To mark the 100-year anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, the Library of Trinity College Dublin has digitized diaries, letters, and memoirs from World War One in a newly launched free and publicly available website, Fit as Fiddles and as Hard as Nails.
Even if your ancestors are not among the Irish soldiers featured on this website, their written words provide you with an idea of what a soldier’s life was like.
The writings on the website are by the following Irish soldiers: Lieut. Arthur Nickson Callaghan, Lieut. Henry Crookshank, Major Richard William George Hingston, Captain William Patrick ‘Pat’ Hone, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kenneth Howard-Bury, Captain Cyril Stanley Beresford Mundey, Private William Raws, and Lieut. Charles Wyndham Wynne.
Image of Richard William George Hingston’s diary and transcription on Trinity College’s ‘Fit as Fiddles and Hard as Nails’ website about Irish soldiers’ voices from the Great War.
The authors served on both Western and Eastern Fronts. Three of them were Trinity graduates; two never came home and two received the Military Cross. Among them are Lieut. Henry Crookshank, father of Trinity’s History of Art Professor, Anne Crookshank, and Captain William ‘Pat’ Hone, descended from the famous Hone family of artists Nathaniel and Evie Hone. He was father of author Leland Bardwell who died last week.
While diary entries made on the battlefield tend to be brief, the memoirs on this website, such as William Raws typed 139-page account, provide more insight.
In contrast to the diaries of hardship and loneliness from the men fighting on the front, some of the extracts from Emily Wynne’s ‘home-front’ diary shed light on a somewhat restricted civilian life back in Dublin.
A total of 1,600 pages have been digitized as part of the project.
