Project number 2

An early donation to the archive was an autograph book used by soldiers who had been sent to the Red Cross hospital at Belle Vue House Sudbury to convalesce. There are drawings and prose in the book and these give us an idea of what the soldiers were feeling at the time. The first soldiers often suffered from frostbite and trench foot. Later the common type of wound was an injured arm resulting from shooting above the trench.

Here are some examples of  entries in autograph books written by the soldiers, talking about the nurses and volunteer nurses who looked after them. 

Some soldiers came from Canada and Australia and were sent to England to recover from their injuries because it was closer to the battlefields than sending them home.

The photograph shows some nurses and patients from the Belle Vue Red Cross Hospital. The nurses with the Red Cross on their apron are VADs and the soldiers wore a uniform called Hospital Blues.

Below are some suggestions for a project using these archives. You only need to choose one. 

Placing yourself in the position of a soldier sent from the First World War trenches to Sudbury a place a long way from your home in Australia or Canada, write a description of how you might feel particularly knowing that you have been sent to recover your health in Great Britain so that you can then be sent back to the battlefields.

1. The drawings in the autograph book are similar to those of Winifred Attwell an illustrator at the time. Try and draw a cartoon of your own in the same form.
2. Using information from the autograph entries try and research the badges of these regiments and prepare a drawing of some of them.
3. What does V.A.D. stand for and what other services did V.A.D.s perform during and before World War I?