How did I get here?

Journey from manufacturing engineer to military researcher-cum-historian

Introduction

This is not my first post using Substack but you might say this is the first of my proper intended newsletter. Up to now I have been figuring out how to use the system!

I intend to mainly use my newsletter to share tips on researching soldiers and to illustrate them with examples from the 10,000-plus men that I have studied.

But I thought that I would begin by telling you something about how I came to do this stuff at all. Maybe it’s a bit self-indulgent but I hope you find it interesting.

Making a living from it? Nah

Go back, say, to the eve of the Millenium. I had just started a new business in the world of IT consulting and systems integration. I was MD of this business, and VP of its parent in the USA. Busy doesn’t even get close to my life at that time or for the next couple of years, as we quickly grew that business to well over 100 staff and continued upwards. I made more money from this venture than from anything else I have ever done, and it made my family secure. If anyone had said to me at that point, “but of course, pretty soon you will give all of this up and be a full-time military historian, mainly researching the lives of soldiers”, I would have laughed it off. Sure, the British Army in the Great War had been a deep interest for me for twenty years or more, but making a living from it? Nah.

In 1996, my interest in the subject came together with another thread of my life, which was in programming computers. I had been involved with that since before IBM invented the PC in 1981, and I could write code and generally mess around and troubleshoot in PC stuff. I began to read about the internet, signed up to Compuserve, and used their system to write my first website. You have to be of a certain age to appreciate what Compuserve was and how clunky it would all look today!

With incredible vision and marketing skills (not) I called my website the British Army in the Great War. I did it for me, really, never thinking for a moment that it would be of much interest to anyone else. I had been a member of the Western Front Association for some years, and found that people were either completely ignorant of this internet thing or even strongly against the whole notion. I remember giving a brief talk on where this might go for historical study (it may have been at an AGM; something like that) and I felt like I was speaking in a foreign language. How things have changed.

In those days, us “webmasters” (again, you have to be of a certain age …) liked to encourage contact, so I added an email link to the site. Soon enough they began to flow in. People would say, “I like the stuff you have on regiments, but I want to know how I find out about my father/grandfather”. In the 90s, the general answer to this was, “you need to go to the National Archives”. So I added some pages on how to research a soldier, simply to reduce the number of times I was being asked the same question.

At some point, I changed the site’s name to the Long, Long Trail.

But the emails kept on coming. They had now changed to, “I know that it needs a visit to the National Archives, but I live in Australia/Canada/Ireland/Scotland/anywhere more than ten miles from Kew, and I need help”. At some point - I only wish I had made a better record of it - I must have agreed to do that for someone, and asked them to cover my travel costs and pay for any photocopying I would need to do. I can’t remember exactly when I did that, but it was certainly before 2002, for I set up a limited company then so I could properly account for income. By then, the real-world business that I had worked for (for which I was European MD, as above) had been bought out worldwide by an Indian company, and I was getting out. Not for me. So I had a bit more time for a short period (although I was soon back in that kind of business) and I think that was when I did that first “paid research”, even though it was only covering expenses.

Over the years I have researched well over 10,000 individuals. In depth. So I have learned quite a bit on how to research them, and a lot on how the army worked. And it is that that I would like to share via this newsletter.

So … back soon.