To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May. David Crane

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       List of Illustrations

       Frontispiece

      1. Portrait of Captain Charlie May (Photo courtesy of family)

       Plates

      2. Charles Edward May (Photo courtesy of Jason Bauchop)

      3. The steamship Westmeath (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

      4. Port Chalmers, Dunedin, 1880 (Photo courtesy of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Ref: O.24194)

      5. Princes Street, Dunedin, 1885 (Photo courtesy of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Ref: C.011756)

      6. The May-Oatway Fire Alarm (Photo courtesy of Dunedin Fire Brigade Restoration Society Inc.)

      7. The May Family in London, about 1905 (Photo courtesy of Susan and Charles Worledge)

      8. Lily May’s wedding, 1909 (Photo courtesy Susan and Charles Worledge)

      9. Trooper May at camp, King Edward’s Horse (Photo courtesy of family)

      10. Charlie outside tent, Salisbury Plain (Photo courtesy of family)

      11. Private Richard Tawney (Photo courtesy of LSE, Ref: LSE/Tawney/27/11)

      12. Captain Alfred Bland (Photograph courtesy of Daniel Mace)

      13. Lieut. William Gomersall (Photograph courtesy of Victor Gomersall)

      14. Private Arthur Bunting (Photograph courtesy Adrian Bunting)

      15. Maude with Pauline in her christening robe, 1914 (Photo courtesy of family)

      16. Maude and Pauline in leather-bound case (Photo courtesy of Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/4/4)

      17. Maude, Pauline and Charlie, perhaps on leave, Feb. 1915 (Photo courtesy of family)

      18. Maude (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/4/4)

      19. Pauline, aged about four with Teddy bear, c.1918 (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/4/4)

      20. Charlie’s personal diaries (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Refs: MR4/17/295/1/1-7)

      21. Pencil sketch by Charlie, ‘Our Camp in the Bois’ (Photo courtesy of the Regimental Archives, Ref: MR4/17/295/5/1)

      22. Charles Edward May, seated, at Imperial School of Instruction camp, Zeitoun, Egypt, 1915 (Photo courtesy of Susan and Charles Worledge)

      23. Dantzig Alley British Cemetery (Photograph courtesy of Derek Taylor)

      24. Charlie’s headstone, Dantzig Alley (Photograph courtesy of Derek Taylor)

      25. Frank Earles, early 1920s (Photograph courtesy of Rosie Gutteridge)

      26. Pauline, a friend and Maude in Fontainebleau, France, 1922 (Photo courtesy of family)

      27. Pauline’s wedding to Harry Karet, 1950 (Photo courtesy of family)

       Foreword

      What is it that makes one diary live and another simply die on the page? Nine times out of ten it is down to the intrinsic interest of the material or the quality of the writing; but every so often one comes across a diary where it is the sense of personality behind it that lifts it out of the ordinary: such a diary is that of Captain Charlie May, killed in the early morning of 1 July 1916, leading his men of B Company of the 22nd Manchester Service Battalion into action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

      There is nothing very remarkable about Charles May, and that is the point about him: from the first page of his diary to the last haunting entries he feels so utterly familiar and recognisable. That is partly because his war was the war that a million men like him knew and endured and has become part of our historic consciousness; but more than that it is because Charlie May is ‘England’ as England has always liked to imagine itself, the England that stood in square at Waterloo and would stand waist-deep in water at Dunkirk, the England of a hundred 1940s and ’50s films, down to his English wife and his English baby daughter and the English batman СКАЧАТЬ