First newspaper colour magazines

[linden]

I first became interested in the Great War when a Sunday colour supplement was brought into class . This was in 1963 or '64 and it must have been one of the early colour supplements .

There were a series of colour photographs taken in the grounds of a chateau . Everything was as it had been left in 1918 , with trees growing through helmets .

Does anyone else remember this feature ? Do you know where it was ?

Regards,

Linden

[charlesmessenger]

Linden

Your question sent me hurrying into my archive and I think that I have got what you have remembered. It certainly came from one of the Sunday colour supplements and it was 1964, when there was a mass of stuff published in the press to mark the 50th anniversary of the outbreak, and was probably the Daily Telegraph. Unfortunately I have kept merely the individual pages and not the whole supplement. They are a series of colour photographs taken in 1964 showing such items as one of the bayonets in the Trench of Bayonets at Verdun, a rusting Lewis Gun on Hill 60, helemts, etc in a wood near Albert. There were also articles by such as Barrie Pitt and Henry Williamson. If you PM me your e-mail address I will try to scan one or two pages and send them to you.

Charles M

[wainfleet]

Hi Linden

I remember this; it was in the Weekend Telegraph, as the Sunday magazine was then called. It had the same effect on me to that which you describe. There was a helmet halfway up a sapling grown through it, and also I think a pair of mildewed boots. The wood was privately owned. I wish we'd kept the magazine as I'd love to look through it again and read the articles Charles describes - I was too young to appreciate them but would have done so now.

Some years later I was similarly fascinated by the opening sequence of Oh What A Lovely War, which featured props such as webbing, a gas mask, and - again - a pair of boots. I wondered how on earth such things had survived. It was only many years later, after I'd acquired some knowledge from collecting, that I watched it again and realised that the webbing was manky old theatrical stock and the mask and boots were from WW2. Likewise the evocative footage from the Great War documentary was in fact all jumbled up, out of sequence and repeated in different places. Sometimes ignorance is bliss!

Best wishes,

Wainfleet