Afterlives of war

Front matter

Michael Roper

OF WAR

A DESCENDANTS’ HISTORY

Epilogue

Appendix I: Afterlives interview profiles

Appendix II: Meeting in No Man’s Land interview schedule Select bibliography

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List of figures

All rights reserved and permission to use the figures must be obtained from the copyright holder.

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Camilla Jarvis and her family’s war heritage. Courtesy of Camilla Jarvis.

Granddad and his lemon tree, Surrey Hills, Melbourne, circa 1964. Author’s own.

Hanne’s cigar box with her grandfather’s honour medal. Courtesy of Hanne Kircher.

Winifred Spray’s photograph of her father John Hickson who died in 1916. Courtesy of Marian Parry-Jones and Peter Blakebrough.

British Guardsman on home leave. www.pinterest .co.uk/pin/416512665539382288/. Accessed 8 September 2022.

‘Goodbye Daddy! God Bless!’, Bamforth & Co. postcard. Courtesy of the Army Children Archive. Harriet Pollock and her daughters. Author’s own. Mary Burdett’s father George, a Royal Army Service Corps motor engineer, on a Clyno motorcycle. Courtesy of Mary Burdett.

Marie-Anne Careless wears the ring that her father smuggled out of Frontstalag 220. Courtesy of Marie-Anne Careless.

Hilary and Dieter meet in no man’s land. Courtesy of Age Exchange and Dieter Filsinger.

Jürgen had recently found this photograph of his grandfather in 1892. Courtesy of Age Exchange and Jürgen Miiller-Hohagen.

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List of figures

Postcard of Delia’s grandfather in 1933 dressed as a centurion. Courtesy of Age Exchange.

‘Three cheers for the fennel flower!’ Postcard sent home by Christel’s grandfather. Courtesy of Age Exchange and Christel Berger.

Savile Lumley recruitment poster, ‘Daddy, what

did you do in the Great War?’ (London: Johnson, Riddle and Co. Ltd., 1915). Imperial War Museum Art (hereafter IWM), PST 0311.

Richard Reiss, The Home I Want, 1918. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library.

Francis Long playing with his children at the beach. Courtesy of Margaret Seabrook.

Margaret Seabrook and her brother playing in the garden. Courtesy of Margaret Seabrook.

Page from Margaret Seabrook’s photo album, ‘Happy Daddy!!’ Courtesy of Margaret Seabrook. A girl leading a blind Australian soldier from

St Dunstan’s Hostel. Model by Clare Sheridan, 1918. IWM Museum Exhibits Collection, Q 66143. Louis Raemaker’s sketch of a blind soldier and his guide. Courtesy of Blind Veterans UK.

. St Dunstan’s postcard ‘Blinded for You’, 1916.

Courtesy of Blind Veterans UK.

“You’ve Not Said How I’ve Growed, Daddy’, Thomas Henry, circa 1916. Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library.

Granddad with the Roper grandchildren at Surrey Hills, circa 1964. Author’s own.

Reconstituted family in the backyard at Montmorency, circa 1977. Author’s own.

Granddad on horseback in the Anzac march, circa 1977. Author’s own.

Robert Henry Roper studio portrait held by the Roper and Toohey families. Author’s own.

David Barker, ‘APRICOT AGAIN!’ Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

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List of figures

Otho Hewett, ‘Each One Doing His Bit’. Courtesy of C. E. W. Bean (ed.), The Anzac Book. Written and Illustrated in Gallipoli by the Men of Anzac (London: Cassell & Co, 1916).

C. E. W. Bean, “Turkish Divisional Orders’. Courtesy of C. E. W. Bean (ed.), The Anzac Book. Written and Illustrated in Gallipoli by the Men of Anzac (London: Cassell & Co, 1916).

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Preface and acknowledgements

The First World War was a global cataclysm and, like all traumatic events, its effects were long-lasting. The impact was not restricted to the generation that took part but was felt by their children and their children’s children too. The traces left by the war could take many forms, in objects such as letters, trench art and foreign exotica stored in family lofts and garages, posted on digital genealogy platforms or put up for sale on eBay. But the conflict also left more intimate and inchoate traces — stories and silences, behaviour and emotions — that were transmitted through the generations. Afterlives explores the legacies of the First World War in families in Australia, Britain and Germany. It is about the shadow that the First World War cast over the descendants, how it shaped their identities and how they draw on its history to make sense of their ancestors and themselves.

The book combines military and genealogical records, interviews, personal memory and ‘co-research’ with descendants carried out over a decade. It is at once historical and personal, a reflection on the past and the present. The research was conceived in 2011 as an oral history of British descendants. At the same time, my father and I were researching my grandfather Robert Henry Roper’s war service in Gallipoli and the Middle East and the legacies of his war in our family. The 2014-18 Centenary commemorations in Australia, the UK and Germany gave new prominence to descendants. I watched these developments as an observer as much as a historian, taken aback by the surge of public interest in the First World War, much of which — in Australia and the UK — was state-sponsored. What had started off as an academic study and a family project, I now realised, was part of a cultural phenomenon, and the Centenary also became part of the story. I debated the structure of

Preface and acknowledgements xiii the book over many months with friends, colleagues, readers of the manuscript and my editor, and eventually decided on a form that reflects the roles I adopted after 2011. I was at various points a researcher interested in the memories of those who came after and an observer during four years of remembrance. But I was also a historian of descendants, and I was myself a descendant. Afterlives reveals the legacies of the First World War through methodological meditations on what it means to come after, commemoration-watching, social history and memoir.

It has been a privilege to hear, record and bring to a new audience the testimonies of the ninety descendants who feature in Afterlives. I would also like to thank the friends, children, grandchildren and carers who acted as gatekeepers for the interviewees. The initial call for participants in 2011 was made possible by Fran Adams, who was then publicity officer at the University of Essex and got it circulated in local newspapers across the UK. Rachel Duffett has worked on the project throughout, providing suggestions about research, reading drafts, planning and hosting events at the First World War Engagement centre at the University of Essex between 2014 and 2018 and producing her own insightful articles on children’s culture and legacies of the First World War. Chapter 4, ‘Meeting in No Man’s Land’ was co-written with Rachel. I admire her energy, creativity and ability to organise, and I am lucky to have had the opportunity to work with her. Elijah Bell marshalled into files the chaos of emails, letters and phone calls that arrived after the 2011 call for participants. James Wallis did a fantastic job researching the family backgrounds of the interviewees. Marion Haberhaugh transcribed the interviews, and Bethany Morgan undertook the herculean task of coding them all in Nvivo, suggesting, too, useful avenues to pursue. Many thanks to them all.

I met David Savill, Creative Director of Age Exchange, in early 2015 at a film screening of their London project Children of the Great War. His enthusiasm and ability to make things happen are extraordinary. Through David, it became possible to extend the project into a study of descendants making history. We invited Age Exchange to a collection day at the University of Essex in the summer of 2015 and in early 2016 we joined their project Meeting in No Man’s Land, which brought together German and British descendants in Bavaria in April 2016. I would like to thank David’s xiv Preface and acknowledgements co-organisers, among them Debbie Clark, Suzanne Lockett, Jürgen Müller-Hohagen, Hanne Kircher, Elfriede Pauli, Hedvig Petzet, Simon Purins, Ivan Riches, Melanie Sommer, Karin Wimmer-Billeter and Margarita Wolf. I am grateful to the participants in the Essex collection day and Meeting in No Man’s Land for allowing Rachel Duffett and me to observe, interview and use their interviews in our research. Sarah Lloyd led the Hertfordshire Everyday Lives in the War First World War Engagement Centre from 2014 to 2018 and provided fantastic support for the Essex branch of our centre. Barbara Peirson, who was Director of the Lakeside Theatre, set in train a verbatim testimony production based on my interviews. Voices of the Great War was written by Annecy Lax, directed by Robert Price and performed by final-year drama students at Essex in June 2016.

The initial interviews were funded by a British Academy Small Grant in 2013, and the collaboration with Age Exchange during 2015-16 was made possible through Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Heritage Lottery funding. I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Research Fellowship in 2017-18 (RF-2016-284), which allowed me the freedom to reimagine the project. All three grant proposals were improved immeasurably by Gary Williams at the Research and Enterprise office at Essex. A Fellowship at Newcastle University in NSW during 2017 permitted time for research and I would like to thank Philip Dwyer for facilitating this. I also gained much from discussions with graduate students over the past decade who were also working on war, biography and generation, among them Allan Hildon, Catherine Hickman, Christos Peristianis, Alice Sage and Terry Smyth.

I am grateful to Robert Baker, the Information and Archives officer at Blind Veterans UK, the archivist Gary Haines at the VXA Museum of Childhood, Jane Brown at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, David Flegg at the State Library of Victoria and staff at the Imperial War Museum for help in locating archival materials. I had fascinating discussions on the gut and war with the gastroenterologist Martin Veysey, Dr Richard McClelland and Janet McCalman who is leading the ‘From Diggers to Veterans’ project at Melbourne, whose expertise was much appreciated. Bruce Scates, Rebecca Wheatley and Laura James helped me gain access to my grandfather’s pension files in 2016 and were warm hosts and sources of helpful advice during my

Preface and acknowledgements XV

Centenary visits to Melbourne. The Channel Island historians Gilly Carr and Louise Willmot provided clarification of events on the island during the Second World War. Bruce Scates and Raelene Frances organised the tour of Gallipoli in 2015 which brought together First World War historians from around the globe, and I would like to thank them for their hospitality. Janet Butler discovered a copy of my grandfather’s memoir in the Liddle Collection in Leeds and kindly got in touch to let me know. I have benefited greatly from discussions with Jill Barnard, Johnny Bell, John Murphy, Kate Murphy and Alistair Thomson, colleagues on the Australian Research Council History of Australian Fatherhood project who read and commented on drafts. I would like to thank Penny Summerfield for providing access to her interview transcripts. Many thanks also to my stepmother Robyn Roper for contributing her knowledge of the Roper family history, and for access to my father’s papers.

Draft chapters (in some cases, multiple drafts of the entire manuscript) were read by Shaul Bar-Haim, Graham Dawson, Rachel Duffett, Richard Hall, Sean Nixon, Paul Thompson, John Tosh, James Wallis and Bart Ziino. Their comments and conversations helped to develop and deepen my thinking, and I am fortunate to count many of them as friends as well as colleagues. I gained much from conversations with David Bell, Marion De Landmeter, Peter Doyle, Matt Ffytche, Karl Figlio and Ross Wilson. Tracey Loughran and I co-organised The Historian’s T’ conference at Essex in 2019 with help from the AHRC and I would like to thank Tracey and the participants for their reflections on subjectivity in historical work. Coffee with Jonathan Lichtenstein — who at that time was writing his descendant memoir The Berlin Shadow — was always a pleasure. Anne McElroy, Alice Roper and Thomas Roper lived with the book for more than a decade. Their scepticism about my ability to finish it became a family joke, but in truth, it could not have been completed without them, not least because of their insightful comments on drafts in recent months.

Lastly, I would like to thank Cath Roper and Lyndal Roper, whose own experience of the First World War’s legacies in our family and thoughts about subjectivity, mental health, family transmission and social history inform the entire study. Since our parents’ deaths, we have had to find new ways to communicate with each other across barriers of time difference, geography and a global xvi Preface and acknowledgements pandemic. Afterlives is the result of one such communication and I look forward to others.

Permissions

An earlier version of Chapter 4 was published as M. Roper and R. Duffett, ‘Family Legacies in the Centenary: Motives for First World War Commemoration among British and German Descendants’, History and Memory, 30: 1 (Spring/Summer 2018), 76-115. An earlier version of Chapter 7 was published in the Proceedings of the British Academy, ‘Little Ruby’s Hand: Young Women and the Emotional Experience of Caregiving in Britain after the First World War’, in L. Noakes, C. Langhamer and C. Siebrecht (eds), Total War: An Emotional History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 59-77.

Introduction

The last German veteran of the First World War, Erich Kästner, died in 2008, the last Australian veteran, John Campbell Ross, in June 2009 and the last British veteran, Harry Patch, a month later. All that remains of the contemporary witnesses are the ghosts that endure in grainy snatches of black and white film, audio recordings and the ephemera held by families and archives. Today, children and grandchildren are the final remaining links to the living memory of the conflict.

I began conducting oral history interviews with British descendants in 2011, the very moment when the contemporary witnesses died out. The war had sometimes affected their children and grandchildren profoundly, but they did not necessarily consider that they had a legacy of their own. As she described her mother cleaning and bandaging the hole in her father’s face — a wound caused by infected shrapnel that eventually killed him —- Marion Armstrong suddenly paused and exclaimed: ‘It’s my mother’s life that’s interesting!’ She went on to tell me that she had trouble getting to sleep as a small child because her father ‘was on morphia, and he was moaning in the next bedroom - as I say, a little cottage’. Her infant insomnia felt as nothing compared to her parents’ distress.

When the reminiscence arts organisation Age Exchange organised a collection day for First World War descendants at the University of Essex in July 2015, Camilla Jarvis arrived with a suitcase full of objects which she laid out on two tables. Her grandfather Philip, a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), had died in a mid-air crash in 1919, and his daughter Léonie was born a month later. On one table was the memorial book put together by her great-grandmother, with photographs of her grandfather playing in a sailor suit, his school reports and photographs of him as a dashing young recruit dressed in the uniforms of the Army Services Corps and RFC. Camilla had a lock of Philip’s hair that may have been taken from the corpse: his hair was the ‘very same colour’ as her own, Camilla observed. On the second table was the baby book kept by Philip’s widow Eileen, documenting Léonie’s life ‘from the day of her birth to the day of her marriage’. Day one recorded a child ‘perfect in limbs and health’ who in the hours after her birth ‘began to resemble her father’. The book recorded Léonie’s christening, first Christmas, nicknames, toys and poems, sketches and hand-tinted photographs. Camilla was wearing the sapphire engagement ring that Philip gave her grandmother, and at home she had the dressing table set that had been his engagement gift. All these items had been passed to her by her mother, a private treasure trove that documented the life of the First World War serviceman, kept by three generations of women.

Scars and missing limbs were a common sight for children growing up in the 1920s and 30s, but as Camilla’s suitcase of objects shows, the war past was also present in collections of letters and postcards and photographs, souvenirs and medals. Its legacies could sometimes be benign or even positive. Rosemary Gitsham’s father had served in Gallipoli and the Somme and had a hole in his elbow that was ‘large enough to put an egg in’ but he showed no other signs of trauma.! Love of travel and technology were the main legacies of his war. There were framed photographs of the Egyptian desert and pyramids on the walls at home, and in the loft were old maps, flight logbooks and drawings of aeroplane engines. Inspired by his war service as a mechanic, he joined the RAF in the mid- 1920s and was ‘mad about flying’. Rosemary inherited his passion: she had spent her entire career working for an aviation firm and had flown, she told me proudly, ‘in everything except a helicopter, and a microlight”

The subjects of this book are the generations in Britain, Germany and Australia born after the First World War who lived in its shadow.” Growing up with a war in the family, some of them went on to become history-makers, researching their ancestors’ war pasts, signing up for heritage events and interviews and seeking out the connections between their family’s story and the public history of the conflict. In Britain, their pasts and their stories had largely escaped historical attention prior to the Centenary, even though in 2013 almost half

Figure 0.1 Camilla Jarvis and her family’s war heritage. Courtesy of Camilla Jarvis. All rights reserved.

the population claimed to know a relative or community member who had been involved in the war in a combatant or auxiliary role.’ Professional historians typically treated the war in the family in a last chapter or epilogue — as my own book The Secret Battle did — or merged it into a grand narrative of aftermath which assumed rather than investigated the personal impact on successors. ‘After’ was sometimes delimited as 1919, before most of the descendants still alive in 2013 were born.* As the Centenary dawned and professional historians reflected on popular beliefs about the First World War in Britain, some took aim at amateur family historians for uncritically repeating the ‘pity of war’ narratives of senseless slaughter on the Western Front that they learned from the war poets and Blackadder Goes Forth. British history of the First World War, remarked David Reynolds in 2013, had become ‘stuck in the mud and stalled on the Somme’, and descendants, it seemed, were partly to blame.’ Afterlives brings the histories of descendants like Marion, Camilla and Rosemary to the fore. It documents the varieties of war heritage in their homes as children, reconstructs their relationships with the

‘contemporary witnesses’ and ruminates on how the war past in the family shaped them.° It reveals their efforts to piece together the war histories of parents and grandparents, and how they interact with different national traditions of remembrance. Finally, it seeks to understand the personal motivations that draw descendants into research on the First World War, how they ‘use’ history and what history means to them as a social and emotional pursuit.

Most descendants grow up with a ‘lived history’ of the war in the family before they possess a ‘learned history’.’ When I began interviewing British descendants, I was initially taken aback by how little they knew about what their mothers and fathers did during the war. Some turned to fiction to fill in the gaps. Rosemary Game’s father was a tunneller who died of war-related rheumatism in his forties, she told me in 2013. Yet it was only after reading Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong in the 1990s that she began to appreciate what he must have gone through. As a Mass Observation directive in 2014 showed, other descendants had also formed their impressions of the First World War by reading Birdsong.® Shuttling between the war and the efforts of a granddaughter in 1978 to reconstruct the life of the grandfather she never knew, Birdsong spoke to their own experience of coming after.

At the same time, perhaps because some descendants grow up with an afterlife in the family that does not fit the popular imagination of the First World War, they develop a critical understanding of received narratives. June Teape, my first interviewee, had donated a substantial archive of her father Walter Hempshall’s artefacts to the Imperial War Museum. There are photos of Walter in the familiar ruined landscapes of France and Belgium, but there are also images of him standing outside a hospital tent in Kenya with a pet monkey, pictures of Kikuyu and Masai warriors and of Walter posing with East African soldiers. Speaking to me in 2011, June thought historians should talk more about the global dimensions of the First World War. Brian Keys brought another theatre of the conflict into view in 2015. His paternal grandfather had served in Murmansk in 1918 supporting the White Russian Forces in their campaign against the Bolsheviks. Illness and disease were the main killers. Brian marvelled at his grandfather’s stoicism, poorly fed, snow blowing into their huts, the chilblains on his feet a permanent legacy of the campaign. Brian was irritated that the Western Front dominated public discussion of the First World War and that the Russian campaign, ‘another Churchill embarrassment’, was largely forgotten.

The history-making of descendants like Brian and June goes back a long way and in Britain they have played a central role in the history and popular memory of the First World War. Ted Hughes’s poetry evoked his father’s war in Gallipoli and France and the Calder Valley communities of his childhood which mourned their losses, and his commentaries on Wilfred Owen during the 1960s helped bring the war poets to prominence.’ In his popular 1960s BBC radio programme The Long Long Trail, presenter Charles Chilton mixed facts about the war with songs and excerpts from interviews with veterans. It was Chilton’s format and ironic tone that Joan Littlewood subsequently adopted in her production of Oh, What a Lovely War! Chilton’s stance on the war was informed by a personal history: born in 1917, his father was killed in the conflict and his mother died when he was five from an abortion that went wrong." The Long Long Trail was inspired by the discovery of his father’s name on a memorial at Arras dedicated to his memory.

In recent times it is the third generation that has kept the First World War within the mainstream of national culture. Pat Barker’s 1990s Regeneration trilogy, with its themes of masculinity, homosexuality and trauma, was at one level a commentary on the contemporary age, the historical setting serving as a ‘backdoor onto the present’.'' Yet it was the product of an earlier time, too. As Barker told The Guardian in 2012:

My grandfather had a horrific wound in his left side. I used to see it every Friday night when he got stripped off for a wash at the kitchen sink before setting off for his weekly night out at the British Legion. It was a bayonet wound, but he never talked about the war. So there was a wound, and there was silence. But that kind of silence becomes compelling. It’s a space which invites imaginative exploration.”

Barker describes a motivation common among descendants, who are drawn to imagine — perhaps through literature, perhaps through history — the backstory of the marks of violence. The sense of recognition felt by readers like me was not just because the Regeneration trilogy resonated with the psychological sensibilities and victim culture of the fin de siècle, but because it spoke to personal histories of war and their aftermaths.'°

Two of the cinematic ‘blockbusters’ of the First World War Centenary were produced by grandsons. In Peter Jackson’s interview about They Shall Never Grow Old — a masterpiece of haunting which transforms black-and-white footage of the Western Front into full colour and gives voice to its silent soldiers — he explained that ‘it’s a war I grew up with in my household’. Jackson’s grandfather died in 1940 from multiple wounds and Jackson never knew him: a family loss had brought the First World War into his home, while They Shall Never Grow Old employed lip readers, oral testimony, colouring techniques and 3D to bring the soldier on the Western Front back to life. Growing up, his grandfather’s compulsion to wash his hands made Sam Mendes curious about his war. After five decades of silence and then in his seventies, his grandfather began to talk about the mud on the Western Front and how they could not keep themselves clean. Mendes’s film 1917 stitches together the episodic horrors of trench warfare into ‘one long shot’, as if the family war stories, in the way Mendes experienced them growing up, were a singular cataclysm.'*

Descendants were thus prominent among the filmmakers, broadcasters, theatre directors, novelists and poets who put the First World War on the cultural map in mid-twentieth-century Britain and Australia. They were, and are, people who grew up with the memory of war and, as adults, sought to render it in poetry, novels, radio and theatre.'° Through research and imagination, they could reconstruct scenes their fathers and mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers had witnessed.

Many of the historians who became First World War specialists in the twentieth century also had a family link to the conflict. Martin Middlebrook, whose 1971 book The First Day of the Somme described the ‘blackest day in the history of the British army’,!° was profoundly affected by his mother’s stories of a sister trapped in Belgium, a brother hit in the stomach and killed at Ypres in October 1915 and another who died from chronic bronchitis after being gassed and made a prisoner of war.” Denis Winter’s unsparing account of trench warfare Death’s Men draws on the testimony of his uncle Joe and father Harry.'* Patsy Adam-Smith was among the first wave of historians in Australia to interview veterans, and the introduction of her 1978 bestseller The Anzacs is a poignant statement of what it means to come after: ‘You were too close, nearness blinded, deafened, stupefied you with its immensity’, she comments, a feeling which in later life prompted a wish ‘to answer my own perplexities’ and gather the testimonies of other First World War returned soldiers.’ A family history of war can encourage the historical turn and be a source of creative insight. The second edition of Alastair Thomson’s Anzac Memories, published nineteen years after the first in 1994, includes an essay about his grandfather Hector who suffered from bouts of mental illness after the war. Joan Beaumont, a staunch critic of the commemorative excess surrounding the Anzac legend and the role of descendants in perpetuating it, nonetheless begins her The Broken Years with an arresting description of how the war affected her uncle; in effect, intimating the power of an intergenerational transmission about whose effects on historical understanding she is at the same time sceptical.”°

During the past half century, the cultural circuits in Britain and Australia that link families and the public memory of the First World War have grown and become increasingly sophisticated. Descendants can now subscribe to powerful online research tools like Ancestry.com, peruse digitised official records, and access resources from institutions like the Australian War Memorial and the Imperial War Museum. Yet, as I have come to understand since starting the book, the national absorption in First World War history in Britain and Australia and the active involvement of descendants in contributing to it cannot simply be explained as a generational transfer in which the descendants get their ancestors’ war story on the record as the contemporary witnesses pass away. The efforts of descendants are underwritten by the state and a media that thrives on hidden histories of war. When in 2011 I put out an appeal in local newspapers across Britain asking people born in the 1920s and 30s to get in touch, I was deluged by letters, emails and phone messages. The respondents were not just animated by the sense that their family story might otherwise be lost, but by the belief that it deserved to be heard and would reach a sympathetic public.

The Anglo-Australian historical culture is strikingly different from Germany’s, as I discovered in 2016 when Rachel Duffett and I took part in the Age Exchange project Meeting in No Man’s Land, which brought together British and German descendants to share family heritage and stories of the conflict. Prior to the planning meeting in January, Creative Director David Savill asked us to bring along an object that represented the war in our family. I brought a photograph of my grandfather underneath the lemon tree in the backyard of his suburban Melbourne home and a cassette of the interview I had done with him in 1980, both artefacts already in the public domain and part of my family heritage.

But among the German organisers, the ephemera of the First World War, if it existed, was not claimed as family heritage, and had not been shared publicly. Hanne Kirschner, one of the organisers from Munich, brought along a cigar box which she and her cousin had retrieved from the outbuilding of the family joinery works just days previously. The box contained the Honour Medal that belonged to her grandfather, issued in 1934 as part of Hitler’s effort to rehabilitate the veteran, and decreed by the National Socialists to be the only legitimate award of military service. Her grandfather had been a soldier in Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (‘Storm Detachment’), and Hanne was ‘ashamed’ of him. The medal had lain in the cigar box since his death in 1951, an object that — like her grandfather’s part in the Nazi regime — was in the family but not spoken about. The British descendant Camilla Jarvis, by contrast, had paid for her grandfather Philip’s Military Cross to be mounted in a special silver frame and kept it on display at home.