Notebook of Private Arthur Snape of the 1/8th Lancs Fusiliers, including notes on training, poems, and diary
Item
Title
Notebook of Private Arthur Snape of the 1/8th Lancs Fusiliers, including notes on training, poems, and diary
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Identifier
9488.cpd
Creator
Snape, Arthur
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Abstract
A notebook kept by Private Arthur Snape of the 1/8th Lancashire Fusiliers, A Company, 42nd East Lancashire Division, believed to have been a sniper. The notebook contains a variety of material, including accounts of Snape's own movements and the operations he was involved in. He took part in the Dardanelles campaign in 1915, was in Malta later in 1915, then Egypt 1916-17, and finally France in 1917. The notebook also includes references to Gallipoli, Suvla Bay, and Anzac.
Snape's account is in multiple sections throughout the notebook, but each is a continuous narrative, suggesting it may have been written as a retrospective memoir rather than a diary kept day by day. The longest section occupies most of the second half of the book: it begins with Snape's enlistment on 27th May 1915, and ends with his division leaving Egypt for France on 3rd March[?] 1917. There are also notes on training courses (subjects covered include sniping, orders for a camp guard, and bombing), details of the Dardanelles losses up to December 11th 1915, a list of payments, and two poems, one beginning "Here is a story of which a soldier tells / Who was in that famous landing / on the shores of the Dardanelles", and the other entitled "Empire".
Snape's account is in multiple sections throughout the notebook, but each is a continuous narrative, suggesting it may have been written as a retrospective memoir rather than a diary kept day by day. The longest section occupies most of the second half of the book: it begins with Snape's enlistment on 27th May 1915, and ends with his division leaving Egypt for France on 3rd March[?] 1917. There are also notes on training courses (subjects covered include sniping, orders for a camp guard, and bombing), details of the Dardanelles losses up to December 11th 1915, a list of payments, and two poems, one beginning "Here is a story of which a soldier tells / Who was in that famous landing / on the shores of the Dardanelles", and the other entitled "Empire".
Date
1915 - 1917
Date Created
1915-01-01
Temporal Coverage
1917-12-31
Source
Notebook
Medium
Paper
Type
Diary
number of pages
87
Contributor
Meriel Patrick
Alun Edwards (Ferrens Art Gallery, Hull submissions day 31st May 2008)
Alison McKnight
Publisher
The Great War Archive, University of Oxford