“Wish I was at home for Christmas,” runs the chorus of Stop the Cavalry, the seasonal anti-war pop song, in a lyric that voices the dreams of serving soldiers down the ages. The same poignant sentiment is illustrated in the rediscovered drawings of the first world war trench artist and cartoonist Henry Page. But Page, who was a young private in the London Regiment, also wishes he could be at home for spring, summer, and autumn too, “in the arms of the girl I love”.
His landscape sketches and studies of fellow soldiers have been unearthed by researchers working at Southwark Archives in south London and offer an astonishing fresh insight into the life of troops who survived in close quarters and travelled together through countries very unlike their homeland. Many of Page’s drawings also express his love for his “girl” back home, Edith Pedley – a young woman he was later to marry and live with happily for 56 years until his death.
The sketches and cartoons, which run from 1915 to 1919, when Page was finally demobbed, were found in a scrapbook in the records of the 2/24th County of London Battalion of the London Regiment (The Queen’s) during a research project carried out in collaboration with the family history research company FindMyPast.
Among the most striking images is a rough cartoon that contrasts the jubilation the troops felt on Armistice Day in 1918 with what they actually had to do, still under orders. The artist imagines them somersaulting and dancing in celebration while in reality they all had to press on, marching in the cold. In another evocative sketch, Page imagines resting back in England in a bucolic country scene with Pedley by his side.
His drawings have been published by FindMyPast to mark Remembrance Day this weekend, and they closely chronicle his time spent serving abroad, including detailed depictions of the front and inside a military hospital.
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Perhaps the most affecting, though, are Page’s wistful drawings of what he was looking forward to: a nice cool pint on a hot summer’s day, a walk in a meadow. There is also a series of amusingly decorated envelopes, each addressed to Miss Edith Pedley.
Page (known to his friends as Harry) was born on 20 November 1889 and grew up in Stoke Newington, north London, where his father ran a clothing and furniture business. As a young man he joined a small design and printing firm in the City of London, training as a draughtsman. By the time he volunteered in October 1915, at 25, he had met Pedley, a shorthand typist from Mile End in east London.
After almost a year of home service, Page was sent to France for six months. Then in December 1916 his regiment set off for Salonika (Thessaloniki), Greece, and the next summer he was shipped to Alexandria, Egypt, where he caught paratyphoid fever. As he recovered in the 21st General Hospital, he sent carefully decorated envelopes to Pedley, one going out with each weekly post. The couple married in London in July 1920 and lived with the bride’s parents before moving to Luton in the 1930s.
Some of Page’s cartoons were published in Britain during the war, with one newspaper comparing him to another better-known wartime cartoonist. But after the war he went back to his work as a commercial artist and little is known of his later career. The archive is keen to learn of any surviving examples of his advertising work.
Page’s drawings were featured in a history of his battalion in the 1960s and he kept in touch with all his fellow soldiers, helping to organise annual reunions for those who served with him by designing hand-drawn programmes. In 1958, he donated his sketches, photographs and personal papers to the regimental museum.
Page died at 87 in Ringwood, Hampshire, where he had spent retirement with his wife, who outlived him by eight years.