Mee and My Heroes
Malcolm Brown describes how his work in the Imperial War Museum shows the experience of Great War soldiers transcends and challenges standard attitudes towards the conflict.
In the 1930s my parents bought a Book of Heroes, by the once hugely popular writer for children, now almost forgotten, Arthur Mee. I treasure it still.
It featured the standard celebrities: Socrates, Francis Drake, Abraham Lincoln; female ones too, Joan of Arc, Grace Darling. But what interested me far more was a section on the Great War, then not twenty years over. Included in it was a striking full-page drawing entitled 'The Man Who Won the War'. And who was this gallant hero? Field Marshal Haig? Marshal Foch? Prime Minister Lloyd George? No: it was the ordinary soldier: the run-of-the-mill 'Tommy', the man who bore the burden of the trenches for a shilling a day.
One reason why it so impressed my child's mind was that my father had worn khaki from 1915 to 1919 and had served as a private soldier in France, though as a member of the Medical Corps rather than as the fighting infantryman depicted in Arthur Mee's drawing.
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