The stage play The Wood. Pic: Drew Buckley THEATR Mwldan is offering a streamed broadcast of the stage play The Wood, originally written to commemorate the centenary of the end of World War One. The Wood was recorded on stage as live at the Torch Theatre, Milford Haven, under Covid-19 guidelines during lockdown 2021. From acclaimed Welsh playwright Owen Thomas, writer of the award winning Grav, the play is inspired by a true story. It is set in July 1916, and as the Battle of the Somme rages, Mametz Wood echoes to the sounds of war as the 38th Welsh Division face the ferocity of the German army.
Family memories with Fay Hampson. As well as bringing up four children and running a thriving bakery business on Charles Street, Wrexham, for many decades until they sold it circa 1949/50, my grandparents Mary and Herbert Hampson always played an active role in what is called nowadays the community. In Grandma’s case her main commitment was to the British Red Cross. The monochrome photos were taken in 1940. Her son-in-law, Doug Stokes, was already a prisoner of war. Her younger son Jeff would be shot down in 1943, missing for weeks and was a PoW until the end of the war. One of her brothers had been killed at Mametz Wood in the First World War and another severely gassed as was her brother-in-law.
McCarthy Stone is building a retirement living complex on the former Mountjoy School site in Flood Lane. It has been announced the site will be called Gordon Court, after Second Lieutenant Colin Graham Gordon who lived nearby at West Bay Road before he went off to fight for his country. It comes after the housebuilder invited the Bridport Heritage Forum to name the new complex, giving the group the opportunity to put their stamp on the development. Sheila Meaney from the Bridport Heritage Forum said: “As part of a four-year project at the Heritage Forum we compiled the life stories of all the men of Bridport who sadly lost their lives whilst fighting in World War I.
Others will take solace and inspiration from the poetry from Britain’s greatest war.
The First World War was “one of the seminal moments of the twentieth century in which literate soldiers, plunged into inhuman conditions, reacted to their surroundings in poems”, writes English lecturer Dr Stuart Lee on Oxford University’s First World War Poetry Digital Archive.
According to BBC’s HistoryExtra, “some 2,200 writers published poetry about the Great War between 1914 and 1918, 25 per cent of them women and fewer than 20 per cent men in uniform”.
Below are some of the best, written during the years of the First World War and beyond.