Tales from the Front (36) tells the story of Frank Wilcox, a native of Victorian Bournemouth, who fought in the Great War. Private Wilcox had served with the local militia before joining the First Battalion, Dorsetshire Regiment. He came to France in autumn 1914, fighting at Hill 60 the next year, where he went missing, another plausible victim of poison gas on the evening of May 1st, 1915.
Tales from the Front (35) tells the story of Frederick George Jeans, a native of Victorian Bournemouth, who fought in the Great War. Private Jeans, a former gardener, enlisted with the First Battalion, Dorset Regiment. He fell at Hill 60, near Ypres, in the evening of May 1st, 1915, a victim of poison gas, a new type of killing agent.
Tales from the Front (32) tells the story of Alfred Charles Holley, a native of Victorian Bournemouth, who fought in the Great War. Private Holley had already served with the First Battalion, Dorset Regiment, but returned to civil life. By April 1915, however, the war had summoned him back to the ranks. He reenlisted and served in Belgium, to fall at Hill 60, a small mound of huge strategic importance to both sides.
Tales from the Front (31) tells the story of William Lanham, a native of Victorian Bournemouth, who fought in World War I. A former labourer, Private Lanham, a member of the First Battalion, Dorsetshire Regiment, fell during the savage fighting at Hill 60.
Tales from the Front (24) traces the intertwined fates of Erasmus and William Trickett, two young labourers whose lives ended at Ypres in 1915. Their reconstructed story reveals how inherited customs, closed networks, and local identity struggled against the pressures of modernity, migration, and industrial conflict. Thus, through genealogy, social history, and battlefield detail, the narrative shows how war accelerated change and reshaped families whose futures once seemed secure.