Barnwell at War Everyday Lives in Working-Class East Cambridge during World War I - delivered by Royal Mail
Barnwell at War
Everyday Lives in Working-Class East Cambridge during World War I
£4.99 + £1.75 p&p = £6.74 delivered by Royal Mail
40 pages with 27 illustrations
Published by Lovely Bunch 2018
Accounts of the World War I experiences of Cambridge University undergraduates and dons are not difficult to unearth. Letters from the front, personal memoir and first-hand reportage fill booksellers’ shelves.
This is not the case with narratives of the town’s working class, many of whom served their Varsity masters before marching off to the front.
The experiences of those who stayed at home in eastern Cambridge have been all but ignored.
The fate of the young Barnwell men who formed Abbey United Football Club – later to become Cambridge United – has similarly been overlooked.
Researchers from 100 Years of Coconuts have collaborated with Wolfson College and the AHRC-funded University of Hertfordshire’s Everyday Lives in War centre to address this.
The result, Barnwell at War, reinstates the cultural memory of an area of Cambridge beyond the touristic gaze, and suggests an indicative pattern of life for the wider majority of the UK population through an era of unparalleled trauma.