Abstract
In the early months of 1916, Charles Robb a retired shipping clerk in the East End of London, England, wrote a series of letters to his 19-year-old son Arthur, an army private awaiting embarkation to the Western Front. Charles Robb was my great grandfather and Arthur Robb was my grandfather. The letters offer an intriguing glimpse of one man ‘doing’ fatherhood under conditions of traumatic separation and extreme anxiety. This paper presents an analysis of the letters from a psychosocial perspective, exploring the ways in which the writer exhorts his son to live up to the ideals of Christian manhood, while managing the anxiety of separation by presenting a reconstruction in language of the familiar world of home and church.
Highlights
On a Sunday evening in February 1916, a 65-year-old shipping office clerk from East Ham, a suburb on the eastern outskirts of London, England, sat down to write a letter to his 19-year-old son, a private in the Royal Fusiliers, who was stationed at Aldershot, Hampshire, awaiting transfer to the WesternFront in France
Born in Soho, London in 1851, the son of a law stationer’s clerk and a mother who would die within weeks of his birth, my great grandfather Charles Edward Robb spent most of his childhood in Stepney in the East of London
‘courting’ Polly Webb, the daughter of a Stepney bootmaker, whom he would eventually marry. Legend would have it that when war broke out, my grandfather joined up as soon as he was able, perhaps even falsifying his age to ensure that he was eligible for active service in the Labour Corps of the Royal Fusiliers
Summary
On a Sunday evening in February 1916, a 65-year-old shipping office clerk from East Ham, a suburb on the eastern outskirts of London, England, sat down to write a letter to his 19-year-old son, a private in the Royal Fusiliers, who was stationed at Aldershot, Hampshire, awaiting transfer to the Western. There has been a lack of academic attention paid to the study of fatherhood in the First World War by comparison with the impact of the Second World War on fathering practices (see for example, LaRossa 2011) Besides his gender, there were other reasons why my great grandfather’s letters caught my interest as a researcher on fatherhood and masculinities. Methodist Christian faith: it seemed difficult to separate or disentangle his faith from his fathering These letters offered a case study of a man ‘doing’ both fatherhood and religious faith, while these two aspects of his identity appeared interwoven in intriguing ways. This article will reflect on the more general questions raised by these letters and the experience of analysing them These include questions about the validity or legitimacy of using material from one’s personal family history as the material or basis for academic research. What kinds of methodological questions does this bring to the surface, and how should the researcher approach the use of ‘found’
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