Just when you might have thought that every possible aspect of the First World War had been captured in books, films, poems, and songs, in bushelloads of photos and billions of words, University of Essex historian Professor Mike Roper has found a new war zone. He has gone in search of the Great War’s overshadowed people – its children.

Hostilities ended in 1918, but the actual fighting gave way to a different, more low-key conflict for which there could be no Armistice. “My interest is in the way the conflict reverberated within families across the twentieth century,”

says Mike.

Mike began his project, Children of the Great War, after he became conscious of a knowledge vacuum. “While we know a lot about the effects of the war on those who fought it, little has been studied about what it meant for families, and, particularly, children,” he says.

The silence has now been broken by more than 150 people who have talked to Mike. This trawl continues with a “collection day” on July 18. Everyone with family memories of the Great War is encouraged to come along to the university and share them.

A sense of quite urgent deadline hangs over the project. Already the last remaining voices of those who fought in the war have fallen silent. Now, says Mike, “the children of the Great War are themselves in their eighties and nineties...”

If the voices of the Great War children have largely gone unrecorded until now, this is because the sound of the war’s aftermath is the sound of silence.

Mike says: “It was a different age. Men were not encouraged to get things off their chest.

They were expected to be stoic.

Fathers never talked about the war, and children did not ask about it.”

His findings are full of poignant illustrations of this.

One woman remembers her father, who had been wounded in the leg. “Yet she had never seen the wound. It was always kept hidden,” says Mike. “The little girl brought her father his slippers (while he was changing) in the hopes of catching a glimpse.”

Psychologists might tut-tut at the way the veterans bottled up their memories, but there was a positive side. “The wartime generation wanted to get on with life and put the war behind them,” Mike says.

“They looked to the future, and much of that future was focused on their children.

“That may be why they produced so many great writers of children’s literature, like WE Johns (Biggles), AA Milne (Winnie the Pooh) and Tolkien (The Hobbit). And it was also a generation that produced leaders in progressive education.”

The war also heralded the age of mass foreign travel, previously a preserve of the wealthy. Millions were posted abroad to fight, and huge numbers returned to the battlefield countries after the war. One of Mike’s interviewees recalled, with regret, an unthinking remark made to his father. On his way to Spain, he told his dad: “I don’t want to get stuck in one place, like you.” It did not occur to him, at the time, that his father had fought the war in another country than Britain.

It has become a commonplace that the war helped to liberate women. Mike is not convinced. The fate of one Essex woman, Evelyn Tuffin, was typical. Her son, Hedley Green, from Colchester, recalls: “She went to France as part of the Women’s Auxiliary Army, where she worked in an officers’ canteen. She ended the war as a sergeant.” As such, she out-ranked Hedley’s father, a private.

Women who served in uniform often enjoyed the experience, a notion which would have been inconceivable to men waist deep in the blood and mud of the trenches.

“My mother really made the most of the war,” says Hedley Green. “My father never talked about it, but she used to tell us children about her escapades.

There is a photograph of her in a Highland officer’s full-dress uniform.”

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Evelyn Green, as she nowwas, received an invitation to sign up again for her old job. “But she couldn’t accept, because she now had my sister and myself to look after,” says Hedley. There were to be no more wartime escapades.

One group of post-war children did indeed find themselves in the front line.

They were the sons and daughters of disabled servicemen. “The damage could be both emotional, and financial,” says Mike. Many men survived the fighting, only to die more lingering deaths from the effects of gas or shrapnel. And their children were watching.

One interviewee remembered: “We lived in a little cottage, so there was no privacy, and I can remember the nurse coming to dress it (his wound) regularly. He had a hole right round there. ..It gradually ate his face away till he had a haemorrhage when it hit his main artery here, and that was when he died. That was my ninth birthday.”

Mike Roper’s speciality is the legacy of conflict, and one legacy of the First War proved to have true staying power. The generation brought up in the shadow of the First World War was the generation destined to fight the Second World War.

They went to battle forearmed with their parents’ stoicism.

“Emotional restraint and endurance were hallmarks of interwar English culture,”

Mike says. “During the Second World War, they would become keys to national identity and survival.”

The attitude is summed up in the account of one witness that will haunt anyone who reads it. Her father had survived the war, but died young. Her brother Eric became the family’s father figure Then Eric was killed in a wartime plane crash. Even this tragedy could not prevent her mother from adhering to the maxim: “Keep calm and carry on.”

She cried non-stop for two days, but kept on with the housework routines. “She was cooking and doing everything, she didn’t give into it, but she was just crying as she walked around.”

This carry-on spirit passed to the next generation. The daughter did not weep, at least openly. “But,” she says, “I can remember waking up next morning, every morning, for ages after, and my cheeks were stiff with salt ... I must have cried all the time I was asleep.”

  • CHILDREN OF THE GREAT WAR – MEMORY COLLECTION DAY: Anyone from Essex with direct family memories, or memorabilia, of the 1914-18 war, is invited to attend a special event at the University of Essex’s Wivenhoe campus, on Saturday July 18. A team of family history specialists will conduct interviews. Material obtained will be archived in Europeana, the online cultural resource. Venue: Sociology Dept, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park. Times: 11am to 4pm.