Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233Kate Hunter, ‘More than an Archive of War: Intimacy and Manliness in the Letters of a Great War Soldier to the Woman He Loved, 1915–1919’Gender & History, Vol.25 No.2 July 2013, pp. 339–354.
More than an Archive of War: Intimacy andManliness in the Letters of a Great WarSoldier to the Woman He Loved, 1915–1919
Kate Hunter
Great War soldiers are the largest group of correspondents represented in the collectionsof public repositories in New Zealand and Australia. The survival of thousands ofletters from servicemen to their families and friends results from a combination ofboth societies having high literacy rates with the remoteness of these home frontsfrom the theatres of war. This archive has been developed and identified as one ofwar both by the institutional home of these letters – the larger collections being in warmemorial museums – and historians’ use of them.1 They are, however, far more than anarchive of men’s war experiences. At their core, letters were men’s attempts to sustaintheir emotional relationships with family and friends and, through these attempts tomitigate the separation they were experiencing, men revealed a great deal about theirunderstandings of themselves as men in these relationships. As epistolary historianshave established, letters are revealing of social codes and are ways that correspondentsvariously ‘fashioned’ themselves, created ‘fictions’ and maintained versions of theself.2 Using the example of letters from New Zealander Lindsay Inglis to his fianceeMay Todd this article argues that, further than simply maintaining ‘manly selves’in the face of war, men’s love letters can reveal masculine aspirations, their futureversions of themselves and their relationships with women. In his efforts to maintainemotional proximity in the face of physical separation, Lindsay’s letters, and otherslike them, allow us to move beyond discussions of representations and prescriptions ofmasculinity, to an analysis of the dynamism of masculine identity in these key yearsof social and cultural transformation.
In emphasising the narrative of the man rather than that of the soldier, I aimto extend the arguments of Michael Roper both in highlighting romantic rather thanmaternal and filial relationships, and by widening geographical coverage. Roper’semphasis on the deeply embedded pyschic importance of relationships in the familyhas alerted historians to the potential of soldiers’ letters as sources for understandingthe expressions of gender within individual subjectivity. I suggest, further to Roper,that soldiers’ presentations of the self in romantic letters were more self-conscious andspoke more to the future than to the past. As Joanna Bourke has argued of emotions, thenarration of loving and longing, and of manliness within those narrations, ‘to oneself
as much as to others’ relied on historically specific ‘ordering mechanisms of grammar,plot and genre’.3 Lindsay’s letters articulate his understanding of modern love andmodern manliness within a broader but fading plot and genre of imperial, adventuringmasculinity. The circumstances of war meant that he was also in the unusual positionof being able to compare his own letters to his lover with those of other men to theirs.In his position as an officer, and hence censor of other men’s letters, he was privyto the words and conventions of other male correspondents. The ways men imaginedthemselves, and fashioned themselves as potential husbands, are legible in their lettersfrom war, illuminating a wider range of men’s understandings of manly roles than isavailable for any other historical period.
Pursuing this argument responds in part to John Tosh’s concerns that, ‘[t]hechallenge of our subject is to convey the imperatives of masculinity as they wererealised in historical experience’. Roper, too has argued that studies of masculinity haveremained concerned with social and cultural constructions of gender rather than seeingit ‘as an aspect of personality’.4 Foundational work on masculinity in Australia and NewZealand, as elsewhere, was principally concerned with mechanisms by which dominantmodes of masculinity were promulgated through the holy trinity of sport, schoolingand soldiering. Practices and expressions of masculinity in men’s lives have been lessexplored but more recent research has attempted to tap into men’s understandings ofsocietal messages about manliness, despite the methodological difficulties.5 In none ofthis Australasian research have soldiers’ letters been used as a source, it being muchmore usual to end nineteenth-century studies at or before 1914 and for twentieth-century studies to focus on the interwar period.6 Some notable British and Europeanstudies of epistolarity and masculinity use soldiers’ letters elegantly and insightfullyas key sources.7 Within these studies of wartime masculinity there has been a tendencyto focus on the disruption to pre-war forms and discourses (sometimes referred to ashegemonies) that the circumstances and experiences of war precipitated. The war isposited as the catalyst for change in masculine identities, rather than as an event thatcreated the need to communicate those identities and their dynamism on paper. I wouldgo so far as to suggest that the focus on war has prevented historians of masculinityfrom exploring the more nuanced shaping of men’s gendered identities by modernitythat characterises scholarship of femininity of this same period. Instead, the war’scentral position maintains particular links between combat, militarism and manlinessfor men of this generation. One scholar, for example, simply argues ‘because combatwas so firmly gendered as a male activity’, soldiers’ war narratives ‘inevitably reflecton how they understood themselves to be men, both physically and emotionally’.8
When the Great War and masculinity share centre stage, the powerful culturaltropes of war require interrogation. Janet Watson, for example, has successfully demon-strated the historically specific nature of the automatic association of disillusionmentwith the Great War experience, and the narrowing of the view of the war by the 1930s tosimply a ‘useless sacrifice on the part of the soldiers in the trenches’.9 For the purposesof this article, it is germane to identify the importance of immobility or entrapment asa trope in Great War studies. Some scholars have captured this idea in the emphasis onmud in popular memories of the war; others in the notion of the soldier as the victim.Elaine Showalter, not without criticism, went so far as to construct a parallel betweennotions of hysteria in Victorian women as a bodily revolt against social constrictionand neurasthenia in soldiers who were equally powerless in the face of industrial
Intimacy and Manliness in the Letters of a Great War Soldier to the Woman He Loved, 1915–1919341
warfare and military discipline.10 By contrast, mobility has become fundamental tothe understanding of modernity and femininity in the early twentieth century, mostclearly when the lack of freedom of movement denied modernity to groups such as in-digenous women. Yet because of the ‘inevitable’ coupling of combat with masculinityand the Great War with stasis, the importance of mobility in the emergence of modernmasculinity has been overlooked.11 Lindsay’s letters to May highlight the importanceof mobility in the development of their relationship, and I argue this is a key way inwhich their romance was modern.
Dominion soldiers were highly mobile: going to war entailed a journey of several
Q1
weeks and mimicked the voyages of wealthy travellers to Europe. Indeed, Australianand New Zealand soldiers were known as ‘six-bob-a-day tourists’ and (New ZealandPrime Minister) ‘Massey’s tourists’.12 While the tourist analogy has been debatedand criticised, making the parallel is helpful in that it realigns going to war with itscorollary of returning home. Histories of the soldiers’ experience all too often terminatein the midst of battle. Bart Ziino reminds us, however, that both war and touring ‘wereexceptional experiences, whose value and meaning were negotiated with home society. . . [T]he process of going to war has much to do with the very process of comingback’.13 The narrative of returning home was crucial to and unwavering in Linsday’sletters, as will be shown below.
Lindsay’s letters were written from the same theatres of war as those of Britishsoldiers, but his experience was infused by a colonial culture remote from Britain,by a war that took him tens of thousands of miles from home, and by the subsequentsustained separation from his family and fiancee.14 Born and schooled in New Zealand,Lindsay left in November 1915 and did not return for four years. His letters demonstrateboth an imperial identity and loyalty, and a sense of distinctiveness from Britain.Writing from the multi-racial, multi-ethnic theatre of war he identified himself clearlyas a ‘New Zealander’, compared men of various nationalities and narrated his time onleave in England and Scotland as a tourist, not an exile returned home. The corollaryto mobility was that the experiences of soldiers from the dominions were most keenlycharacterised by the extent of separation. In the face of uninterrupted absence fromhome, community, family and friends, Australasian soldiers’ letters acted to shore upcontinuing and coherent personal, and masculine, identities. As David Gerber arguesof immigration – and how much more pertinent it is when the voyage is one into war –the journey exposes the immigrant to the ‘risk of a radical rupture of the self. Personalidentity’, he continues, ‘depends on the assurance that we are indeed the same personwe have always been and it is served through abiding relationships with significantothers’.15
The extent of separation from those significant others was palpable. While mailbetween the western front and England took between three and six days, letters betweenEurope and New Zealand took at least fifty days.16 Time and distance were of enormousconcern and consequence to Antipodean soldiers and their loved ones. In the case ofcourting and newly-married couples the problem of distance was compounded because,as Christa Hammerle suggests, in letters between couples the future was at stake.17
There was not the continuity of a life-long relationship on which to fall back as therewas with parents: as Roper puts it, mothers were constant, ‘the proof of her love didnot lie in the letter itself’.18 Understandably then, separation forced soldiers and theirlovers to become regular and faithful letter-writers or risk emotional and perhaps social
estrangement. For Australian and New Zealand soldiers, letters ‘exclusively defined theconnection between lovers’ and it is no surprise that those connections often failed.19
It is in the survival and development of their intimate relationship over four years ofsuch separation that Lindsay’s letters to May are remarkable.
Amidst the millions of letters crossing from battle fronts to home fronts, LindsayInglis’s letters to May Todd arrived, were read again and again, and were replied to.20
These replies, and the occasional parcels that accompanied them, similarly arrivedon the battle-front with astonishing regularity, although not as often as their recipientwould have liked – a fault of the war, not of the writer. The lovers had presumablymet in the South Island town of Geraldine, where Lindsay’s father was a solicitor andMay’s father was the Presbyterian minister. By 1914, May’s family were residing inthe St David’s manse in Petone, just north of Wellington on the southernmost tip of theNorth Island. In 1915, Lindsay left Otago University in Dunedin where he had beenstudying law and enlisted in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF), embarkingon the Tahiti in November of that year.
Despite his university education, Lindsay is remarkably typical of correspondentsof this period in the Australasian archives. Deliberate collection policies made bypublic repositories, as well as the development of popular national memory aroundthe war, have resulted in a militarisation of men in this period despite enlisted menbeing the minority of the male population. It is striking that no letters from Lindsayto May survive from 1914, the year when Lindsay was at university in Dunedin andMay lived hundreds of kilometres away in Wellington. The collection begins withhis departure to war in November 1915. In keeping with other British and dominioncollections, New Zealand records are in the main letters from young Pakeha (European)men.21
Indeed, the requirements of the nation at war coincided with the years of men’slives when they were forming significant emotional attachments and preparing them-selves for marriage. The NZEF, as with the other dominion forces, was made up almostentirely of young single men in their twenties at a time when the average age of firstmarriage for New Zealand men was twenty-eight years and falling.22 In enacting con-scription in New Zealand in 1916, the goverment called up unmarried men first. Whilelove letters survive in the soldiers’ archive, they are, as Hsu-Ming Teo notes, necessar-ily a ‘lopsided view’ of relationships because they are overwhelmingly the product ofhappy unions.23 The circumstances of war also meant that, usually, only one half of theletters survived: Lindsay’s survive but May’s letters do not. Except for rare exceptionswhere men were stationed in England or returned regularly to permanent digs, Aus-tralasian soldiers simply could not carry letters with them and they were destroyed. InFebruary 1916, Lindsay wrote to May,
You know, old chap, for I’m sure I told you, that after two or three mails accumulate there has tobe a conflagration of letters because one can’t possibly carry them round with him on this sort of ajob. I just keep enough always to hand to carry on with until the next mail. I’m afraid, chick, that Iam naturally loath to do away with them. It’s nearly always my orderly who says, ‘Time you hadanother fire, Sir’. And so the conflagration comes about.24
The survival of Lindsay’s letters alone makes this collection much more typical of‘war letters’ than those used in studies where both sides of the correspondence survivesbut they are no less useful.25
Intimacy and Manliness in the Letters of a Great War Soldier to the Woman He Loved, 1915–1919343
War separated men and women, and, as other historians have pointed out, itsrealities forced adaptations in epistolary form.26 Accepting the arguments of episto-lary historians that letters themselves were governed by cultural rules, by form andtraining, appropriate forms of etiquette, address and apparatus, Lindsay’s letters arealso evidence of where those cultural rules were broken in order to reinforce emo-tional intimacy and where they were broken because of the circumstances of war.As will be discussed below, censorship especially broke epistolary norms and it ex-posed one set of men – officers – to the correspondence of other men. The verymaterials of Lindsay’s letters also speak to the importance of continued connectionover norms governing appropriate paper and layout of letters. Soldiers wrote on anypiece of paper they could find: tiny notebooks, the backs of envelopes, other lettersand signals pads, cross-hatching or writing around the edges where necessary. Theycommented on the arrival of parcels containing envelopes and writing paper. Evenwithout the actual content of letters, their material existence points to the urge to write,record, connect, reveal and reassure, and to some abandonment of the rules of theform.
There are 136 surviving letters from Lindsay to May, written variously from Egypt,France, England and finally from Germany after November 1918. Lindsay’s longestletters, between nineteen and twenty-three pages, were written at sea, in hospitalor on leave. The shortest letters, often just a page from a notebook, were writtenin July 1916. He wrote no letters at all in September 1916 (during the Battle ofthe Somme), commenting in October, ‘You’ll know the reason of the gap in themail. We’ve had a pretty rough time of it for the last month as you’ll no doubtguess when you see the casualty lists in the papers. Poor old NZ’ (5 October 1916).In this way, the artefacts themselves are a map of his war experience marking outthe time he had available for letter writing and the periods when the demands onhim were such that letters to May were simply not possible. Similarly, the paperLindsay’s letters are written on varies enormously in quality and again forms a collageof comfort and deprivation. At best the paper is thick blue stationery or hotel stationeryfrom London’s Strand Hotel. Mostly, his letters were written on pages from his fieldnotebooks or the messages and signals pads. At worst, during the ‘paper famine’ of1917 his letters were written on used envelopes and packing paper from parcels.27
Despite the meagreness of paper supplies and quality, letters were too important not towrite.
Various features of epistolary relationships pointed to by historians of nineteenth-century letter writing are present in Lindsay’s letters. There was an epistolary pactbetween May and Lindsay that letters should be of a certain length which, while notspecified, was apparent in Lindsay’s apologies for brevity.28 He also demonstratedconcern about the materiality of his letters, often apologising for a ‘measly scrap’written in a hurry (12 December 1915). He regarded the service postcards as ‘measly’and ‘barren’ but hoped that they were at least being delivered when letters werenot because ‘it would help just to get something every now and again, wouldn’t itchick?’ (8 March 1916). That letter writing was a learned skill was also clear fromLindsay’s letters. In his self-consciousness about his own unusual position as thecompany’s censor, which compelled him to read other men’s letters, Lindsay revealedhis appreciation of proper form. In one letter to May in February 1916 Lindsay reflectedon the letters of one man whose contradictory character ‘will keep me interested as
long as I am near him’, who wrote ‘regularly to his people at home and also to his“steady” – and his letters are models of form and well-written – finishing up “Youraffectionate son, Edward”, and so on’ (16 February 1916). The regularity and patternsof letter-writing among his men are also confirmed by Lindsay’s assessment that ‘Ifeel like a spy prowling into these things, and hardly ever read them. I know quite wellnow the letters where there’s a chance of having to strike anything out’ (16 February1916).
Another epistolary continuity in Great War letters, especially those of dominiontroops, was writers’ and readers’ persistent concerns about time. Like most soldier-correspondents, Lindsay not only recorded the dates of May’s letters that he hadreceived but wanted to know how often his letters arrived in her hand. Lindsay wasaware of ‘epistolary time’, the disruption in the correspondence caused by time anddistance, for example noting when he was ill, ‘There is no need to worry. I’ll be asright as rain long before this reaches you’ (2 April 1916).29 Inevitably time took its tollon his memory also. In 1918, three years after leaving May in New Zealand, Lindsayconfessed, ‘I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like to have you in my arms’ (14 August1918). Time as measured by the arrival of mail was only one sort of time Lindsayexpressed. As will be discussed below, Lindsay played with time in his letters, blurringthe past into the future by drawing on experiences of being together with May toimagine a future for them.
Lengthy separation also meant that a language with which to express lovingfeelings had to be found. Words to describe love eluded Great War correspondents asthey had for writers over the nineteenth century, and while literate, few Australians andNew Zealanders had a large repertoire of expressions appropriate for such emotions.30
Lindsay, and presumably May, found intimacy difficult to express in their lettersand there was some frustration evident over this but they did not resort to formulaicexpressions. Instead, they developed a shared code, something specific to them as acouple in their particular times and places: their love was ‘this’ (always in quotationmarks). ‘This’ is what sustained Lindsay through four years of war, three of them onthe western front. Early in the correspondence, while still in the Middle East, Lindsaywrote of the sustaining power of his love for May, constructing her as his moral compassamidst the blatant presence of prostitution in Cairo that was the subject of comment inalmost all Australasian soldiers’ letters:
One thing you may be sure of, pal, is that our thoughts – yours and mine – you know the things youalways call our ‘creeds’, chick, are the most sacred things I have. Never be afraid of that, darling.So many people have quite, quite different ones though. There is nothing, missus o’mine, like ‘this’in all the earth for steering a chap straight and making him hate like poison those things that are sovery much part of places like Cairo (15 December 1915).
May, too, spent time pondering the nature of ‘this’ in her letters. At the start ofher letter of 7 February 1916, received in France in late March, ‘you said quite a lotabout how lasting “this” is. Never fear, old lady – don’t I know it? You need never beafraid of my losing sight of any of the things that mean so much to us. You know it’(26 March 1916). By 1917, having been away from May for seventeen months, ‘this’had become the most important of Lindsay’s methods of psychologically coping withthe war. Writing about the relationship took up increasing space in his letters as thewar went on. He wrote almost desperately in 1917:
Intimacy and Manliness in the Letters of a Great War Soldier to the Woman He Loved, 1915–1919345
Oh May, old pal, hold very tight to ‘this’ – if you could only see some of the things I’ve seen sincethat day on the wharf [when the troopship left New Zealand], it would make you feel even morethan you know now [what it is] to have a real lasting care, to have something like ‘this’ that youknow will be with you over and through everything . . . without it I can’t imagine what would makethings really matter . . . (1 March 1917).
The religious tone with which Lindsay wrote about ‘this’ made all the morepoignant his change of signature to May. In early letters from war, Lindsay signed off‘All my love for you always and “after” too . . . ’ but by mid-1916 all reference to anafterlife had been dropped and Lindsay most commonly ended his letters ‘All my loveto your own dear self’. His faith was increasingly placed in ‘this’ and he reminded Mayoften that ‘the most sacred of all things for me is your trust and care’ (12 December1916). Within his letters to May, Lindsay narrated longing, a sacred love and a futurein which they were together.
May was only nineteen years old when Lindsay enlisted, but his hopes for a futurewith her were based on such a strong commitment that he had given her an engagementring before leaving New Zealand. Their engagement was secret until November 1917when Lindsay secured permission from May’s father for their marriage.31 Lindsay’sways of addressing her in his letters also showed a familiarity not often seen insoldiers’ letters to women who were not already their wives.32 May and Lindsay hadan exclusive and shared language which, along with Lindsay’s frequent use of theterm ‘missus’, also provided reinforcement of their current and future relationship.Despite the strength of their intentions to be together, the couple were each surroundedby incontrovertible evidence that their future was at risk: as an officer at the frontLindsay saw every day the precariousness of life, while May was assailed by casualtylists and the bereavement of her father’s parishoners. Throughout the war however,Lindsay maintained an unfaltering narrative of togetherness that was almost divinelydetermined.
Lindsay achieved this narrative by weaving together past and future throughouthis letters. Shorter letters written from the front line almost never failed to mentioneither memories of May, or future plans, usually described as ‘when’ (again, alwaysin quotation marks). That May also envisioned a future together was evident fromLindsay’s comments on ‘[t]hose dream thinks of yours’ (26 March 1916). Duringleave or a stint in hospital Lindsay’s letters became fulsome and rich with descriptionof this past and future web. Lindsay daydreamed in his letters and over May’s letters: hemay have written letters elbow to elbow with other officers in the mess, but he read themonly in the ‘old valise’.33 While Lindsay relied enormously on narrating an idealisedfuture for himself and May, contemporary advice to romantic correspondents remainedsceptical of the sustaining power of imagination. The columnist of a 1917 New Zealandnewspaper made the distinction between courting or newly-married couples and thosewho had been married for longer, suggesting that ‘married people have something todraw on besides imagination. They have facts to write about, like gas bills and thechildren’s education’. Lovers were warned ‘that there is nothing on which to feed thelove vocabulary in a prolonged separation . . . Even the sweep of her eyelashes doesnot affect a man who has not seen them for twelve months’.34
The Great War nonetheless occurred in a window when ‘Enlightenment associa-tions between the imagination, immaturity and irrationality were eroded by intellectual,
social and cultural change’, but before the increasing suspicion of the influence of massculture on the fashioning of the self in the interwar period. 35 Soldiers imagined theirfutures vividly and in doing so dreamed of the men they wanted to be and the rela-tionships they wanted to inhabit. A letter written in hospital in Cairo in March 1916 isworth quoting at length to illustrate Lindsay’s narration of the imagined future:
My dearest, still on the string as you will have seen by the heading [the hospital address] . . . [but]there is one consolation – you will profit by it, missus dear, for it provides a chance of writing foryou that doesn’t often come my way . . . Now comes the question of what we’re going to talk aboutin this particular billy doo. I am very muchly tempted to start and tell you about all the thousand andone little things I’m simply aching to do with you. I said ‘aching’, pal dearest, and I mean it. Thereare so many pictures stored away of such very happy times, but I feel somehow as if these won’t bea patch on what’s going to happen when I get Home again to you. I can’t explain the feeling in somany words, darling; but somehow or other I feel as if I am better able to make things worth whilefor you than I ever was before. I want to work with you, I want to go to places with you, I wantto play with you, and I want there to be heaps of times, too, when there’s just you and me – veryclose. You know it as well as I do . . . I’d give anything for a together [sic] like that night in the bigbasket chair. But it’s just hopeless when I start to write about all these things (8 March 1916).
Such explicit narration of the future was essential for Lindsay. As an officer hewas socially isolated from the men with whom he spent most time, but when he waswriting he was together with May. ‘How would you like to go off to some sandhills andread Kipling’, he continued, ‘or wash dishes, or go shopping, or shooting, or boating,or gardening, or to listen to the RA Band – any mortal thing you like as long as it’stogether’? Despite such vivid letters, he knew the limits of imagination:
It’s all very warm and comfortable in the valise and I have so many unforgettable pictures storedup that the dream think is a very real one; but you see there isn’t really any soft curly hair to touchmy face, no dear old pal close with an arm around my neck and herself where I can hold her close. . . (8 March 1916).
While soldiers’ letters shared characteristics with nineteenth-century correspon-dence the most extraordinary departure from accepted epistolary norms was the readingof other men’s letters in the enforcement of censorship regulations. Lindsay’s role as anofficer meant he was responsible for censoring his men’s letters, even their love letters,and he, like other officers struck by the expressions of affection in men’s letters and‘their directness in expressing them’, commented on his men’s writings to May.36 Hiscomments reveal the desperate need for intimacy on the part of his men and the struc-tures and rituals they employed to overcome temporal, spatial and emotional distance.They did so in ways that Lindsay found bemusing, however. He described,
. . . one chap who writes pages and pages every week to ‘her’ describing in long reams of pencilevery little item of each day – everything he eats, everything he wears, every button he sews on –he must write with one hand and do things with the other, chick, I’m sure . . . and he ends up withrows of ‘barbed wire’ [crosses/kisses on the bottom of his letter]. It’s all genuine, and I presumethat the pair of them enjoy the writing and the reading of them considerably . . . Of course theywould be unbearable for anyone not interested in every little thing he did, but I s’pose that’s thepoint, n’est-ce pas? (16 February 1916).
Similarly, Lindsay noted that there was a ‘chap’ who wrote every week to hissweetheart,
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. . . almost identically the same every week . . . A little about the food, a little about the weather, aword or two about the last move from camp to camp, a remark or two about the neighbouring town,an assurance that ‘she’ needn’t be afraid of his being captivated by any of the ‘dusky beauties’ inthis sandy clime, and winding up with a wish to get back and a promise to make her happy whenhe comes (16 February 1916).
That Lindsay would describe these formulations of love letters indicates that hesaw his own letters to May as something different, certainly as more interesting, but hewas not unaware of the ironies of his judgements of other men’s letters, concluding,‘I’m afraid I can’t throw stones, can I dearest?’ (16 February 1916).
Lindsay’s letters both depict a range of emotional articulation that occurred inmen’s letters and demonstrate that the form of the letter governed expression to varyingextents. Lindsay was perhaps more able than others to describe his feelings for Maybut fell back often on recounting shared memories of their physical contact whichfed imaginings of their life together when he returned. Other soldiers’ expressionswere more prosaic but served their purpose to ‘bind the correspondents’.37 Form wasimportant and perpetuated late nineteenth-century characteristics, including epistolarypacts, wrestling with expressions of intimacy and love and a focus on the body in anattempt to overcome separation. In a situation where, as Lindsay indicated, one neededto have anchors for the self – ‘something . . . you know will be with you’ (1 May 1917)– the form of the letter could provide a link with the past, while the emotions expressedwere products of the extraordinary, tumultuous, terrible present.38 Under the stress ofwar men clung to aspects of their pasts and idealised peacetime lives and relationships.
These continuities should not be mistaken for conservative or static masculineidentities. The mobility associated with war, both geographical and social, exposeda wide range of men to each other’s characters, actions and, in the case of officers,letters. Lindsay’s views of other men, of all ranks and nationalities, demonstrate thatthe emotional and physical demands of war shaped and sharpened conceptions ofmasculinity. Lindsay wrote to May that the wide range of men he encountered taughthim quickly to be flexible in his attitudes. He continued, ‘as long as a man has grit,as long as he does nothing “double” or underhand, as long as he doesn’t try to coverthings by whining or excuses, one can make heaps of allowances’ (18 December1915). These seemingly conservative essential attributes of manliness were a contrastto Lindsay’s admission in the same letter that war made him too self-reflective, ‘pickingholes in himself’ as he put it, to criticise other men. The particular circumstances ofwar brought men together in an extraordinary way, sometimes under considerablestress, and in conditions that invited comparisons between individuals and groups.War forced the mobilisation and cohabitation of men from across class, religious andethnic spectrums opening the world to them in more than a geographical sense. Muchlater in the war, Lindsay again turned the focus on his inner character, writing to May,‘one thing I would not have missed this experience for is the knowledge of men andcharacter generally that has opened up for me’ (26 October 1917). In the very the actof self analysis Lindsay revealed dynamic and modernising masculinity.
Epistolary historian Mirielle Bossis has argued that letter writing is a processof ‘creating fictions of oneself for the other’ and the ‘fictions’ Lindsay created ofhimself were both well-established and modern.39 Lindsay was an ‘imperial man’in the sense John MacKenzie uses the term.40 He attended the solidly middle-class
Waitaki Boys’ High School (1907–1913) where he was head prefect, captain of theFirst XI cricket team and the First XV rugby union side.41 Geoffrey Sherrington hasargued that at the Antipodean public schools, it was ‘character, character and againcharacter’ that was emphasised and the extent to which ‘athletic games [were regardedas] . . . an aid to manliness that cannot be overestimated’.42 The 1906 volumes ofWaitaki Boys’ magazine, the Waitakian, confirm immediately these arguments. In theinaugural editorial it was announced that, ‘Next term we are to begin with two newmasters . . . both good scholars, good teachers, good athletes, and the right stampof men’.43 Lindsay’s life as a boarder involved morning exercises, ‘entertainments’in which humorous readings and recitation were combined with musical items andboxing matches, and camping parties which included rabbiting, eeling and fishing.These camping trips were considered a change in routine and ‘ruddy cheeks andhealthy appetites of campers bore eloquent witness to the health-imprinting qualitiesof the outings’.44 The Library Notes from the Waitakian also list the additions tothe boarders’ library for that term incuding a tranche of colonial adventure fiction.45
Authors added to the collection later in the year included H. Rider Haggard, RolfBoldrewood, Rudyard Kipling and Ethel Turner.46
Lindsay’s letters reveal him as a ‘successful’ product of this enviroment in that hedrew on the ‘colonial chivalric code’ and the imperial quest to fashion his identity.47
In addition to his forms of address to May – ‘Old Chap’, ‘Pal’, ‘Old Lady’ – his earlyletters from the war were heavily influenced by the imperial idiom of adventure writersas his first letter from El Dabaa on the Egypt-Lybia border illustrates:
Dear Old Lady,
The Senussi have started scrapping properly at last, though we haven’t had a dust-up at Dabaa yetwe are in easy reach of trouble. Yesterday there was a fight between a force of Yeomanry and theniggers which proved that the Senussi are pretty hot stuff and have been a great deal underestimated. . . the scrap was quite sufficient to show that they are well mounted, well armed and jolly goodshots (12 December 1915).
Lindsay’s letters from El Dabaa continued to include phrases from this adventureliterature: his men were ‘in fine form but of course simply spoiling for a more excitingexistence’; he was frustrated by the seeming lack of action in Europe, wishing that‘they’d . . . have a decent go with bayonets or axes or anything sudden and fix upthis blanky war satisfactorily – have a ding dong go and settle it up once and for all’(15 December 1915). Even after his mobilisation to the western front, Lindsay main-tained a cheerful, adventuring facade: ‘And now, dear, there’s not much more I can sayexcept that the weather’s glorious and the country beautiful in spite of the fact there’sa war on and most things are smashed’ (18 May 1916). By 1917, Lindsay’s letters hadbecome much less concerned with the war but still referred to the ‘dust-up’ and to hisdigs being located on ‘the main “boulevard” leading Fritzwards’. But 1917 is perhapsbest summed up by an opening to a June letter: ‘Dearest, the scrap I wrote from is stillon though so far we have enjoyed it considerably more than the Somme’.48
While Lindsay clung to particular formulations of imperial manhood in his lan-guage, his attitude to May and their relationship revealed a much more modern subjec-tivity at work. Historians have implied, if not directly argued, that imperial manhoodwas essentially conservative, that it was part of an attempt to ward off or resist theemergence of the New Woman and the emasculating effects of industrialisation and
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the decline of empire.49 Lindsay’s letters, however, reveal that he may have been lessinfluenced by the views of his school and more by views such as that of Robert Baden-Powell: that ‘girls must be partners and comrades, rather than dolls’.50 His relationshipwith May as expressed in his letters adds weight to recent arguments that the interwarperiod was a complex melding of modern and conservative views and indeed pullsback the periodisation of such melding.51 Lindsay regarded May very much as a fellowadventurer, indeed as his comrade, his ‘pal’. One of the reasons he wrote such long let-ters on the journey from Auckland to Egypt was his desire to share with her everythingthat he was seeing: ‘I am sure, sweetheart, that you would have loved seeing all thenew things . . . . I wish you had been there too – you would have enjoyed seeing all thenew things so much . . . . [and yet still later in that letter] The population was all kinds.Wisht you’d seen it’ (7 November 1915). He was so taken by Colombo in particular,and the journey in general, that he suggested in this letter, ‘I’ve been “cogitating” –result? Plans to come and see it all some day in quite a different way . . . you might beable to guess how if you thought very hard. Think so?’ Although the travelling of theearly months of the war slowed and Lindsay began to feel the monotony of the westernfront, there were still times when he included May in his adventure. Describing thehumour and camaraderie of the trenches he noted in 1916, ‘If you could actually seesome of the things that happen, you’d absolutely revel in them I know’ (28 May 1916).But in the later years of the war it was the times away from the frontline that madekeener his desire to have her with him: ‘I think I miss you more on leave than at anyother time. It feels so much like burning daylight to be without you in a place like this[London]. Quite different from being with the Company where I wouldn’t have youcome for all the world – much as I long for you . . . ’ (14 August 1918).
Mobility – both actual for Lindsay and imagined for May – made their relationshipmodern.52 Indeed, mobility was so central to Linsday’s articulation of their relationshipthat May did not inhabit a single, stable domestic space in Lindsay’s narratives evenwhen he wrote of their future in New Zealand. In one letter he jokingly warned Mayagainst marriage to him saying, ‘[p]erhaps when I come back you will find that youcan’t keep me glued to one little house for more than a few days at a time – I’ll beissuing marching orders every few days’ (30 April 1916). Mobility was integral toimperial adventuring and to war, and both were highly gendered. Lindsay’s journey,from the colonies to the European centre, was arguably the antithesis of imperialmanhood, facilitated as it was by improved transportation technologies and prolongedby industrial, modern warfare. Yet Lindsay’s aspirations, for example to revisit Asiawith May, relied on the increasing access of the middle class to travel and improvednetworks of transport and communications, both of which actualised the spaces ofand facilitated the spread of modernity. That Lindsay incorporated May into theseaspirations, rather than keeping her at home as the war had done, inducted her into amodern romance.
The other modern construction of May in Lindsay’s letters was as his sexualpartner. Very occasionally there is eroticism in Lindsay’s letters that did not diminishdespite his absence, perhaps attesting to the power of their letters to maintain theirintimacy, however imagined or constructed. In August 1918, after not seeing May foralmost three full years, he wrote to her, ‘And so your hair, dear, has grown down toyour waist. I shall take it down one of these days to look at it – will you object verystrenuously? How do you wear it at night now, chick? Do you tie it back with a ribbon?
What do you do? I want to know. Tell me please’ (18 August 1918). More commonwere references to intimate moments between them before the war as the descriptionsof the clearly memorable ‘basket chair’ attest. Lindsay also wrote to May of venerealdisease cases among his men and of prostitution in Egypt demonstrating his franknessaround sexual matters.53 It is possible to say with certainty unusual for an historian,that Lindsay and May had not had sexual intercourse before Lindsay left for the frontbecause May wrote about when ‘the thing’ might happen. She wrote to Lindsay aboutone of her walks to the bridge in Petone from where she could see both the sea and themountains:
And you’d felt another time the fascination of the free open places . . . and you said, too, that thethought had come unasked that such a place – away, camped by ourselves – would be ideal for thething to happen. It would, old chap. Do you know, dear, what we’ll probably find is that wheneverthings seem to make us – you and me – feel that it is time for it, it will happen – just as a sort ofnatural consequence . . . you and I are so close in everything, old lady, that I fancy that somehowit’ll ‘just happen’ (25 June 1916).
A formulation of their marriage as a sexual as well as a reproductive unit wasinherent in Lindsay’s writings. He wrote often about wanting to be alone with May.Perhaps this was the desire of all young couples in an era when courtship was stillrigorously supervised, but it is a strong expression for personal writings of this period.I would suggest it reflects the blurred edge between Victorian marriage which was,by and large, enmeshed in a web of wider family occasions, living arrangements andholidays, and ‘modern’ romance described by historians of the interwar period.54 It hasbeen well established that the geographical mobility the war imposed and encouraged,freed young people from the family constraints on and supervision of courtship.55
There were clearly wider romantic possibilities being imagined by young people inlove during, as well as after the war. One manifestation of Lindsay’s desire to bea couple alone was in his imaginings of the future: ‘Dream places, homecomings,holidays (we shall take them together – one long one to ourselves every year and somewith other people now and again), days, evenings, nights . . . ’ (1 March 1916). Healso wanted to be alone with her in their marriage. As Timothy Frank has pointed out,falling family size in the early twentieth century indicates that husbands and wiveswere discussing contraceptive decisions, but evidence of those discussions has beenelusive.56 When May wrote that a fellow parishoner Mrs Nisbet had announced that‘every girl ought to be a mother’, the question of whether or not they would havechildren became a subject for discussion in their letters. Lindsay replied, ‘Of course ifthey are married it is people’s duty to have children; but to marry for no other reasonexcept to have children would be hateful to me’ (30 April 1916). Two months later,May was still debating this question and Lindsay wrote:
Kiddies have a very big pull, haven’t they, old lady? But they’re not everything – not the only thingsare they? . . . No chick, I think if two people were capable of a great love at all – or if one ofthem was – and they did come together caring like you and I for instance, it would be bad for boththemselves and the kiddies [if they married only to have children]. Don’t you think so? (4 June1916).
And in 1917, almost a year later, again in response to the interfering Mrs Nisbet andher ilk, Lindsay reassured May, and, in effect, put an end to this line of discussion,
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‘I wonder if we bothered much about population before the old [troopship] “Tahiti”pulled out? Did we? If we didn’t, I rather suspect we won’t once more when our shippulls in. Don’t you? I think if I were you I’d just leave it to us! Shall us? Let’s (6 May1917).
Lindsay and May corresponded for the entire duration of the war until they werereunited and married in December 1919. They had two daughters and lived in Timaruon the South Island until the outbreak of the Second World War. After Lindsay served inCrete and North Africa, he and May lived in the British-occupied zone in Germany until1950. Their love letters were lodged in the Alexander Turnbull Library (Wellington)by May in 1970 as part of Lindsay’s papers after his death in 1966.
Love letters sent from theatres of the Great War were written under extraordinarycircumstance where mass literacy, mass separation, trauma and monotony coincided.As such, it is arguable that the experiences of war and the likelihood of death providedwhat Liz Stanley calls ‘a theatre for the construction and performance of self in whichthe distances of time, space and the absence of face-to-face contact enables rather thandisables communication’.57 Many soldiers came to believe, quite matter-of-factly, thatit was nothing other than luck or Providence that extended their lives each day. This isone explanation for Lindsay and May’s frankness: that with the threat of death ever-present, they abandoned restrictions and conventions that may have constrained themin face-to-face contact or in more formal letters. Denied the opportunities for physicalintimacy, their letters had to replace walking home in the dark after a dance and othermoments of unobserved togetherness. Lindsay’s letters to May are more than a recordof conversations usually inaudible to historians: they are conversations that might neverhave happened if their relationship did not have to be conducted by post. The sustainedseparation of these lovers necessitated the writing of manliness through descriptionsof responses to war, questioning of the self and imagining a future. Through all thesedevices Lindsay revealed himself to May as a man and potentially a husband.
This analysis of Lindsay’s letters extends the scope of histories of masculinity totake greater account of the effects of geographical proximity and mobility on war ex-perience and masculine identity. While Great War historians, even of dominion troops,have focused on the theatres of war, especially the western front, soldiers inhabited agreat many spaces. Some of those were imagined and created through narrating theiraspirations for a post-war future. The shape of that future points, in Lindsay’s case, to anemerging modernity. Lindsay’s letters reinforce general findings that soldiers’ letterscan reveal the ways gendered social codes were absorbed into ‘fictions’ of self, and thespecific constellation of Lindsay’s place of origin, education and war experience as anofficer produced articulate and dynamic expressions of his masculine identity as both‘imperial’ and modern. The writings of soldiers provide a vast archive for pursuingquestions of how modern subjectivities and identities emerged and competed in thisformative period. Men both clung vigorously to their pre-war masculine identities and,in the case of men such as Lindsay, realised new ways of understanding themselves,and others. His letters are also a particularly articulate example of how his inner worldwas shaped by his past relationship with May and his present one with her letters.Soldier-correspondents were conscious that their identities and subjectitivies formedin the years before the war were maleable – were shaped by travel, exposure to awider world and to violence and suffering of many kinds. Denied physical proximityand communication of affection, ambivalence and emotional anxiety through touch
and gesture, soldiers were forced to narrate themselves. By post they created intimacy,made their masculine presence and present felt and understood, and by imagining theirfutures forged modern manliness.
Notes1. The largest collection in Australia is housed in the Australian War Memorial Museum, Canberra; in
New Zealand, the Auckland War Memorial Museum and the Kippenberger Archive at the Waiouru ArmyMuseum together house more than the Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), the national manuscripts repos-itory in Wellington.
2. See Matt Houlbrook, ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”: Culture, Fiction and Selfhood in Edith Thompson’sLetters, 1921–22’, Past and Present 207 (2010), pp. 21–49, here p. 221; Liz Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium:On Theorising Letters and Correspondence’, Auto/Biography 12 (2004), pp. 201–35; David Gerber ‘Actsof Deceiving and Witholding in Immigrant Letters: Personal Identity and Self-Presentation in PersonalCorrespondence’, Journal of Social History 39 (2005), pp. 315–30, here p. 318.
3. Joanna Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History’, History Workshop Journal55 (2003), pp. 111–33, here p. 121.
4. John Tosh, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity and Gender History’ in Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann andJohn Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 2004), pp. 41–60, here p. 56; Michael Roper, ‘Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity andEmotion in Gender History’, History Workshop Journal 59 (2005), pp. 57–72, here p. 57. Two exceptionsto this are Martin Crotty, ‘Pointing the Way – Antipodean Responses to J. A. Mangan’s Athleticism andRelated Studies: Scotch College, Melbourne in the Inter-war Years’, International Journal of the Historyof Sport 20 (2003), pp. 64–81 and Barbara Brookes, ‘Shame and its Histories in the Twentieth Century’,Journal of New Zealand Studies 9 (2010), pp. 37–54.
5. Crotty, ‘Pointing the way’, p. 65; see also Tosh, ‘Hegemonic masculinity’. More recent studies in Australiaand New Zealand include Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870–1920 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001); Kate Murphy, ‘The “most dependable element ofany country’s manhood”: Masculinity and Rurality in the Great War and its Aftermath’, History Australia 5(2008), pp. 72.1–72.20; Timothy Frank, ‘About our Fathers’ Business: Fatherhood in New Zealand 1900–1940’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Auckland, 2004); Chris Brickell, Mates & Lovers: AHistory of Gay New Zealand (Auckland: Random House, 2008).
6. See for example Crotty, Making the Australian Male, which addresses 1914 onwards only briefly in theconclusion.
7. See Martyn Lyons, ‘French Soldiers and their Correspondence: Towards a History of Writing Practicesin the First World War’, French History 17 (2003), pp. 79–95; Martha Hanna, ‘A Republic of Let-ters: the Epistolary Tradition in France during World War I’, American Historical Review 108 (2003),pp. 1338–61; Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke:Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005); Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the FirstWorld War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
8. Meyer, Men of War, p. 9.9. Janet Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 9. See also pp. 262–77.10. On mud see Das, Touch and Intimacy especially chapter one; on soldiers as victims, see Samuel Hynes, The
Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (London: Pilmico, 1998); Elaine Showalter, The FemaleMalady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987). For a criticismof Showalter’s argument see Laurinda Stryker, ‘Mental Cases: British Shell-shock and the Politics ofInterpretation’, in Gail Braybon (ed.), Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of1914–18 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 154–71.
11. On mobility as a central tenet of modernity see The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group, TheModern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity and Globalization (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 2008); Liz Conor, ‘“Blackfella Missus Too Much Proud”: Techniques of Appearing, Feminin-ity, and Race in Australian Modernity’ in The Modern Girl, pp. 220–39; Liz Conor, The SpectacularModern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UniversityPress, 2004); Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, andModernity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Intimacy and Manliness in the Letters of a Great War Soldier to the Woman He Loved, 1915–1919353
12. Richard White, ‘Europe and the Six-bob-a-day Tourist: The Great War as a Grand Tour, or GettingCivilised’, Australian Studies 5 (1991), pp. 122–39; Lindsay refers to the New Zealanders as ‘Massey’stourists’, Lindsay Inglis to May Todd, 30 December 1915, MS-Papers-0421, ATL.
13. Bart Ziino, ‘A Kind of Round Trip: Australian Soldiers and the Tourist Analogy, 1914–1918’, War &Society 25 (2006), pp. 39–52, here p. 39. For criticism of White’s tourist analogy see James Wieland,‘There and Back with the Anzacs: More than Touring’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial 18 (1991),pp. 49–56.
14. Gender historians of white settler societies have long debated the permutations of gender roles in colonialand frontier societies: classic works that addressed this problem include: Raewyn Dalziel, ‘The ColonialHelpmeet: Women’s Role and the Vote in Nineteenth-century New Zealand’, New Zealand Journal ofHistory 11 (1977), pp. 112–23; Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male, AHistory (Auckland: Penguin, 1987); see also John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
15. Gerber, ‘Acts of Deceiving’, p. 318.16. Fifty days was the length of mail from the western front to Australia and New Zealand ships followed the
same routes. Roper, Secret Battle, p. 52.17. Christa Hammerle, ‘“You Let A Weeping Woman Call You Home?” Private Correspondences During
the First World War in Austria and Germany’, in Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters andLetter-writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 152–82.
18. Roper, Secret Battle, p. 63.19. Martyn Lyons, ‘Reading Practices, Writing Practices: Love Letters and Ecritures Intimes in Nineteenth-
Century France and Australia’, in David Garrioch, Harold Love et al., (eds), The Culture of the Book: Essaysfrom Two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop (Melbourne: Bibliographical Society of Australia andNew Zealand Occasional Publication no. 8, 1999), pp. 356–65, here p. 359. Thousands of New Zealandsoldiers married women in Britain: see Trooper John M. Jack who wrote to friend Louise Inkster that ‘Ido not know what the young ladies in NZ will think of the New Zealanders getting married over here [inBritain], there are more than 2000 married now and so many more being married’. John Jack to LouiseInkster, 18 December 1916, Louise Inkster Papers, MS-Papers-4466, ATL.
20. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: ReaktionBooks, 1996), pp. 21–2 cites figures of 11 million letters per week being carried by the British ArmyPostal Service by 1916; Michael Roper cites 8,150,000 letters per week and over 1 million parcels. MichaelRoper, ‘Maternal Relations: Moral Manliness and Emotional Survival in Letters Home During the FirstWorld War’, in Dudink et al. (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War, pp. 295–316, here p. 297.
21. Chris Pugsley calculated that 2,227 Maori and 458 Pacific Islanders enlisted in the Maori Pioneer Bat-talion, but the numbers of Maori who enlisted in other units of the 110,000 strong NZEF is not known.Chris Pugsley, Te Hokuwhitu a Tu: The Maori Pioneer Battalion in the First World War (Auckland: Reed,1995).
22. Kris Inwood, Les Oxbury, Evan Roberts, Heights and Weights Database Project – MORE DETAILREQUIRED – WHAT IS THIS?; Patrick Festy, ‘Canada, United States, Australia and New Zealand:Nuptuality Trends’, Population Studies 27 (1973), pp. 479–92, here p. 491. The mean age of enlistmentrose from 25.9 years in 1914 to 27.3 years in 1917 before falling slightly to 26.7 years in 1918.
23. Hsu Ming Teo, ‘Love Writes: Gender and Romantic Love in Australian Love Letters, 1860–1960’,Australian Feminist Studies 20 (2005), pp. 343–61, here p. 343.
24. Lindsay Inglis to May Todd, 12 February 1916.25. For example, Martha Hanna, ‘Your Death Would be Mine’: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War
(Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006).26. Lyons, ‘French Soldiers’; Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters’.27. Reference to the paper famine is in Lindsay’s letter of 16 November 1917.28. For prescriptions of the length of letters see, for example, the letters of Fred Cato and Frances Bethune in
Lyons, ‘Reading Practices, Writing Practices’, pp. 359–60.29. On epistolary time see Cecile Dauphin, ‘Letter-Writing Manuals in the Nineteenth Century’, in
Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau and Cecile Dauphin, Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from theMiddle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 136–42, herepp. 138–9.
30. On the difficulties of expressing loving feelings see Susan Foley ‘“Your Letter is Divine, Irresistible,Infernally Seductive”: Leon Gambetta, Leonie Leon, and Nineteenth-century Epistolary Culture’, FrenchHistorical Studies 30 (2007), pp. 237–67, here pp. 255–7. Quote from p. 247.
31. There is a carbon copy of a telegram in the collection that says simply: ‘Yes, wearing ring. May Todd’.
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354 Gender & History
32. Other examples, such as Thomas Dale’s letters to his fiancee Emma, are fond but more formal. Headdressed her as ‘My Dear Emma’ or ‘Emm’, and signed his letters ‘With very best love, Tom xxxxxxx’.This difference could have been a result of class and religious differences, and it must be noted that soldiers’letters to their fiancees are not common generally in collections. Thomas Dale, letters to future wife EmmaNewton, MS-Papers-8532, ATL.
33. In one letter Lindsay noted, ‘There is a long table in the tent that we’re using as a mess room absolutelychock full of officers with scratching pens and all jammed up against each other to try to get the benefit ofthe simple kerosene lamp . . . ’ (30 December 1915).
34. ‘Love Letters: the Mistake of Writing Too Many’, Wanganui Chronicle, 23 November 1917, p. 7.35. Houlbrook, ‘“A Pin to See the Peepshow”’, p. 224.36. Roper, Secret Battle, p. 174.37. Foley, ‘Your Letter is Divine’, p. 239.38. Roper, ‘Slipping Out of View’, p. 62.39. Mirielle Bosiss ‘Methodological Journeys Through Correspondence’, Yale French Studies 71 (1986),
pp. 63–75, cited in Foley, ‘“I Felt Such a Need to be Loved . . . in a Letter”: Reading the Correspondenceof Leonie Leon and Leon Gambetta’, French History and Civilization 1 (2005), pp. 254–64, here p. 256.
40. John MacKenzie, ‘The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter and the British Masculine Stereotype in late Vic-torian and Edwardian Times’, in J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin (eds), Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987),pp. 176–98.
41. Paul Goldstone, ‘Inglis, Lindsay Merritt’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, www.dnzb.govt.nz.42. Geoffrey Sherrington cited in J. A. Mangan, ‘Noble Specimens of Manhood: Schoolboy Literature and
the Creation of a Colonial Chivalric Code’, in Jeffrey Richards (ed.), Imperialism and Juvenile Literature(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 173–94, here p. 178; Crotty, ‘Pointing the way’,pp. 67–8.
43. Waitakian, 1906, p. 9. There had been one issue of the school magazine printed in 1886 but it began inearnest in 1906. The copies of the Waitakian held in the National Library of New Zealand are Lindsay’sdespite the fact that he did not start at the school until 1907.
44. Waitakian, First Term 1907, pp. 20, 44 and 1906, p. 32.45. Waitakian, First Term 1907, p. 28.46. Waitakian, September 1907, p. 19.47. Mangan, ‘Noble Specimens of Manhood’, pp. 177, 191.48. Inglis to Todd, 14 June 1917, 4 March 1917, 14 June 1917.49. See for example MacKenzie ‘The Imperial Pioneer’; Tina Loo, ‘Of Moose and Men: Hunting for Mas-
culinities in British Columbia, 1880–1939’, Western Historical Quarterly 32 (2001), pp. 297–319; Crotty,‘Pointing the way’.
50. Baden-Powell cited in Kirstine Alexander, ‘The Girl Guide Movement and Imperial Internationalismduring the 1920s and 1930s’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2 (2009), pp. 37–63, herep. 41.
51. See for example Tammy Proctor, On My Honour: Guides and Scouts in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia:American Philosophical Association, 2002), and Alexander, ‘The Girl Guide Movement’.
52. On mobility as a central tenet of modernity see The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group, TheModern Girl Around the World; Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman; Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune.
53. See for example Lindsay’s letter of 14 June 1917.54. Kathryn M Hunter, Father’s Right-Hand Man: Women on Australia’s Family Farms in the Age of
Federation, 1880s to the 1920s (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2004); Houlbrook, ‘“A Pinto See the Peepshow”’; Charlotte Greenhalgh, ‘Bush Cinderellas: Young New Zealanders and Romance atthe Movies, 1919–1939’, New Zealand Journal of History 44 (2010), pp. 1–21; Chris Brickell, ‘Sexuality,Morality and Society’, in Giselle Byrnes (ed.), The New Oxford History of New Zealand (Melbourne:Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 465–86, especially pp. 465–73.
55. During the war these freedoms were usually evinced by ‘moral panics’ played out in the press. Clare Cul-leton, Working Class Culture, Women and Britain, 1914–1921 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999);Susan Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France duringthe First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
56. Frank, ‘Our Father’s Business’, p. 43.57. Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium’, p. 208. She is referring here to letters from death-row prisoners in the 1990s.
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Marks a point in the proof where a comment needs to be highlighted.
How to use it
Click on the Add sticky note icon in the Annotations section.
Click at the point in the proof where the comment should be inserted.
Type the comment into the yellow box that appears.
USING e-ANNOTATION TOOLS FOR ELECTRONIC PROOF CORRECTION
For further information on how to annotate proofs, click on the Help menu to reveal a list of further options:
5. Attach File Tool – for inserting large amounts of text or replacement figures.
Inserts an icon linking to the attached file in the appropriate pace in the text.
How to use it
Click on the Attach File icon in the Annotations section.
Click on the proof to where you’d like the attached file to be linked.
Select the file to be attached from your computer or network.
Select the colour and type of icon that will appear in the proof. Click OK.
6. Add stamp Tool – for approving a proof if no corrections are required.
Inserts a selected stamp onto an appropriate place in the proof.
How to use it
Click on the Add stamp icon in the Annotations section.
Select the stamp you want to use. (The Approved stamp is usually available directly in the menu that appears).
Click on the proof where you’d like the stamp to appear. (Where a proof is to be approved as it is, this would normally be on the first page).
7. Drawing Markups Tools – for drawing shapes, lines and freeform annotations on proofs and commenting on these marks.
Allows shapes, lines and freeform annotations to be drawn on proofs and for comment to be made on these marks..
How to use it
Click on one of the shapes in the Drawing Markups section.
Click on the proof at the relevant point and draw the selected shape with the cursor.
To add a comment to the drawn shape, move the cursor over the shape until an arrowhead appears.
Double click on the shape and type any text in the red box that appears.
