History Pearls Before Poppies
Rachel Trethewey (The History Press, £20)
By February 1918, the First World War had dragged on for 3½ years, with no end in sight. on the battlefields of France, the allied forces stood with their backs to the wall as the German army redoubled its efforts to break the stalemate. on the Home Front, shortages of food and fuel, on top of nightly bombing and ever-lengthening casualty lists, strained the fortitude of even the staunchest patriots.
It was at that moment of national gloom that the doughty Lady northcliffe, wife of the proprietor of The Times and The Daily Mail, conceived the notion of the ‘Pearl appeal’. England’s women would be invited to donate single pearls from their private collections to make up a new necklace, which would then be sold to benefit the red Cross. So far, so straightforward. What she cannot have anticipated is the outpouring of emotion that greeted her novel proposal. Battered and bereaved, determined to show support, members of the aristocracy and upper-middle class (those, that is, who owned jewellery in the first place) rallied to the cause in their thousands.
With consummate skill, rachel Trethewey traces the stories of dozens of donors, hitherto insulated from life’s harsher realities by money and position, but now eager to prove that they, too, had suffered devastating losses. From the Countess of rothes, who gave a pair of pearls she had worn the night she survived the sinking of Titanic, to the untitled but fiercely proud Lilian Kekewich, who sent a pearl apiece for the three sons and one brotherin-law she had lost in the fighting, each tale is distinguished by the same qualities of sorrow, courage and compassion. Taken together, they provide an original and often deeply moving perspective on civilian life during that most devastating of conflicts. Martin Williams