Wednesday 13 November 2013

Sepia Saturday 203: A shadowy person in the doorway

The photo theme for Sepia Saturday is of a person standing in a doorway.  I had a couple to choose from but actually not many in our collection.  This was the most interesting. 

Laddy & William Pearce
The person sitting on the porch is my great great uncle, William (Willy) Henry Pearce, not long back from WWI, taken about 1919. He is patting the family dog called Laddy. Nearly all the Pearce family dogs were called Laddy - not partically imaginative. In the doorway is a family member. It is probably Willy's mother Eliza, judging by the long skirt and apron, but we can only guess as the woman's head is in the shadows. The house is 60 Aikmans Road, Merivale, Christchurch where the Pearce family lived for many years. Most old Christchurch houses were made of weatherboards with a porch and some decorative posts, as in this picture, with iron fretwork around the gutter area to make it look pretty. You can see the shadow of the fretwork in this picture. It must have been quite a sunny day with high contrast. Willy's eyes are hidden by the shadow of his hat and he has a fag hanging out of his mouth, possibly a habit he got from the war. Willy Pearce was never quite the same after coming back from war. It was called shell shock back then, or Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) these days.  If we could see the expression on his mother Eliza's face, it may have been an expression of concern for him.

I wanted to research where Willy went during WWI and was excited to find that his army medical records have finally been scanned and put online on Archway, Archives New Zealand.  Click here to view them. I was interested to find out what affected him so greatly. But the record was mainly medical and only mentions the places in England that he went, not the battles he endured.

Willy's medical showed he was a normal and healthy 20 year old man when he entered the army.  He was short at 5 foot, 3 1/2 inches tall, with black hair, dark complexion and grey eyes and weighed 135 pounds.

He was transported on the ship Willochra, departing Wellington on 16 October 1916 and arriving in England on 28 December along with hundreds of other men.  He was admitted to Devonport Military hospital the day after arrival on 29 December 1916 with Laryngitis and bronchitis.  He was discharged to the Command Depot Codford, Wiltshire, England, on 8 January 1917.  He then got mumps on 8 March 1917 and was discharged on 21 March 1917.  He certainly had an unwell time at the beginning of that year and probably wished he was at home sitting on the porch!

What he did after that is not recorded on this particular record.  His other records are held in Wellington and are not accessible on the Internet yet.  Maybe soon I will be able to click a button and read about his war time life.  At the moment what he saw and experienced is still a mystery to me.

Willy married and had children and lived until he was 78 years old.  His mother in the doorway back in 1919, however, would have been very worried about him, a changed man after seeing, hearing and feeling things that no man should have to go through.

20 comments:

  1. What a way for poor Willy to have to start out - at war with his own body before he even got to the actual war. I'm glad he married and had children. Perhaps his family helped him forget - at least a little - the horrors he saw during his time in the war? One would hope so, anyway.

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  2. Very disciplined of you to stick to discussing just one photo. Hopefully Archway will digitalize the WW1 personnel records, as has been done in Australia - there are a couple I would like to see too, eg. My great uncle Austin and my grandfather Oliver.

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  3. Jo, it is more laziness than discipline! That photo was already scanned but others weren't, so the others got put to the side and I just concentrated on this one. I have three small kids, so gets busy!!! :-)

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  4. I've seen that before, where the mother keeps out of the camera in the doorway, sometimes behind a wire screen door, not realizing she is still in the shot. And interesting post.

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  5. A lovely tribute to your great great uncle. Good luck with your future research,.

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  6. Too bad you didn't find the information you were looking for in the online records, but eventually. It's good you saved some of those photos as themes tend to come around again.

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  7. According to Ancestry.com, Willy was a Cheesemaker.

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  8. What an adorable doggie. Thanks for your great uncle's story, and I'm eager to read more stories when you can!

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  9. We had a Laddie when I was a boy after WWII. Willy definitely had a poorly start in England, but he survived a war that so many didn't. Hope you can get his war record eventually.

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  10. That's a sweet photo to chose for this weekend's theme. Your great uncle was lucky to survive illness during his service, as that was a major cause of non-combat casualties. The transportation of troops from around the world, confined to close quarters in ships and camps spread more disease than was understood at the time.

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  11. A classic Sepia Saturday post - a fascinating old photo leading to equally fascinating discoveries about times gone by which are as interesting to the general reader as to impede diary family members. Thank you for sharing.

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  12. What a great photo -- I especially love the skirts in the doorway; such poignancy there! And "weatherboards" are, I think, our "clapboards." Interesting...

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  13. This is a really wonderful old photo and so sharp, with lots of information leading to many thoughts

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  14. Thanks everyone for the lovely comments. Kat, I think it is the wrong William Henry Pearce on Ancestry as he was not a cheesemaker. He was a postal worker or "letter carrier." As far as I know he never made cheese in his lifetime! :-)

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  15. I talked to my Grandma today and she said her Uncle Willy was, she thinks, the sickliest one in the family. She didn't know about his illnesses overseas or where he went to war, so I need those old records to discover more.

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  16. What a bittersweet tale. Great job of fleshing out the bones of the photo! I was also intrigued from the get-go with Willy and Laddy--a very interesting relationship between man and dog.. Thanks for a great post.

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  17. It's a wonderful image of a man with his dog. A very popular category for collectors.

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  18. I very much enjoyed this photo and all the detail of Willy's life.

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  19. Funny little family quirk that all the dogs have the same name :)
    It's an interesting photo, especially the person in shadow in the doorway.

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  20. A lovely old photo. You may be able to read more about his time (and places) in the war in the Unit diaries, if you know any of the battalions that he served in. We have many unit diaries available through the Australian War Memorial. So many are being digitised here in preparation for the centenary next year.

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