Friday the 13th dawned fine in Northern France in April 1917 but it was to prove an inauspicious date for one of two flying aces with a Mosman connection, Captain Lancelot Lytton Richardson.
Project blog
“We desire to express our high appreciation”
Mosman Council made presentations to two prominent citizens and Anzacs in the years after World War One. Mosman Library has scanned these two impressive albums, and you can browse them online as digital editions.
From Mosman to Gallipoli
During a recent tour of Turkey I had the opportunity to visit Gallipoli for a day – now a peaceful, picturesque peninsula. Among the wheatfields, wildflowers, native roses and bright yellow broom bush it was difficult to imagine it as a battleground, devastated by warfare as it was in 1915.
From H.36.a.1.1 to N.10.b.0.5
These are orders for the 8th Australian Field Ambulance ahead of the attack on Fromelles in July 1916. You can see a number of trench map references for the officers in the field, like:
The O.C. “C” Section will take over evacuation of the front line from H.36.a.1.1 to N.10.b.0.5, and make arrangements for prompt evacuation and care of casualties.
(The coordinates all relate to sheet 36 by the way, that is made clear on an earlier page of the unit’s war diary.)
Robert Warren of the Muninn Project has created an API to convert Western Front trench map coordinates to and from longitude and latitude. And he’s made available a web page that you can use to find coordinates on a modern map:
This is a boon for anyone working through a unit war diary, wanting to find quickly the locations and places referred to by the map coordinates. Read more on Warren’s blog post, Converting British Trench Map Coordinates.
For an account of the 8th Australian Field Ambulance’s experience at Fromelles, read these entries in Mosman man Allan Allsop’s diary.
More geographic resources are listed in our blog post, Finding your Anzacs on a map.
Our Homeward Stunt
This magazine – its cover captioned “At Last!!!” – gives a snapshot of life aboard a returning troopship in 1919.
Mosman Library scanned the souvenir from an original copy lent to us by a generous student of history. As well as stories, verse and photographs, the “memento of our voyage home” has notes on returned officers and a list of other ranks aboard. Our donor thought someone might like to see if any Mosman men are mentioned.
Download the high resolution scan 324 MB from our digital archive Trace, a more compact version 70 MB from this website or, better still, read it online as a digital edition.