Tags
Battle of The Somme, Ernest Brooks, First World War, Food and Drink, Imperial War Museum, Museums, photograph, War Photography, Western Front
A quick look through the Imperial War Museum’s photographic archive informs me that this rather striking image, now displayed outside the Museum, was taken by Lieutenant Ernest Brooks during the Battle of The Somme in 1916. You can see the entire photograph here: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205194610.
I started to look at Lieutenant Brooks’ other photographs in the archive, but it appears that he took a tenth of all the official photographs of the Western Front commissioned by the the Ministry of Information during the First World War, which amounts to 4936 photographs, so I didn’t get very far, but I can recommend the 401 I did look at this morning.
Lieutenant Brooks, as well as being the only official British war photographer at the Battle of The Somme, found time to photograph a whole range of scenes from across the Western Front; including members of the Chinese Labour Corps working behind the lines, Baroness Elsiede T’Serclaes and Mairi Chisholm nursing on the front line in Belgium and a British Tommy being awarded a medal by King Nicholas I of Montenegro.
The Antics Roadshow blog 