge that the most interesting detail lies. An innocent-looking hut, located next to the dam on which the bridge is built, measures daily the water flowing through. But it’s not owned by Ugandans, rather by Egyptians – and, according to our guide, they have similar offices in every country that shares what they very much consider to be their river, checking that none of their upstream neighbours extracts more than (what Egypt considers is) their share. 

At present, Uganda is playing by the rules and everything is friendly. Who knows if that will change as climate change bites harder in East Africa in the coming years. But the reminder is there: those ripples that mark the beginning of the Nile are being counted, each and every one.

Rivers of Power by Alejandro Cartagena

We received a surprise gift from Mexico in the mail this week and we were incredibly excited to discover inside a new book by Alejandro Cartagena, who's photographs of 'Fragmented Cities' we introduced in Elsewhere No.02.

Rivers of Power is again centred on Monterrey, Mexico and is a beautifully packaged and designed compilation of archive material and Alejandro's own photographs; a case study in the forces of nature versus human interference. It documents the history of tension between the Santa Catarina River and corrupt parties in power, irrational urban planning and misguided entrepreneurial spirit.

"This is the story of the tragic relationship between two bodies: a critical narration of the long and failed relationship between a society and a river. Although today it is a long and winding sarcophagus, in the past the city depended on the abundance of its stream. Centuries later, with Monterrey transformed into a regional industrial enclave, the Santa Catarina River served as border between social classes: the employers on the north side, the laborers on the south. The first hydraulic engineering works were carried out at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1909, wells and dikes were routed through pipes. That same year the river overflowed and caused the catastrophic flood that took over 5 thousand lives. Entire families disappeared. Since then, the river has been serving a sentence, receiving the treatment of a beast, with its future in peril. ..."

Rivers of Power its mix of archive images, blurred film/tv news stills and outstanding photography is beautiful to look at even though the subject matter is - as always in Alejandro's work - quite disturbing.

Some impressions of the project and the book can be found on Alejandro's website here. To see a selection of his photographs in Elsewhere No.02, purchase your copy via our online shop here.

Printed Matters: Europe by Rail

In Elsewhere No.02 we reviewed The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt, a collection of essays reflecting on his life and experiences at different times and places, and “the one place where all these others originate: his mind.” It is a wonderful book, and it is the description of details and of his favourite things that resonate long after you have returned it to the shelf. One of those favourite things is something all of us at Elsewhere share - a love of trains:

I was never so happy as when I was going somewhere on my own, and the longer it took to get there, the better. Walking was pleasurable, cycling enjoyable, bus journeys fun. But the train was very heaven.

Two friends of ours who also share this love are Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries, editors of Hidden Europe magazine and the co-authors of the Europe by Rail guidebook. As a disclaimer – and the reason we are presenting the book under ‘Printed Matters’ rather than writing a review – our editor Paul worked on previous editions of the book with Nicky and Susanne and had a small involvement in this new edition, a much re-vamped and (dare we say it) improved version of something that was already pretty good in the first place.

Europe by Rail is subtitled ‘the definitive guide for independent travellers’ and there is certainly a wealth of practical advice within the pages for anyone interested in exploring the continent by train. But the real strength – and heart – of the book are the 50 suggested rail journeys, beautifully written, that give you a real flavour of the possibilities out there for crisscrossing Europe and what you might discover along the way.

As the editors write on the book’s website, the variety of the routes and the detailed descriptions offer the would-be traveller numerous options and sources of inspiration: 

Some journeys are sufficiently long that you could easily build an entire holiday around them (eg. from Amsterdam to Oslo or Hamburg to Budapest). Others are more modest in scope - such as a scenic wander through the Harz Mountains of eastern Germany or a rail cruise along the French Riviera. 

Just flicking through the book so many ideas and possibilities jump out at the reader, and it is a testimony to the work of Nicky and Susanne that this is a book that begs to be read, curled up on the couch, as much as it is a guidebook to be stuffed in your rucksack along with your European Rail Timetable before heading off to the station. Ultimately Europe by Rail is a reminder of the truth that Tony Judt himself understood – sometimes it is not about the destination, but the journey you take to get there. See you on platform 5… 

Europe by Rail, by Susanne Kries and Nicky Gardner is published by the team behind the European Rail Timetable, another publication that is indispensable for the dedicated European rail explorer.

Links:
Europe by Rail website
European Rail Timetable website

Elsewhere No.02, which features our review of The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt, can be purchased via our online store here.