2
25
214
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1336/20827/PValentineJRM18040005-0013.2.jpg
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John. Prisoner of war photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Photographs of prisoner of war activities including arts and crafts, sports day and theatrical productions at Stalag Luft 3: miscellaneous items and the Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day at Stalag Luft 6.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day 6
Description
An account of the resource
Top left: in the foreground a man in horse costume. On a podium behind two men in fancy dress, one as woman, and behind a band. Spectators on the left. Captioned 'G35 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Top right: two men in indian fancy dress, one a man the other woman. In the background huts. Captioned 'G36 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Middle left: man dressed as woman with surf board. Captioned 'G37 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Middle right: man with boater hat standing on a chair by a tote board. To the right another man writes on a board. On the left a man in shorts looks on. In the background trees. Captioned 'G38 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Bottom left: two men in fancy dress, one as woman and one with cane, walking towards camera. Other men in the background. Captioned 'G39 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Bottom right: mam in fancy dress as woman with hat. Captioned 'Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. On the reverse 'Jockey 6'.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1943-08
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Six b/w photographs mounted on an album page
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PValentineJRM18040005-0013, PValentineJRM18040005-0014
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-08
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1336/20826/PValentineJRM18040005-0011.1.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1336/20826/PValentineJRM18040005-0012.1.jpg
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John. Prisoner of war photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Photographs of prisoner of war activities including arts and crafts, sports day and theatrical productions at Stalag Luft 3: miscellaneous items and the Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day at Stalag Luft 6.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day 5
Description
An account of the resource
Top right: group of men standing and sitting in cowboy and indian fancy dress. In the background spectators. Captioned 'G28 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Top right: group of men sitting and standing in row. In the background spectators. Captioned 'G29 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Middle left: a Punch and Judy show with man standing on the left. Captioned 'G31 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Middle right: a man in horse costume. In the background on a podium a couple of men dressed as female dancing with band behind. On the right spectators. Captioned 'G32 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Bottom left: two men in fancy dress, one bandsman and one jockey standing in front of a wall with posters. Captioned 'G3 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Bottom right: group of men gathered round a table which has board with marker on it. Captioned 'G34 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. On the reverse 'Jockey 5'.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1943-08
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Six b/w photograps mounted on an album page
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PValentineJRM18040005-0011, PValentineJRM18040005-0012
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-08
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1336/20825/PValentineJRM18040005-0009.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1336/20825/PValentineJRM18040005-0010.2.jpg
aa35b5a12313bf0c6ded97a579e98f97
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John. Prisoner of war photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Photographs of prisoner of war activities including arts and crafts, sports day and theatrical productions at Stalag Luft 3: miscellaneous items and the Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day at Stalag Luft 6.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day 4
Description
An account of the resource
Top left: men in cowboy fancy dress dancing on wooden stage with spectators in the background. Captioned 'G22 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Top right: man doing Scottish sword dance on wooden stage with spectators on the right. Captioned 'G23 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Middle left: five men standing in line two in fancy dress and others in uniform shorts. Captioned 'G24 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Middle right: group of men in kilts standing and sitting in line with spectators in the background. Captioned 'G25 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Bottom left: men in kilts standing either side of a table round which other men are sitting or standing. Captioned 'G26 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Bottom right: a man walking towards the camera with his arms out on the right. Behind and to the left a jockey on a false horse is being led along. Behind and to the right are spectators and in the background huts. Captioned 'G27 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. On the reverse 'Jockey 4'.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1943-08
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Six b/w photographs mounted on an album page
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PValentineJRM18040005-0009, PValentineJRM18040005-0010
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-08
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
entertainment
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1336/20824/PValentineJRM18040005-0007.1.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1336/20824/PValentineJRM18040005-0008.1.jpg
aa0325372d400678c9f4a5cd8e07a955
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John. Prisoner of war photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Photographs of prisoner of war activities including arts and crafts, sports day and theatrical productions at Stalag Luft 3: miscellaneous items and the Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day at Stalag Luft 6.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day 3
Description
An account of the resource
Top left: men in kilts doing Scottish country dancing with spectators all round. Captioned 'G16 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Top right: men in fancy dress dancing in front of decorated hut. Captioned 'G17 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Middle left: group of men in women's' fancy dress standing in a row with spectators in the background. Captioned 'G18 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Middle right: a man stands in the foreground. Behind a number of men playing accordions stand on a podium. In the background a screen and trees. Captioned 'G19 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Bottom left: a line up of jockeys on false horses with spectators lining course in the background. In the foreground a man with pipe. Captioned 'G20 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Bottom right: a large group of men in fancy dress standing a sitting in line. In the background trees and huts. Captioned 'G21 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. On the reverse 'Jockey 3'.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1943-08
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Six b/w photographs mounted on an album page
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PValentineJRM18040005-0007, PValentineJRM18040005-0008
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-08
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1336/20823/PValentineJRM18040005-0005.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1336/20823/PValentineJRM18040005-0006.2.jpg
33fa200ca7c539a5af5395ad10df0381
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John. Prisoner of war photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Photographs of prisoner of war activities including arts and crafts, sports day and theatrical productions at Stalag Luft 3: miscellaneous items and the Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day at Stalag Luft 6.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day 2
Description
An account of the resource
Top left: a group of men in fancy dress in front of a decorated hut. On the right a crowd of onlookers. Captioned 'G10 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Top right: a marching band in column moving to the left surrounded by onlookers. In the background a wigwam and huts. Captioned 'G11 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Middle left: a man dressed as a jockey standing behind a fake horse watched by another man on the right. In the background spectators and huts, Captioned 'G12 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Middle right: a line up of jockeys in fancy dress with fake horses. On the right starters in top hats. Captioned 'G13 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Bottom left: men in kilts doing Scottish country dancing surrounded by spectators. In the background huts. Captioned 'G14 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Bottom right: men in fancy dress on a podium with spectators all round. Man at lectern on the right. Captioned 'G15 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. On the reverse 'Jockey 2'.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1943-08
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Six b/w photographs mounted on an album page
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PValentineJRM18040005-0005, PValentineJRM18040005-0006
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-08
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1336/20822/PValentineJRM18040005-0003.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1336/20822/PValentineJRM18040005-0004.2.jpg
47c1d9ef02d3a3640fef691cf4c0d9aa
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John. Prisoner of war photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Photographs of prisoner of war activities including arts and crafts, sports day and theatrical productions at Stalag Luft 3: miscellaneous items and the Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day at Stalag Luft 6.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day 1
Description
An account of the resource
Top left: a group of men standing wearing a variety of dress standing in front of a corrugated iron wall with 'TOTALISATO ?' in single letter panels. Captioned 'G1 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Top right: three men in fancy dress with a group of men behind watching. In the background single story huts. Captioned 'G2 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Second row left: a group of men some dressed in cowboy fancy dress sitting and standing in front of a single story hut. Captioned .'G3 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Second row right: a marching band in column coming towards camera. Captioned 'G5 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Third row left: a group of men in fancy dress, some as women, some as jockeys kneeling and standing with huts in the background. Captioned 'G6 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Third row right: a group of men in cowboy and indian fancy dress around a wigwam with hut in the background. Captioned 'G7 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. Bottom: a large group of men in various dress sitting and standing in line with huts in the background. Captioned 'G8 Flieger Jockey Club Gala Day' Stalag Luft 6, Aug 43'. On the reverse 'Jockey 1'.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1943-08
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Seven b/w photographs mounted on an album page
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PValentineJRM18040005-0003, PValentineJRM18040005-0004
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-08
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20618/ENilsonRGrunfeld440404.2.jpg
7d3043f5d5b6c94164e3e7af81d393e3
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Copy of letter to Mr Grunfeld from R. Nilson, Stockholm 4th April 1944
Dear Mr Grunfeld, the aid organisation, through which contact was obtained with Sergeant Valentine, writes as follows:
“Our secretary, who at his last visit at Stalag Luft 6 on 2nd March saw the British prisoner of war J. Valentine, has asked us to convey to you Mr Valentine's greetings and his heartiest thanks for the Swedish books in English translation which you have sent him.”
We intend to send some more literature to Mr Valentine.
With kindest regards, Yours sincerely, R. Nilson
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to Mr Grünfeld from R Nilson
Description
An account of the resource
States the organisation through which contact was obtained with Sergeant John Valentine that their secretary had visited Stalag Luft 6 and seen British prisoner of war John Valentine who asked him to convey his thanks to Grünfeld for books he sent him.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
R Nilson
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-04-04
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One page typewritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ENilsonRGrunfeld440404
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Sweden
Sweden--Stockholm
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-04-04
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20616/EBuschSHValentineAS440419.1.jpg
bb64aba7d16dee55ba2369a6a29ded45
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
letter to ASV, c/o Balfour, Beatty & Co Ltd.;
66 Queen St. London
From S.H.Busch; ASEA Fulbourne Rd., Walthamstow, London
19th April 1944
Dear Mr Valentine, Following our conversation over the telephone today I give you a translation of a letter received from my friend, Mr Wernekinck, in Asea, Vesteras, so far as it relates to your son Sergeant J.R.M. Valentine
Through the help of two men in the Swedish organisation “Help the War Sufferers”, your son has actually been located in Stalag Luft 6 & the man actually spoke to him out there writes as follows:-
“Finally, I have to-day found the correct Mr. Valentine. I had a long talk with him and informed him how both Gunnaar Jansson and myself had worked to locate him both in Stalag XX1-B & in Stalag Luft 3. He has not received any parcels from Wernekinck; on the other hand he has received some Swedish Literature, in English translation from a Mr. Rolf Bjorklund, 4 Wittstocksgatan, Stockholm He send a hearty greeting to Mr. Bjorklund. He knew that his father had a friend in Sweden. He did not want any food sent to him as he gets quite sufficient in the camp. When I asked him if he would like some sweets he suggested that there may be others who need them more. He would like, however, to get a violin bow. Perhaps Mr. Wernekinck can help him in this respect. In all other respects he was O.K. and was pleased by my visit. An excellent lad.”
Mr. Wernekinck then continues to say that he will arrange to send the violin bow and also something else which will give him pleasure, and finishes by saying that if his parents would like a message to be sent he would be happy to convey same to him in due course.
Finally, I enclose a copy of a telegram I have to-day sent Mr.. Wernekinck which is self-explanatory
Swedish Literature, in English translation from a Mr. Rolf Bjorklund, 4 Wittstocksgatan, Stockholm He send a hearty greeting to Mr. Bjorklund. He knew that his father had a friend in Sweden. He did not want any food sent to him as he gets quite sufficient in the camp. When I asked him if he would like some sweets he suggested that there may be others who need them more. He would like, however, to get a violin bow. Perhaps Mr. Wernekinck can help him in this respect. In all other respects he was O.K. and was pleased by my visit. An excellent lad.”
Mr. Wernekinck then continues to say that he will arrange to send the violin bow and also something else which will give him pleasure, and finishes by saying that if his parents would like a message to be sent he would be happy to convey same to him in due course.
Finally, I enclose a copy of a telegram I have to-day sent Mr.. Wernekinck which is self-explanatory and I trust will meet with your approval.
Yours sincerely, Sgd S.H. Busch
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to John Valentine's father from S Busch
Description
An account of the resource
Offers a translation of a letter from Mr Wernekinck in Sweden. Notes that due to help of Swedish "Help the War Sufferers" his son John has been located in Stalag Luft 6. Relates from a man who spoke to his son who had tried to locate him in Stalag Luft 3 and Stalag XXI-B. Continues that John had not received any parcels from Wernekinck but had received other Swedish literature from a Mr Bjorklund. John said he did not need any food but would like a violin bow which Wernekinck would try and arrange.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
S H Busch
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-04-19
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One page typewritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EBuschSHValentineAS440419
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--London
Sweden
Sweden--Västerås
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-04-19
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20401/EValentineUMValentineJRM441002-0001.2.jpg
9989e274fc9f1514765769c218348128
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20401/EValentineUMValentineJRM441002-0002.2.jpg
468de156afc878b82b1ebbfbbe24ebba
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
[inserted] 7/12 [/inserted]
DATE October 2nd
My own dearest Johnnie,
Still no mail from you – over a month now, and I expect you are faring just as badly if not worse. I’m hoping there may be some waiting for me at home. We are going back tomorrow, travelling up with Barbara who has been having a fortnight’s holiday, & she’s going to spend a couple of nights with us. We have had a lovely long holiday down here, but I feel it’s about time we went back & I started to get things into order. It’s quite an upheaval leaving here, for I have acquired a lot of goods (the wardrobe, lino, various pots & pans etc) which are going back by goods rail. I can’t have them insured or anything so can only hope they’ll come through alright. Pat Hodson has now rented a wee cottage down here, near where she was staying, so I’ll be able to get rid of all her things eventually and have the house to ourselves – all ready for you, so do hurry up! Frances is very keen to be back at Chalfont in spite of the counter attraction of the beach & the ferry-boat, I’m so glad she loves it & feels it is “home” already, and I do
[page break]
hope you will too. To crown my dressmaking efforts I have knitted myself a jerkin & made Barbara a blouse, so the time here hasn’t been all wasted! If only I knew where you are now, its awful not having any news except that you have left Luft VI. I’m afraid you’ll have had to jettison a lot of stuff but hope you’ve hung on to the fiddle. All my love dearest – á bientot! Ursula.
[stamp GEPRUFT 131]
[postmark]
[postage stamp]
RANK & NAME: W/O John R.M. VALENTINE.
[stamp PASSED P.W. 3112]
PRISONER OF WAR No.: 450,
CAMP NAME & No.: STALAG LUFT III
COUNTRY: GERMANY
FROM
Mrs J.R.M. Valentine,
Little Close,
Devon Road,
Salcombe,
Devon.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Writes that she has received no mail from him for a month and that she is returning home the next day. Describes challenge of transporting all the items she bought back to their house Writes they have had good holiday but she needs to get home to get things organised. Mentioned lack of news from him but that he has left Stalag Luft VI.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-10-02
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two sided handwritten letter card
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM441002
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
England--Salcombe
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-10-02
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20400/EValentineUMValentineJRM440918-0001.2.jpg
c685b26b0da2af4fe2145b7118992fdd
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20400/EValentineUMValentineJRM440918-0002.2.jpg
7366db24031b096ae2fbab0a2b26ed84
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
[inserted] 11/11 [/inserted]
DATE Sept 18th 1944
My darling Johnnie,
I wonder how much news you get to hear these days – enough to cheer you up, I hope. Sometimes I even let myself imagine your homecoming – but not [underlined] too [/underlined] often, it doesn’t pay! Life here is quieter now that Peter has gone back, but tomorrow Barbara comes down for a fortnight & I think when she goes back we shall probably go home too, all being well. Did I tell you that among my purchases at the auction sale some weeks ago was a large feather bed, for 19/-. I have now been to work on this, cut it in half, using one half for a cot mattress for Frances, & the other half I have made up into 3 pillows & 2 cushions. Quite good value, since I had to pay £1 for one feather pillow from a shop! I have also had the front of my hair permed again – do you remember I had it done in Ayr ages and ages ago when we were still young & foolish? It is only when I am down here that I can have any hairdressing done since Frances can be left with Grannie. We were so sorry that Ann didn’t come to stay here after all, but Grandpa wired that travelling was too difficult. I have now had keys
[page break]
made for the wardrobe I’ve bought & the trunk, so they are all ready to go when we do. The tenants have left Felmersham now, but I’m not letting it again, the risk of damage doesn’t seem worth it for so short a time. I’m anxious to get back but it doesn’t seem wise just yet. I [underlined] do [/underlined] hope it will all be intact for you.
All my love dearest, Ursula.
[stamp GEPRUFT 69]
[postmark]
[postage stamp]
RANK & NAME: W/O. J.R.M. VALENTINE
[stamp PASSED P.W. 9180]
PRISONER OF WAR No.: 450
CAMP NAME & No.: STALAG LUFT III
COUNTRY: GERMANY
FROM
Mrs Valentine
Little Close
Devon Road
Salcombe
Devon
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Writes wondering about the their near future and mentions her plans to return home in a fortnights time. Writes of some other purchases she made a recent auction and that she has has her hair permed again. Concludes with family gossip and that tenants have left their house.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-09-18
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two sided handwritten letter card
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440918
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
England--Salcombe
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-09-18
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20399/EValentineUMValentineJRM440904-0001.1.jpg
675671c30586272d04d896578f29e165
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20399/EValentineUMValentineJRM440904-0002.1.jpg
6d1aa3a69f92cf3230d005d018ddc9f0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
[inserted] 13/10 [/inserted]
DATE Sept 4th
My darling Johnnie,
I suppose it is really a waste of time writing to you any more! In future I hope we always communicate by word of mouth. But as I have already bought this letter card, I may as well send it. This morning I received your letter of June 25, heavily censored as usual, in which you propose letting me go out to work while you look after Frances. Not b- likely!! You’d just play your fiddle all the time. No, when you come back, [underlined] I’m [/underlined] going to sit back & put my feet on the mantelpiece!
Last night we had a small party. Peter is down here, & various other friends on holiday made us up to 12, so I organized a treasure hunt & similar childish games & we had a good time. Frances has overdone her bathing a bit, I’m afraid, & got a chill on her tum & ran up a temperature of 1030. I got the doctor in, just in case, & she got over it in a few days. Since then the weather has been bad so she hasn’t swum again. She has just learnt to float with an old tyre for
[page break]
support & is very keen to learn to swim before you come home. She might even do it, for she seems to have no fear of the water, & I deflate the tyre until it is almost no help. The news is amazingly good, it [underlined] really [/underlined] won’t be long now
All my love dearest & a kiss from Frances. Ursula.
[stamp GEPRUFT 52]
[postmark]
[postage stamp]
RANK & NAME: W/O JRM. VALENTINE
[stamp PASSED P.W. 3112]
PRISONER OF WAR No.: 450
CAMP NAME & No.: STALAG LUFT III
COUNTRY: GERMANY
FROM
Mrs JRM Valentine
Little Close, Devon Rd
Salcombe
Devon
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Writes perhaps it is a waste of time writing but had the letter card anyway. Scotches his proposal of her going out to work while he stays home to look after their daughter. Continues with description of activities, party and daughter's swimming progress.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-09-04
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two sided handwritten letter card
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440904
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania--Šilutė
Lithuania--Šilutė
Lithuania
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-09-04
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20395/EValentineUMValentineJRM440819-0001.2.jpg
9887fc423001993102f984aefb583c44
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20395/EValentineUMValentineJRM440819-0002.2.jpg
cae66a9e769e886e2e892a0b51b4f13a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
[inserted] 18/10 [/inserted]
DATE August 19th 44.
My dearest Johnnie,
The main occurrence this week has been a visit to an auction sale of furniture in the village. I bought quite a lot of things, and am really very pleased with them. The chief item is a Heal’s sectional wardrobe, for the spare bedroom which at present only has the linen chest by way of accomodation [sic] & my home-made corner hanging-cupboard. I paid £16 for this wardrobe & consider it a bargain. It is in white, measures 66” wide & has a full length hanging cupboard with hat shelf, a chest of 4 large & 2 short drawers with above a spacious hat cupboard with shelf. It is beautifully made in sections, so that you can use the three pieces separately but it all goes together with cornice top & bottom. The wardrobe has full length mirror. Getting it home will be a problem, meanwhile it is standing in the garage here. I also bought an Acme rubber [indecipherable word] for £4, (unobtainable now), a large fish kettle for doing my fruit preserving in (7/-) hide & wicker trunk (16/-) shopping basket (13/-) watering-can (10/-) length of wire netting (for our future poultry 4/-) mahogany butlers tray & stand (9/-) hose-pipe (7/-) electric iron (7/6) & an enormous feather-bed for 19/- which I
[page break]
am going to cut up into a quantity of pillows & cushions, which we badly need. It set me back over £26 but they are all useful acquisitions for our home. Frances & I have been getting very brown on the beach but the weather has broken the last 2 days. Next week Ann is due to come & stay for a while. All my love dearest, kiss from Frances xxx Ursula.
[stamp GEPRUFT 67]
[postmark]
[postage stamp]
RANK & NAME: W/O John R.M. VALENTINE
[stamp PASSED P.W. 3112]
PRISONER OF WAR No.: 450
CAMP NAME & No.: STALAG LUFT III
COUNTRY: GERMANY
FROM
Mrs JRM Valentine
At Little Close,
Devon Road,
Salcombe.
Devon.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Writes of going to furniture auction and describes items she bought including a wardrobe as well as other items. Concludes with mention that daughter is getting very brown on the beach but that weather has now broken.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-08-19
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two sided handwritten letter card
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440819
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
England--Salcombe
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-08-19
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20390/EValentineUMValentineJRM440731-0001.2.jpg
1f4f20a75e98659a0b5526f3dd45f563
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20390/EValentineUMValentineJRM440731-0002.2.jpg
b7b8db986aa64fdf64802cfcb0588b33
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
[inserted] 21/11 [/inserted]
at Little Close
Devon Road,
Salcombe,
Devon.
July 31st 1944
My own darling Johnnie,
I’m afraid my letters to you have been a bit irregular since I’ve been down here, not because I think of you less, but partly because the rhythmic regularity of life at home is disturbed by frequent visits to the beach & evenings given over to bridge & mah-jong & even last week, a dance; and partly because, with the war situation changing so fast & so [deleted] regularly [/deleted] favourably I don’t really think you are ever likely to receive these letters – at least, I hope not!
Life down here is very pleasant, the weather is good, & we spend all afternoon on the sands. Frances simply loves the sea, & will soon learn to float if she goes on at her present rate.
Pat & her baby have now left us. She didn’t get on well with my people, was very tactless & inconsiderate, & anyway she wanted to find somewhere where her husband could go if he got leave. Also with the prospect of the war ending soon, she couldn’t have come back to Felmersham, so she scouted round & has been very lucky to get rooms on a farm about 10 miles from here. I’m really not sorry she’s gone, we lived right on top of each other for five months & that’s really enough. My people & some New Zealand friends of theirs here are [deleted] concerned [/deleted] convinced she’s a Maori & at [missing word] half-caste – I don’t know & don’t really
[page break]
[missing word] that it makes much difference anyway.
Frances fell off a chair on to the tiles in the kitchen smack on to her face, & has given herself an awful black eye which has temporarily quite spoiled her beauty. [stamp GEPRUFT 131] I am very busy on dull days making her winter outfit, coat leggings & bonnet in blue woollen trimmed with darker blue velvet. I think its going to look alright. I have made her a blue winter dress with smocking round the waist, & there’s still lots to be done. I’m making the most of Mother’s machine.
I have had two letters from you at last, a p.c. of 4th May & letter of 14th. So glad you’d had some mail at last. There are going to be an awful lot of letters wandering round Europe when the war’s over & the boys come home! Thank you so much for your cheerful letter, you are a real darling.
Mother & I went in to Plymouth for the day the other day, to do some shopping & look round. I bought a macintosh with sou’wester in soft green for Frances, she looks very nice in it. I got some stockings too, but there’s not much to be had.
We are off for an all day picnic today as the weather is so glorious. Frances has got a small boat & is very keen to sail it in the sea.
All my love to you dearest, come home soon!
Yours always Ursula
[circled X] kiss from Frances
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Explains why her letters have been irregular since arriving in Devon. Mentions that life their is pleasant and provides long explanation of why her lodger had left. Writes that daughter fell off a chair giving herself a black eye and writes of her activities and mail she has received from him. Concludes with mention of shopping visit to Plymouth and going of for the day on picnic.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-07-31
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two page handwritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440731
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
England--Salcombe
England--Plymouth
Poland
England--Plymouth
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-07-31
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20387/EValentineUMValentineJRM440720-0001.2.jpg
47621baaacfa3e590113682fade9fedd
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20387/EValentineUMValentineJRM440720-0002.2.jpg
16b6e7a5147f61ce06312ec6281c7051
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
[inserted] 16/11 [/inserted]
[stamp GEPRUFT 128]
Little Close,
Devon Road,
Salcombe,
July 20th
My darling Johnnie,
Life is extremely peaceful here for us – I wonder what it is like for you? I am filled with dread and anxiety about you as the battle front gets nearer to you. It’s getting quite unbearable. God keep you safe, my dearest.
We have been having better weather here and have had several afternoons down on the beach. Frances simply loves the water& has now got a bathing cap, so she lies down & rolls over on the shallows & simply adores it. I have had a couple of swims too, though the water is still pretty chilly. She is getting quite brown, for she often removes her clothes and dances naked on the lawn at home – she is quite graceful now since her dancing lessons and really looks lovely with her golden curls bobbing in the sunlight. I have had her hair cut for the first time, about an inch or so off all over, really just the baby fluff, and now it curls up more crisply than ever and keeps much tidier – a great improvement altogether.
The house is now let for 2 months, at £3.10 pw. though I haven’t yet had the agreement to sign. The tenants are a man & wife – 14-year old daughter so they ought not to do an awful lot of damage if they are decent – as Mr Horne assures me they are. It makes
[page break]
me rather sad to think of other people living in our little house but I think it was the wisest thing to do in the circumstances. Anyway the house has never felt really complete since you’ve not yet lived in it, how marvellous when we are installed at last and all to ourselves!
I have been occupying my leisure time & trying to make up to my conscience for not having more work to do, by dressmaking for Frances, a pair of blue flowered pyjamas, and now a pale blue winter dress with lots of smocking on it. I think its going to look rather sweet. Next I must make her winter coat & trousers & then a blouse for me – the material for all these has been waiting for ages & I’ve just never had time to make them up! There doesn’t seem much spare time even here, for I help Mother in the house in the mornings, take Frances to the beach in the afternoon, & in the evenings we play bridge or Mah-jong! What a lazy life! Still I’m saving some money, & I suppose that’s something.
I am supposed to send off a clothing parcel to you next month but haven’t the faintest idea what to send or whether you are ever likely to receive it. I haven’t had a letter for about a month & feel awfully cut off from you somehow. How I long to have you safely home again my darling! God keep you safe & bring you safely home at last. Frances sends you a big kiss – she says she hopes you bring her a boiled egg & I tell her that’s [underlined] most [/underlined] unlikely! All my love dearest.
Yours always, Ursula.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Writes that she is concerned that the battle front is getting close to his camp. Continues with news of activities in Devon, swimming and daughter's progress. Mentions that their house is now let and describes making clothes for their daughter. Concludes with statement that she does not know what to include in next parcel.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-07-20
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two page handwritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440720
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
England--Salcombe
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-07-20
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20383/EValentineUMValentineJRM440710-0001.2.jpg
a6fbfef332d18973c9e20f487855c6e2
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20383/EValentineUMValentineJRM440710-0002.2.jpg
28fb54f7ee027e752e8c86e59e77df26
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
W/O JRM Valentine
British P/W 450
Stalag Luft III, Germany.
Little Close,
Devon Road
Salcombe, Devon
July 10th
My own darling Johnnie,
I feel most terribly guilty because I didn’t get off a letter to you at all last week. I wrote most of it, but in the rush at the end it got left in my typewriter & is still there! You will see from the address that we are down staying with Mother again. Pat and her baby are here too and we had an awful rush getting away in the end because Pat kept changing her mind as to whether she’d come with me or not – though she hadn’t any workable alternatives. We’d arranged to travel on Tuesday, but on Monday morning she decided not to come & not till 9.30 [underlined] p.m [/underlined] did she make up her mind to come after all, & then we had to walk two miles to the nearest station with her heavy luggage & the baby’s pram! & then do the packing from 11 pm onwards! So you can understand that there wasn’t much peace or time for letter writing. However, we weathered the journey alright in the end, and are now living here in peace and plenty. Frances is thrilled to be back with Grannie & Grandad & by the sea though the weather hasn’t been too good so far, & we have only bathed once. We are expecting to stay for a couple of months, if not more, and Mr Horne, the estate agent in the village & a good friend of mine is going to let the house furnished for that time and look after it for us & see that we get decent tenants. He says he will see to it that they leave when we want them to, I hope to goodness he does for it would be too awful if we couldn’t get into our own home when at last you come back to it. On the other hand
[page break]
2.
he advised strongly against leaving it empty, in case it should be taken over. So I only hope everything will be alright as he [indecipherable word] [missing word] will be. He said 3 1/2 guineas per week would be a fair rent, so I am looking forward to hearing from him whether he has actually let it & if so to whom. It was very difficult to decide what was best to be done, but Frances’s wellbeing counts above everything really I am getting terribly excited & anxious too as events move nearer towards you; I don’t suppose you will even receive this letter. I wonder where you will be these months from now? I suppose its [underlined] just [/underlined] possible you might be home. Glorious thought!
[stamp GEPRUFT 131]
We have been playing wild games of family bridge in the evenings, alternating with mah-jong, its quite fun to waste time again for a bit! On Saturday Pat & I actually went to a dance given in the village, the usual over crowded sort of hop, but very emancipating for those who so rarely dance as me! Poor Mother is having her housekeeping made more difficult because her gas supply is temporarily cut off while repairs are made, & she has to cook for us on a Primus. However, she’s doing very well, & there’s lots of produce from the garden, thanks to all Daddy’s hard work. It was an awful wrench to leave our garden just as everything was producing, there’s a lovely crop of raspberries, of which we ate all we could hold in the time at our disposal! Mr Palmer, the retired gardener who lives next door, says he will keep an eye on it for us & put in a half-day’s work when necessary.
All my love to you dearest & a big kiss from Frances.
Ursula.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Writes apologising for not sending letter previous week and announcing she is visiting parents in Devon for a couple of months. She has arranged to let their house. Describes her journey accompanied by her lodger and goes on to write about her daily activities including playing bridge and mah-jong as well as going to a dance.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-07-10
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two page handwritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440710
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
England--Salcombe
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania--Šilutė
Lithuania--Šilutė
Lithuania
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-07-10
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
entertainment
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20380/EValentineUMValentineJRM440625-0001.1.jpg
7235deaecef82b665edccc99db86c0af
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20380/EValentineUMValentineJRM440625-0002.1.jpg
ee8433c783c5d2ab4d1d961a034fc5c4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
To. W/O J.R.M. Valentine,
British P/W 450,
Stalag Luft III, Lager A,
Germany
[inserted] 7/12 [/inserted]
From Mrs. J.R.M. Valentine
Felmersham, Bottrell’s Lane,
Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks.
Sunday, June 25th 1944.
Johnnie my darling,
I have had one postcard from you this week, dated 16th April; glad you have had letters from Fred Don and Eileen Johnson, but most of your friends don’t write although they would like to because we have been constantly told that each prisoner should only receive one letter a week all told from all friends and relations, and so people like Freeman and Bish don’t write because they are afraid it may hold up my letters and your poeple's. [sic] Perhaps it isn’t actually so, but that is why they don’t write, not that they have forgotten you and anything of the sort. Anyway, I will certainly write and thank Fred for his letters to you – he always was a good and cheerful correspondent. I’m glad to hear from your postcard that you have at last found a good place to practice – though it seems hard that you should be incinerated as well as incarcerated! You will doubtless play all the more freely too if you know that you are not disturbing others. My piano practice goes on as regularly as possible but often there is gardening to be done in the evenings, specially watering the tomatoes and peas and beans, which cuts into the hour, 8 – 9 p.m. when I can get down to it. It is not really possibly to do any by day because of Frances.
The Air Ministry have given me an increase of 3/- per week, all wives’ allowances were recently increased by Parliament, but of course I have had to own up to Touche’s about it, so that it doesn’t get me anywhere. I now have £5.10 from the RAF, and of that I hope to put aside £2.10 into the bank.
Last Tuesday, after the dancing class, Frances and I went over to look at a Fair which was on in Gerrards Cross. I suggested she should try the roundabout, which was fairly mild so she did, though another little girl from the dancing class, older than Frances, was too scared. But the roundabout was too tame for our Frances, so next I took her on a very mild form of switchback, and she loved that too. But what she really had her eye on was that much more potent form of fun when you sit in two-seater chairs attached by a rod to a revolving centre, and whizz round on a metal floor at an increasing pace with sickening lurches round corners. I thought it would make her sick but she should try it once and be cured of all desire for me. Not a bit of it! She loved every moment and wanted to go round again! She seems to have a good head and tummy, so ought to make a good rock-climber! How lovely when we can go for holidays together – but probably there will be smaller hindrances by then, at least I hope so!
[stamp GEPRUFT 131]
Last evening we had a very unexpected visit – you’d never guess who – I didn’t recognise him myself for a moment- it was Stewart Kennedy, who has now walked out on his job in Ayrshire and got another somewhat similar one in Herts. Eleanor had apparently given him a list of people he had to look up, and he had worked round to us. He looked very different from my memory of our visit to their house, when he struck me as being very well turned out and self-possessed, almost arrogant. Now he was dressed in old and dirty clothes, a sports jacket and grubby corduroy trousers, looked very tanned and healthy, handsomer than I remember him, he has such striking blue eyes that I didn’t notice before, and seemed very cheerful and buoyant. He stayed for an hour or so, and had a cup of tea with us – we hadn’t anything stronger to offer him!
[page break]
You know they have a third child now, born last September I believe, called Anne. Stewart is looking for a house down here and will then bring the family down, and I suppose let their house in Troon, which he says is getting too small for them anyway now that their family has expanded. With his usual luck he has managed to get rooms on a farm somewhere in Herts and has some design of buying the whole place up. It’s amazing what one can do with his personality and plenty of money! I’m afraid I couldn’t bring it off for you, Johnnie! Anyway, if Eleanor does come down south, I hope we shall see something of them, for I like them both. We got on to politics with Stewart and had quite an interesting discussion, though I don’t agree with him at all.
I have now myself some voluntary work to do in a convalescent home near here. I have arranged to go every Friday afternoon and do more or less whatever they want. I started last Friday by getting tea and cutting bread and butter for the men and staff, and afterwards darning about two dozen pairs of socks for them. [censored words] and helps to give the illusion that one is doing something for the war effort – if only it could be something more effective, but I really don’t see how that is possible out here. Last Monday a friend of Pat’s from New Zealand came out for the day, a pleasant and talented girl, and in the evening I had consented to collect from house to house for Queen Alexandra’s Rose Day. It is a job I hate, but gave me a legitimate excuse for meeting some of our neighbours on their home ground. Most of them I have not much desire to know more of, but one I think and hope may turn into a friend. This is a Mrs. Kent, who lives in a very picturesque wooden house, chalet type in a thickly wooded garden which I have often admired. She was gardening when I got there, so we chatted about that and then other things. It seems her husband used to work in the oriental section of the British Musuem, [sic] (he now has a job with the BBC,) so he decided to take up Turkish and she learnt it with him for fun, and gradually they have become acknowledged experts, and she does a lot of translating out of Turkish and he has got his BBC job on the strength of it. I think that the ability to share one’s husband’s work, as well as his play, is a thing I covet more than good-looks or social accomplishments, it knits the two so closely together and makes the partnership really complete. I’m afraid, of course, that with your profession I could never attempt that, but I do always hope that as time goes on we may develop interests and activities in common in which I can really work with you. For one thing it is so important when children are adolescent and wanting to break away from their parents, that the parents should have plenty of interests and activities outside the family so that they are not tempted to hang on to their children when they ought to be giving them their freedom. I hope that our music may become one such bond, in which of course the children can join too, and perhaps others may develop. I feel life will be so full and rich for us, when once this ghastly period of waiting is over and we can get down to it.
[censored paragraph]
all my love to you, my dearest one, & a hug from Frances.
Always yours, Ursula.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Starts with discussion over number of letters allowed as reason why some friends refrain from writing. Glad he has found a place to practise violin and mentions an increase in allowances. Goes on to describe daughter's dance class and visit to a fair as well as other activities. Catches up with news of friends and tells of new voluntary work she has started. Continues with news of her lodger and neighbours. Concludes by thought of their future.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-06-25
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
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Two page typewritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
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Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440625
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Chalfont St. Giles
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-06-25
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20245/EValentineUMValentineJRM440617-0001.2.jpg
0601469d202170b5c48ce4ef10f1c999
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20245/EValentineUMValentineJRM440617-0002.2.jpg
8022161565d111d7d80e044306be4397
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
To. W/O Valentine, J.R.M.
British Prisoner of War no. 450,
Stalag Luft III, Lager A, Germany
From Mrs J.R.M. Valentine,
Felmersham, Bottrells Lane,
Chalfont St Giles, Bucks.
Sunday, 17th June 1944.
My darling Johnnie,
After I had finished writing to you last week and used up all the paper, I had a wonderful mail from you, letters of 12th and 26th March, and 9th April and postcard of 2nd April. It was a real thrill, what a pity it doesn’t happen more often. I will now attempt to answer some of the points, though by the time you get my reply you can’t possibly remember what you asked? However the Cozystove. This is the silver finished one that Mother had in the hall at Lido which I bought from her for the sum of £5 - £10 really but she discounted £5 because we paid for the new handbasin in the bathroom which Mrs. Stenzel broke. It certainly is a great asset in the sittingroom [sic]. Quite a lot of your remarks about the camp were censored out of your letters so I gather they weren’t too complementary. In this letter (12th March) you write very despondently about the fiddle, and it nearly makes me weep to think of all you have to contend against and of your courage in carrying on. From the later letters I gather that you managed to pull out of that particular slough of despond, as I suppose you do out of so many that you never mention. God, how I long to make you really happy again! Now for the next letter, 26th March, in which you acknowledge the arrival of 6 ”A” strings some music and the Argotone. So I’m glad they all arrived safely. It is awful to think that you haven’t had a clothing parcel for 9 months, but I’m afraid there is nothing I can do about it here. What rotten luck that two consecutive ones should have gone astray, it wouldn’t have been so bad if there had been one in between. In your letter of 9th April you touch on financial topics, say you don’t intend to audit my accounts (after I’ve kept them so religiously all this time, it’s enough to make me give up the good the good habits I have so painfully acquired!). I couldn’t help laughing at you when, after cautioning me about our increased expenditure when you are back, you immediately proceed to ask if we couldn’t have H & C laid on in the bedrooms! If you get made a partner, yes certainly! I have no idea actually how much it would cost, but personally I have other improvements that I would put higher up the list of priorities. I shouldn’t think it would cost very much to install a hand basin in our bedroom, in the corner beside the bed, for this is just nextdoor [sic] to the bathroom so it would not mean much extra piping. I suppose it would be quite possible in the spar [sic] room too, for the rising main up to the storage tank goes up one corner. I have put up the corner hanging cupboard in that particular corner, to hide the pipes, but of course that it [sic] easily removed. Personally I am not so particularly keen on basins in the bedrooms, though I suppose it is some convenience. What I would like to have done is a) have a linen cupboard, preferably with a hot pipe in it, built into the space formed by the staircase well, opening into the bathroom. That would be a proper builder’s job, but would make a lot of difference to the accommodation. Then if we still have money to throw about, I should very much to have an extra room built on on top of the garage. The garage walls are a good 9” thick so they would stand it; an extra entrance would have to be arranged from the staircase, it wouldn’t be very difficult I should think. However, all that is likely to remain in the very far distant future, for it will certainly be very difficult to get any private building jobs done soon after the war while the enormous housing programme is going on. That will give us time to save up enough money!
[page break]
Talking of spending money, Mr Brown, our next door neighbour, and I have come to terms about the piece of land with the outbuildings at the end of our garden, and I am buying it from him for £20. We have written to our respective solicitors, so now I suppose it is just a matter of time. Horswell came over the other day and was amazed that I was getting it for so little. He said that it would put have put at least £120 on to the price of the house if it had been sold with it, but he is an awful liar and you can’t believe what he says anyway. Besides which he was asking £1650 for the house before I beat him down. I am still toying with the idea of keeping rabbits and hens in it, and for that matter we could keep a cow there! (That is if we could rent somewhere to pasture it) I don’t expect I will shall do anything as drastic as that till you come home, for one thing with livestock you are so terribly tied, so we might want to have a holiday, visit our respective parents and so on. What a gorgeous thought, I can’t really visualise so much happiness yet, but it certainly seems to be coming much nearer now.
It is a gorgeous day to-day, and I am sitting out in the garden typing this with the typewriter on the tea trolley, wearing shorts and a sun bathing halter. Pat is stretched out on a rug in the bathingsuit [sic], and Frances has been playing with a bucket of water, dressed in a sunsuit too. Quite a change from the cold winds we have been putting up with. This morning Frances and I sat out on the lawn topping and tailing the gooseberries for the pie, Frances is getting quite handy with/scissors [sic], but is left handed with them as with everything else. Her dancing class and Snow-White [sic] are still the main ingredients of her imagination, so she is always hopping and skipping about and pretending to be one or other of the characters in the story, perhaps she is going to be a great actress or dancer – she certainly has enough good looks!
Yesterday evening I went over to Jordans, which is about 5 minutes on a bike, to a concert given by the Griller String Quartet in the Mayflower Barn. It was a lovely programme, Schubert’s A Minor and Haydn’s E flat quartets, and a slow movement from a quartet by Bloch, which I didn’t look forward to but turned out to be beautiful. The setting was so lovely too, in the historic old barn with sunlit lawns and flower beds beyond. I’m glad we live so near Jordans, there are lots of interesting things going on there and the enterprising and intelligent people living there. It is beautiful country too. Pat has now started to take piano lessons from Madame Fastre, a Belgian concertpianist [sic] who lives in the village. I gather that she also teaches the violin, so perhaps you will have lessons from her when you come back. I do hope you will learn from a good teacher, after struggling alone for so long you do deserve some decent tuition. She only charges 21/2 guineas for 12 lessons, so that really isn’t bad. Pat has also joined the St Giles Singers as a contralto, which ought to be fun for her. We couldn’t both join, and as she is more experienced in choir singing than I, it was obviously for her. I have been busy dressmaking and have just finished my black and white printed lawn dress which was meant to be for last summer. I think it is quite successful. Frances and I have been invited to stay at Barnet the weekend after next and I am thinking of wearing it then. There is a service at St Paul’s for prisoners of war and I have written for tickets for Ann and me. I’m hoping to work in a routine visit to the dentist this weekend too.
[handwritten] all my love to you my darling husband, and a big kiss from Frances to Father – Daddy, whom she remembers every day in her prayers.
Yours always, Ursula.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Reports arrival of several letters and postcard and attempts to answer all his questions and future plans for the house. Mentions buying adjacent plot of land getting it at a very good price and possibility of keeping rabbits. Continues with description of days activities and going to a concert locally and lodger taking piano lessons, Concludes with new that she and daughter have been invited to stay with friends.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-06-17
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Trevor Hardcastle
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two page typewritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440617
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Chalfont St. Giles
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-06-17
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
entertainment
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20241/EValentineUMValentineJRM440611-0001.1.jpg
8baa1492e410c25bd03a0a988ce0f246
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20241/EValentineUMValentineJRM440611-0002.1.jpg
1bb0ca94bc2f31c96a524431934db3c4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
To. W/O Valentine, J.R.M.,
British Prisoner of War No. 450,
Stalag Luft III, Lager A,
Germany
[inserted] 18/10 [/inserted]
From Mrs. Valentine,
Felmersham, Bottrell’s Lane,
Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks.
Sunday, June 11th 1944.
My own darling Johnnie,
There is still no news from you to answer, I do so hope that you are getting a few of my letters through, specially now that I have some photos to send at last. I am enclosing some more Polyfotos of Frances this time. I think she really looks more grown-up in some of them than she strikes me as looking in real life. But perhaps that is only because in the flesh her childish prattle dispels any illusion of great age. Worst of all, of course, the photos miss her colouring, which continues to be as lovely as I have ever seen (maternal pride notwithstanding, even you will have to admit that she is sweet!) Of course she is a demon in many ways, but sometimes she is very thoughtful and kind as well,. She simply loves her pussy, but her affection takes rather too violent forms and I still often have to intervene to save the wretched kitten from being strangled.
Nothing very much has happened this week; that is in our private domestic affairs, outside very big things have happened which you will doubtless have got to know about. The main thing at home was that Mr. Brown, our new next door neighbour, and I have come to terms about the sale of the piece of land at the end of our garden, with the outbuildings thereon. The price agreed on is £20, which I think is probably quite a bargain from our point of view, and he is apparently satisfied too, since he doesn’t use the land and couldn’t sell it to anyone else. I got the local estate agent and surveyor, Mr. Horne, a dear fatherly little man, to come up and see if the price was fair, as Mr. Brown asked me to, and Mr. Horne, having examined the outbuildings gazed at me with round eyes and said “Will he sell you all this for £20?” and afterwards announced solemnly that he thought it was the right price. The outbuilding consist of four sections in a row, first a small stable, big enough for a horse and with a manger at one end. The other end has about a dozen rabbit hutches built in, and I am now seriously considering the idea of keeping rabbits, high-class rabbits of some sort, chinchilla, or rex or silver fox, the kind whose skins are really worth selling (Ann Doxford kept quite a lot and made money out of the too). Next in the outbuilding comes a smaller section, about 4ft wide, fitted with roomy shelves on both sides. Then comes another horse box, and the last section has very large windows on both sides, and will make quite a good substitute for a greenhouse, and potting shed. Altogether the extra space and storage room will be most useful to us, and opens up all sorts of delightful possibilities in the way of poultry and rabbit keeping – there is plenty of room to keep a pony for Frances too!! I am not going to rush into a lot of livestock all at once, for one thing I haven’t the cash just now, but it is nice to think that we can expand whenever we want to. As for the £20 purchase price, that of course is going to set me right back where I started from in my attempt to save something towards the £200 we owe my people, but I do think you would approve of the purchase. I shall have to think of some quicker way of making £200!
[page break]
Pat and I were listening the other day to a woman talking on the wireless of how she and her husband had make [sic] a success of a small holding of 20 acres of rather poor land, without any previous experience and not very much capital. It set us both wishing again, for she and Frank had wanted to go into farming when he got out of the merchant service. Now they have absolutely no idea what is going to happen to them after the war, and we started building fantastic schemes of the four of us (with children) going into partnership with a small farm after the war. You would run the business side of it and presumably keep on with your job as well, Frank would do most of the actual work on the farm during the day, and Pat and I would look after the poultry, vegetables, flower garden, houses, children and all the rest. It might be great fun, but of course it would depend on whether you and the Hodsons took to each other. I like them both and think you would too, but one can never really judge for other people. I suppose it is all rather a crazy idea, but it would be jolly if it happened to turn out. We could start quite well from [inserted] here [/inserted] if only one or other of our neighbours would depart so that Frank and Pat could have their house. Pat, of course, is all in favour of our packing up and going to New Zealand and buying a large sheep farm with a piece of coast all of our own and a beach for the children to bathe. All very idyllic, but as neither we nor they have any capital, it hardly seems practicable.
Miss Pewsey, our little grocer round the corner, was ill last time we went with a very bad catarrh, and when we came home Frances told Pat very solemnly that Miss Pewsey was ill with tar in her throat. She got muddled up between soya and soil too, and almost refused her custard when I told her there was soya in it. Tomorrow there is a circus on in Chalfont St. Peter, and all being well I hope to take Frances, it ought to be quite a thrill for her.
I have now got 2 dozen tomato plants in the garden, but the broad beans have got the black fly, so all in the garden is [underlined] not [/underlined] lovely. We have had some rain recently, and I have been doing some weeding and trying to get it to look tidier. The herbaceous border is bright with large poppies, pink and scarlet, in full bloom just now, and the valerian, which grows all about the place like a weed, is in flower too and trying to justify its existence. Another of Frances’s words, which I have been meaning to tell you, is Chebud, for cherub which I almost prefer to the original!
There are such a lot of things I should like to write to you about which are forbidden, things that are happening in the world just now. I’m afraid my letters must seem awfully trivial to you sometimes, but I am not allowed to write about any but purely domestic matters, and nothing very exciting happens in the domestic round. I have kept up my practice pretty regularly this week, mostly Chopin and Debussy and have read an Austrian novel, otherwise its all more or less housework.
Monday.
4 lovely letters from you today, 12.3, 26.3, 2.4 & 7.4.44. Thank you so much dearest, will reply more fully next time.
All my love to you my own darling & big kiss from Frances. Ursula.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Writes there is still no news from him and hopes her letters are getting through. Mentions she has agreed sale of plot of land with neighbour and describes outbuildings on it. Describes listening to radio programme on small holdings with lodger and dreams of following suit. Continues with gossip and news of garden. Complains that there are many things she wished to write of but are forbidden which make her letters seem trivial.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-06-11
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two page typewritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440611
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Chalfont St. Giles
Poland
England--Chalfont St. Giles
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-06-11
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20233/EValentineUMValentineJRM440604-0001.2.jpg
a7a7eea41ebb775a4d83191029366320
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20233/EValentineUMValentineJRM440604-0002.2.jpg
47e699aab258071e8586ef9ee6e3a0ff
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
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Transcription
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Start of transcription
To. W/O Valentine,
British P/W 450
Stalag Luft III, Lager A,
Germany
[stamp GEPRUFT 67]
[inserted] 18/10 [/inserted]
From Mrs. J.R.M. Valentine,
Felmersham, Bottrell’s lane,
Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks.
Sunday, June 4th 1944
My own dearest Johnnie,
I actually had a postcard from you this week, but as it was dated 23rd January, the news wasn’t exactly hot. Anyway I was glad to gather from it that you had got yourself a new pair of boots from the Red Cross, for of course the shoes I sent wouldn’t arrive for ages, if ever. I have no idea what to send in your next parcel, sometimes I feel all hopeful and think it doesn’t matter whether I send one or not because you ought to be home before you could receive it, but other times I am in more cautious mood and realise that it is better to be on the safe side. Two lines of your postcard were blacked out, so that it doesn’t leave very much over for me to reply to. You say you are fit, and that is the main thing. Also you say that you love me, and that is more important – not really [underlined] more [/underlined] important I suppose, for if you were ill, life would be a nightmare, but it makes everything worth while for me. You have seemed particularly near to me this week, so that two or three times I wanted to down tools and just cry for longing for you – particularly on the 30th May, terrible anniversary. Remember how wretched we used to feel if we were apart for more than a month? And now it is two solid years – grim years, but not totally wasted, I am sure. You are learning the fiddle, and Dutch, and have discovered your love for music, and I, though I haven’t added anything much to my intellectual accomplishments, have been able to do some of the groundwork in getting our home together, and Frances has grown up from a crawling baby to an independent and self-possessed young lady of three. These two years may not have been wasted but they have been quite long enough. They have seemed pretty arid to me, though I can do more or less what I like with my time, so what they have been like for you I can barely imagine. We shall just have to blot them out with the happiness and intensity of our living when you come back.
Frances has had quite a busy week. Tuesday was her dancing class as usual; on Thursday I took her to the cinema for the first time to see “Snowwhite [sic] and the Seven Dwarfs”, as this story plays such a large part in her imagination as well as her dancing class just now. Unfortunately we had to sit through another film first, which though not unsuitable was unutterably boring. However, she stuck it out, and at last got her reward. Of course a good bit of the humour went over her head but she grasped the main points of the story, and thought she was duly impressed by the wicked queen and the huntsman and so on, she wasn’t really frightened and doesn’t seem to have suffered from bad dreams on that account. She really behaved very well during the show though of course she chattered a good bit – but then the audience was mostly children and they all chattered about the film. Then her third engagement this week was a birthday party on Saturday at the house of one of the little girls at the dancing class, Barbara Kelly. It was at Gerrards Cross, and mothers were not invited, so I took her there and provided myself with a book which I lay and read in a secluded part of the common till it was time to fetch her again – a very satisfactory arrangement, much better than trailing home and back again. Frances seems to have had a wonderful time. She managed to get hold of Mr. Kelly, a large man well over 6ft and getting on for 50, and persuaded him to dance Snow White with her, and at intervals during the afternoon was to be seen arabesquing gracefully across the lawn with huge Mr. Kelly lumbering after her like a great bear.
[page break]
We have been having a special “Salute the Solder” savings week in the village this week, and as I have now got about £40 in house and establishment accounts besides the £50 which you gave me out of your RAF account, I have put this £50 into savings certificates – not that it wasn’t doing just as much good in my bank account but one may as well play the game. There have been rejoicing of all sorts in the village, and I actually went to one dance in the village hall given by the British Legion Womens Section. It wasn’t very thrilling, though I quite enjoyed dancing a bit again; the only reasonable person I met was a U.S. Sgt, an Austrian by birth, who speaks the same languages as I do and knows and like the same places and things. He drops in in the evenings sometimes, and the three of us argue about politics and international affairs and everything under the sun.
Tuesday, June 6th.
The great day has arrived at last, I hope you will have heard about it as we are hearing. There must be considerable rejoicings in all the prison camps. Here we feel a mixture of tenseness and relief, relief that at last it has started, but tenseness because it is going to be pretty awful from now till victory. There is so little that ordinary housewives can do to help. The ordinary daily round has seemed an awful anti-climax today, but of course Frances went to her dancing class as usual. I suppose that even when the armistice is signed I shall still keep on washing up and sweeping and dusting! My day will come later, so don’t be surprised if on your return the house looks far from clean, I shall probably have gone on strike at last!
Last Wednesday I cycled over to Jordans to look at the new Junior School recently started there. It is a delightful place, just a large hut really with two large classrooms, cloakroom, kitchen, and the sweetest little lavatories you have ever seen, small and low! I should very much like Frances to go there when she does start, perhaps in the autumn, I can take her on the back of my bicycle in about 5 minutes, and I am sure the companionship would do her good even though they might not teach her much at the tender age of 3 1/2. She, of course, is very keen to go to school. Pat has now decided to have some music lessons (piano) from a Madame Vastri (I suppose that is how she spells her name) who lives in the village. She started yesterday, and is now overwhelmed with a programme of scales and exercises she has to do for next week. Between the two of us we keep the poor old piano going, for I have been practising regularly every evening from 8 – 9, and feel I am getting a little better.
I have bought a dozen tomato plants from Mrs. Sharpe for the very modest sum of 3d each and have stuck them in, but since then the weather has been cold. The runner and french beans are coming up, and so are the Argentine and South African marrows I have sown. The weather has been terribly changeable, on Whit Monday it was simple baking, and after doing a large wash we made some sandwiches and took a picnic lunch up into the woods, Frances and baby and all, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.
I do hope you will like the Polyfoto snaps of Frances that I am sending herewith. More to follow. Our kitten is coming on well, & is nearly clean now.
All my love to you, my own darling, it won’t be long now till we are reunited.
Always yours & longing for you, Ursula.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Reports receiving postcard he sent in January an glad he got new boots from Red Cross and discusses whether she should send more parcels or not. Laments over time missed while he has been a prisoner despite fact he is learning violin and Dutch. Continues with news of daughter and successful "Salute the Soldier" week. Mentions accounts and going to British Legion dance and meeting an American. Notes arrival of great day at last and assumes rejoicing in prisoner of war camps. Writes of visiting new junior school where she would like daughter to go. Concluded with gardening news.
Date
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1944-06-04
Contributor
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Tricia Marshall
Format
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Two-page typewritten letter
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
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Identifier
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EValentineUMValentineJRM440604
Coverage
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Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Chalfont St. Giles
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-06-04
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
entertainment
prisoner of war
Red Cross
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20231/EValentineUMValentineJRM440528-0001.2.jpg
301f54cdf9c7cbdcea382431615a588b
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20231/EValentineUMValentineJRM440528-0002.2.jpg
664d983f4101e4a2308c445d28411188
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
To W/O Valentine,
British P/W 450, Stalag Luft III Lager A
Germany
[ink stamp] [inserted] 20/8 [/inserted]
From Mrs. Valentine, Felmersham, Botterell’s Lane,
Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks.
Sunday, May 28th 1944
My own darling Johnnie
There is still no mail from you – I have a nasty feeling that letters are going to become scarcer and scarcer until they practically cease to arrive as the war draws to its climax. However, if the fact that mail is getting rarer means that the war is drawing closer to its end, I can put up with it quite stoically. Of course it is far worse for you to be cut off from news of home – I do hope that the photographs I have been sending lately will arrive. The one enclosed today is of Pat Hodson and her infant Carol, the latter as you can see has got a very snub nose, but she is a sweet baby and very healthy and good. Frank, Pat’s husband has now gone back from leave, and the house seems very quiet and subdued without him, he is such a cheerful sort of fellow. Pat and I have taken up our various activities with renewed vigour, and have tried to organise a timetable to ensure that we get at least a few of the things done that we want to do. Of course nothing much reasonable ( i.e. brainwork) can be done during the day while the sprogs are around, but when we have got rid of them, at 7 p.m. we have a quick supper, during which we both read, then I have half an hour on the piano while pat practices her typing, an accomplishment which she wishes to acquire, heaven knows why, then Pat goes at the piano and I pitch into something else, generally mending or ironing or fruit bottling ( I have bought a pounds of gooseberries from old Mr. Palmer next door and bottled them – ours are not ready yet and anyway there will be very few.) I have decided to take up Russian again and see if I can’t learn it properly this time. I haven’t actually started yet, but Sunday evening is dedicated to my letter to you. We are having simply gorgeous weather just now, much to Pat’s annoyance since it was horribly cold all the time Frank was here, and I have to spend some of my evenings watering the more urgent vegetables – the ground is terribly dry again. I have planted out the bush tomatoes and cucumbers, seedlings which Daddy gave me at Easter and which I have been nursing ever since. Some of the French beans are through but not the runners yet. The main crop of peas are coming on quite nicely and I had the unpleasant job of sticking them yesterday, its awfully hard on the hands.
Nothing very striking has happened this week. At the beginning looked after Carol a fair amount while Pat and Frank went out together, Tuesday Frances had her dancing class as usual, and on Thursday evening Frank departed . Then we changed bedrooms back again, and I am glad to be in my own again. I have now got the green and white table lamp which someone gave us for a wedding present beside the bed for a reading lamp, so that I can indulge I the vice of reading in bed ( I never get enough reading in otherwise). I have just finished “ Madam Curie” by her daughter Eve, a really fascinating book which makes one feel that one must fit in a little intellectual work beside the housework, since she did such a prodigious amount as well as bring up a family. ( of course she didn’t have to do much housework , lucky thing!) On Saturday, just as I was preparing to cook the meat and make the pastry, a strange sight appeared in our drive, to wit Mr. Horswell, in a smart blue lounge suit, astride a foaming charger. We went out to greet him, and he asked me if I would like a ride, so up I hopped, in cotton dress, no stockings and an apron, and took the beast out for a trot. luckily it turned out to be quite tame, and we had quite a pleasant ride. But I am still stiff from it, though I wasn’t up more than 10 minutes!
[page break]
Frances is very keen to have a pony, not content with a kitten, but I have prudently told her to wait and ask father! Really, though, I should love to have her taught riding fairly young, there is a good bit of hacking done round about here, I often see one woman who seems to conduct a riding school out with youngsters of various ages, and I do hope we shall be able to rise to having her taught at well.
I believe I have told you in earlier letters that at the end of our garden there is a piece cut off, which geometrically should obviously belong to us, on which Mr. Horswell built himself a massive series of outhouses, about 10ft tall and constating of various sections, in at least one of which he used to keep a horse, so you can judge the size. The rest of the ground he used as a chicken run. I have been coveting this piece of land for a long time, the outhouses would be most useful, as greenhouse, garden shed and potting shed, house for the children to have as their own to play in, and general dump, and the extra bit of land would make all the difference to our garden. So at last I plucked up courage to approach our new neighbour, Mr. Brown, who looks like a peppery retired Colonel but told Pat he was something to do with the Navy – anyway he is peppery and rather queer – he has a passion for airing shirts all round his garden. He turned out to be quite docile, to my surprise, and said at once that he would consider my request either to sell or rent the land to us. That was yesterday, presumably he has been brooding on it but nothing further has happened. I really haven’t the faintest idea how much the land is worth, it is not large, but the building is probably worth something, though not to anyone else, since I shouldn’t think it could be taken away. I do so hope he will be reasonable.
This afternoon Frances and I went out for a picnic, and I took my paintbox and perpetrated a sketch of a scene that I love particularly among the many lovely views round here. This morning I went to church.
Frances continues to grow and flourish, and her hair is getting longer, curlier and thicker, so that it is quite a problem to do. The brushing and combing sessions night and morning are a trial, and I am now doing it with a ribbon tied right around her head keeping the long hair out of her eyes, and she looks very sweet like that. Her little limbs are growing so straight and firm, I am really proud of them and only wish my legs were as nice as hers! She hasn’t made any very memorable remarks recently, but she keeps up a constant chatter. She is very fond of her kitten and is learning to be a little more gentle with it. The kitten incidentally has started on a course of house-training, we put a tin lined with newspaper in the corner of the kitchen where it usually makes its messes, and put some sand in it, and to our joy and surprise the cat now performs in the tin and kicks the sand about like anything .Pat and Frank wanted to give me a present for the garden, presumably because I looked after their infant for them, but of course this is not the time of year for transplanting trees or bushes. However, they bought one stripling bush, which is due to have a lovely misty blue flower when grown, I can’t read the label but it is something like Ceanalba, and they also gave me 15/- to buy roses in the autumn when they can be transplanted. Wasn’t it kind of them? I shall use the money to buy roses for the enlarged pergola I want to make in the autumn dividing the lawn from the vegetable garden. There are about 6 climbing roses already there, but I think more will be needed , and I should like to plant clematis, honeysuckle and jasmine as well. The herbaceous border looks like nothing on earth this year but I am hoping to improve that nest year too.
[inserted] All my love to you, my dearest, I long for you so terribly, Ursula. [/inserted]
End of transcription
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Notes that mail is getting slower as war draws top climax but hopes photographs she sent will arrive. Describes lodgers baby and recent activities including intention to take up learning Russian again. Continues with description of daily routine and outhouse buildings on adjacent land that she would like to obtain. Mentions starting negotiations with owner. Writes of daughters activities, progress and her kitten.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-05-28
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Jan Morgan
Format
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Two page typewritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440528
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Chalfont St. Giles
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-05-28
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20227/EValentineUMValentineJRM440522-0001.1.jpg
3b79a47145afddf4ca37907eaad7c114
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20227/EValentineUMValentineJRM440522-0002.1.jpg
7babb3e6b354dcd4621828224b49cacd
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
To W/O J.R.M. Valentine,
British P/W 450,
Stalag Luft III, Lager A
Germany.
[postmark] GEPRUFT 52 [/postmark]
From Mrs. J.R.M. Valentine,
Felmersham, Bottrell’s Lane,
Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks.
Monday, May 22nd 1944.
My darling Johnnie,
This letter probably won’t contain much sense, because I am writing it at the diningtable still littered with supper things, at which Pat and her husband Frank are sitting smoking their cigarettes and making rude remarks at me. They have volunteered to do the washing up for me, chiefly because I have looked after their baby all day while they went gadding off to Windsor, so I am making the best of it. (They [underlined] will [/underlined] keep talking!)
This week has been pretty hectic. It started off with Vera Bowack arriving on Monday evening with Desmond FitzGerald, an old friend of Norman’s, for supper. I am wondering if perhaps Desmond may some day take Norman’s place, he is quite a decent type, considerably older than Vera but on the other hand pretty well off. Vera stayed for the night, and left next day after lunch on the same bus as Frances and I went to the dancing class. So you can imagine there wasn’t much time over that day. When we got back, Pat was all ready to depart and I had to take over the baby. You see, her husband was due to arrive in London on leave that night, and she went up to meet him. So I bathed the two sprogs and put them to bed, and then the next item on the programme was the arrival of Barbara for two nights. I wanted to meet her, as I knew she had some awkward luggage, but didn’t know quite which train she was coming on. However I worked it out that she might arrive at the bus stop at 8 p.m. or 8.27. At 7.50, when I wanted to get out my bicycle to whizz down and meet her, I couldn’t find the garage key anywhere. I searched frantically, but it was nowhere to be found, so in desperation I seized the triangular file and proceeded to burgle the garage by filing through the padlock. I got down to the bus stop soon after, but she didn’t arrive on either bus, so I decided I must go back and see that the children were alright, and then go down again and meet the 9 p.m. bus. This I did, and was half way down to the Pheasant again when I met her trudging up the hill, an enormous brown paper parcel under one arm, a cake tin with holes in the lid on the other, and a strange lady walking beside her carrying her suitcase on her bicycle. This kind woman had gone right out of her way to help Barbara, who had succeeded in arriving on a bus that wasn’t even down on the timetable! It turned out that Barbara had brought Frances a kitten, a wee ginger job, five weeks old, with blue eyes and white spats, also two large water colours for us from a lady she knows in Huntingdon, and a large suitcase full of winter things to be parked in her trunks in our garage. The water colours are good, I think, views of Scottish lakes. One is very large 3’ X c.2 1/2’ with mount, and I am having some difficulty in getting them [deleted] mounted [/deleted] framed. However, it ought to look very nice in the dining room over the sideboard, where there is a large wallspace. Next morning was fairly peaceful, for Barbara helped with the baby, I bathed her and Barbara administered the bottle. At tea-time Pat and Frank arrived, and there was great uproar. Frank is a charming fellow [words missing] most unassuming and great fun. I am sure you would like him, and I do hope that we can all meet together after the war. You would like Pat too. It is nice to have a man about the house after all these years of undiluted feminine society, - not that I see very much of him! However he has done one or two odd jobs, he is quite handy as carpenter and so on, and gives his daughter her bottle with the utmost sangfroid. Yesterday was their fourth wedding anniversary, and the baby was christened down at St. Giles
[page break]
church. I was godmother, and managed to find a small silver bracelet in Gerrards Cross for half a guinea which I presented to the infant. We had a teaparty to celebrate the occasion, at which were present Frank’s mother, two sisters and a girl who lives with them, and on Pat’s side Matron from Fircroft (since all Pat’s relations are in New Zealand). We had a posh cake, decorated with some of the flowers I saved from our wedding cake. It was rather amusing about that too. Pat was sent several cakes for Christmas and she gave away most of them but kept one specially for Carol’s christening [sic] When the great day drew near she asked her mother-in-law to send out this parcel, which she hadn’t unpacked, and when it arrived here it turned out to be not a cake at all but some other tins of food! So I had to set to and bake a cake after all. Anyway the christeneing [sic] went off according to plan, except that Carol set up a howl on entering the church and kept it up all through the service, which wasn’t nearly so long as Frances’s. Do you remember that, and how good Frances was? Carol wore Frances’s christening gown and the Shetland shawl. Frances wore one of her sweetest embroidered muslin dresses from India, and her white fur coat, as it was a very chilly afternoon. She had a bright blue ribbon round her hair, and looked really adorable. You have a really lovely little daughter, you know. Do come home soon before she is too grown-up. I grudge every week that passes now when you don’t see her. She is thrilled to bits with her kitten, and I am afraid she is going to throttle the poor little creature with her excessive passion. I have to intervene constantly to save its life, but the kitten seems to like it and always goes back to Frances for more. It is as yet by no means clean, and I am trying to train Frances to wipe up after her cat, but she is not too good.
Today Pat and Frank went off to Windsor, as I said, ostensibly to go on the river, but instead they spent most of their time shopping, and have bought among other things a chest of drawers. Perhaps Pat will be able to keep her room more tidy when she has got more drawer space, though I doubt it!
Did I tell you in my last letter that Mother had offered [inserted] to lend [/inserted] us the small beige carpet which used to be in the nursery at Lido? It arrived today, and I have put it in Frances’s room, and the matting rug which was in there is now down in the kitchen, and the whole place looks very much better.
The garden is still being most unsatisfactory. I don’t know if this season is being particularly difficult, or if our soil is poor and if it is just that I am a rotten gardener, but anyway the result is the same, mothing [sic] grows. I have thinned out the parsnips and the lettuces and the spinach and weeded the early potatoes, and it is all fairly tidy, but it just doesn’t grow! Admittedly the ground is still too dry and we had two or three sharps [sic] frosts this month and the weather is definitely cold, but somehow other people’s gardens look a little better off than mine. I am sending you this week the photo of the front of the house, which the D & P people simply didn’t print the first time. Sorry about the splodge of light right across it, there must be a leak of light in the bellows of my camera, as so [words missing] [inserted] many of my snaps suffer [/inserted from this defect. However I hope the photo will give you some idea of our establishment, which as you will see is not terribly original in design, but nevertheless quite a solid and reliable structure. Frances stands in the gate [inserted] way [/inserted], from which the actual gates are still missing, awaiting repairs. My aunt Con writes that Miss Hoare, your [indecipherable word] [indecipherable word] has just died of heart failure, I’m so sorry - for your sake too. All my love to you, my darling, I long for you terribly, yours always, Ursula.
End of transcription
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Writes of daily activities involving lodger going off to meet husband leaving baby with Ursula as well as talk of other visitors including her sister. Continues with description of other activities and catches up with family gossip. Concludes with lament over unsuccessful gardening efforts.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-05-22
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Robin Christian
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two page typewritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440522
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Chalfont St. Giles
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
England--Buckinghamshire
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-05-22
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20224/EValentineUMValentineJRM440514-0001.1.jpg
55c5cc25b50862607b438655b9469735
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20224/EValentineUMValentineJRM440514-0002.1.jpg
52925977cae862f29c534728804ced20
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
W/O Valentine, J.R.M.,
British P/W No. 450,
Stalag Luft III, Lager A,
Germany
[stamp GEPRUFT 52]
From Mrs. J.R.M. Valentine,
Felmersham, Bottrell’s Lane,
Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks.
Sunday May 14th 1944
[inserted] 13/10 [/inserted]
My darling Johnnie,
This week has been one of frustrated hopes. In the first place, no mail from you. Then we had arranged quite a full programme of entertainment, all of which fell through at the last moment except one. I had invited the Horswell’s to tea on Tuesday, and apparently Mr. Horswell simply forget [sic] to pass the invitation on to his wife, anyway she knew nothing of it. However that was all to the good, for we were late getting back from the dancing class anyway. Wednesday we were expecting Barbara, but she has postponed her visit till next week. Thursday we invited to tea a girl who lives in the village with her twin daughters of 14 months, her husband was killed in Africa. She duly came, she is a nice type, also desperately looking for a house, for she has to get out of her present cottage in August. On Friday Vera Bowack was due to come, but she wrote that she could get a lift up to town on Monday, so we are expecting her then instead. So instead I went in to Gerrards Cross on Friday to see Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in “Wuthering Heights”, thoroughly enjoyed [inserted] it [/inserted] and wept buckets. Do you remember our seeing a stage version together in Oxford? I enjoyed that expedition more, for other reasons!
So the chief event of the week after all was the purchase of a pair of shears – quite an achievement these days, I can tell you. They only cost 5/11 too, and seem to be quite good. As a result I spent Saturday afternoon clipping the edges of the front and back lawns and trimming two little ornamental bushes in the front garden. The second rhododendron is now in bud, it is a dark purple one, and will make a nice contract with the white. The irises are just coming out too, they seem to be mostly white. We had some longed-for rain last night, quite a good heavy shower, and everything looks much brighter today. So I have been busy on the lettuces this afternoon and have thinned and transplanted dozens and dozens. So if my letter contains less sense than usual it is because the blood went to my head through a surfeit of transplanting!
I had a letter from Grunfeld this week, enclosing a copy from Nilson describing a visit from a Swedish representative of some sort to you. I suppose this is a different chap from the one your father told me about, is it? You live in quite a social whirl!
Frances has recently begun to show marked signs of independence in the management of her own affairs, such as teeth cleaning, hand washing and other toilet requisites. She has to be supervised of course, but it is all to the good that she should want to do it on her own. She is also very keen on laying the table for me, and she doesn’t do too badly at it; gives us large forks for desert occasionally and that sort of thing, but on the whole she is pretty good – for her age. She is awfully sweet with Carol too, and makes herself quite useful to Pat is [sic] collecting and assembling the requisites for Carol’s bath.
[page break]
In one of the photos I am sending herewith you will behold your daughter sitting in a cardboard box, deeply engrossed in the intricate business of putting a nappy on her Bunny Rabbit. She has even learnt to fold Carol’s nappies into double triangles. The photo of me with Frances in the swing was taken last autumn down in Devon by Peter, who has only just sent me a print. The photo of Ann isn’t very flattering of her, we had rather a struggle with Frances to make her stand still. That is the dining-room window to the right of Ann, in the photo of me and Frances taken at the same spot you can see something of the espalier pear against the wall. I am sending all the snaps at once, instead of spreading them out over as many letters as possible, because I am afraid mail communications may get even worse when things really get moving.
The main preoccupation at the moment is the news that Pat’s husband Frank is coming on leave next week. Pat is in an absolute fever, has gone clean off her food, and spends all day making herself new clothes to greet the occasion. He hasn’t had a week’s leave for over six months, and has been in one or two notable actions, so there will be great celebrations. The baby is to be christened on Sunday 21st May, their wedding anniversary, and I am to be one of its godmothers. So I am busy making myself a new dress too, with some material which I bought last summer and never had time to make up. It is a black and white printed lawn, from Liberty’s, and I do hope it will look equal to the occasion. There will be a few relations of theirs to tea after the christening, luckily Pat already has a cake sent for the occasion. While her husband is here they are going to use our bedroom – I do hope you don’t mind, but it seemed ridiculous not to offer it to them. This will be a sort of dress rehearsal, pale and mild in comparison, for your home-coming. I wonder if I shall go as goofy as Pat has done!
Mother has very nobly written to offer to lend us the little beige carpet which used to be in the nursery at Lido, and I have accepted most thankfully. If it comes I shall put it in Frances’s room, and then the matting which covers, but does not grace, the floor in there at present, will come down into the kitchen, and the shocking old rug at present in the kitchen, which used to be over the tank in the loft at Lido, can be slung out. It will be a great improvement all round, and a considerable relief to me, for now the rug which I am knitting with so much labour out of string can be a hearthrug, as I first intended, instead of having to be made three times as big to go into Frances’s bedroom.
I am having great difficulty in saving my £2 per week now with our enlarged household. After a bit I saw it was hopeless, and only aimed at 30/-, since of necessity it must cost more to feed four than two, but even 30/- doesn’t always get saved. However, house a/c has a credit of about £20 at the moment, so it will survive. The RAF supplements and Pat’s £2.00 per week go regularly into establishment account of course, so we are really doing alright. I long to spend lots of money on the garden, buying bedding plants and perennials for the herbaceous border, but all seedlings and plants are a wicked price now, 2d each for antirhinums and so on, so I am trying to be very strong minded, make the best of what is there and concentrate on vegetables this year. I have sown dwarf and runner beans, and today put in some fancy marrow seeds, which I am trying for the first time. But I am not really pleased with the way things are growing.
I love you so much darling.
Yours always, Ursula
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Whites that she has had no mail from him that week and that some plans for week fell through. Describes other activities of shopping, gardening and mentions receiving information about visit to his camp by by Swedish representatives. Writes of daughter's progress and describing photograph she is sending. Continues with news of impending visit by lodger's husband catches up with family news and gossip and mentions her savings plans.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-05-14
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two page typewritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440514
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Chalfont St. Giles
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-05-14
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20222/EValentineUMValentineJRM440507-0001.1.jpg
8a755ea837422afc4ea8ec12998095fe
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20222/EValentineUMValentineJRM440507-0002.1.jpg
f6a300de8cfa43f416cc587a36071426
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
W/O J.R.M. Valentine,
British {P/W 450,
Stalag Luft III, Lager A
Germany
[inserted] 20/9 [/inserted]
From Mrs. J.R.M. Valentine,
Felmersham, Bottrell’s Lane,
Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks.
Sunday, May 7th 1944
My darling Johnnie,
I have done quite well for mail from you this week, and at last your letters addressed direct to this house are beginning to arrive. I have yours of 27.2. and the postcard you wrote to Frances for her birthday, which thrilled her very much. It is so nice to think that now you know at [sic] little about your future home, and I do so hope that you are satisfied with it; I am, although of course there are always things I want to do to improve it. Anyway I think we ought to be happy here; perhaps we should be happy anywhere providing we were together, but much more so in a little home of our own. I have had a terrific “day of rest” today. It was my turn for cooking, not going to church (on alternate weeks I cook on Saturday and go to church on Sunday, and on the others Pat goes to church). So I did a vast bake, because we seem to be having a lot of people coming next week, including I hope Barbara and Vera Bowak; so I baked two cakes, jam tarts, flapjacks, savoury twists, three pies of various sorts, as well as the dinner. After lunch Pat was going out to tea so I had to go down to the bus with her to help her with the infant, and after that Frances and I came, and I proceeded to turn out hall and dining-room and do the floors with a new type of polish which Mother has found very good, called Glo-coat, which one paints on once and then no more has to be done to it for weeks. So I thought I would try it, and the polish is certainly very nice, but I find that it took a lot of colour out of the floor, which I had just got to a nice rich colour by daily polishing with Cedar oil, so I am not sure I am so pleased after all. Then I gave Frances her tea, and proceeded to have a session on the piano. I really must get into action again to be ready for you, besides I enjoy it so much, but it does seem difficult to make time for it. I don’t know whether it is just that I am getting used to the piano, but it doesn’t sound at all bad to me now, and I really enjoy playing. This was interrupted by a visit from a local Red Cross bigwig, asking if she could help me with my parcels to you. We discussed the question of my doing a spot of work for the Red Cross locally, so I may find myself charring in a hospital soon! Any moment now Pat will be home from her tea-party, and then it will be supper time, and after that I suppose more sewing. We both find that we never have time to do any reading, so now by mutual consent we devote supper time to reading, prop up our books in front of us and only speak to ask for more food or to read out juicy passages from our respective books. At present I am reading a book of Joad’s called Guide to Modern Thought, a very lucid precis of modern scientific and philosophical theories on life, and find it most interesting. Perhaps you will hardly believe it, but sometimes I actually [underlined] envy [/underlined] you! I envy you this unparalleled chance to tackle a new subject and extend the scope of your mind. I often tell myself that now is my chance to do the same thing, because when you come back we shall have other things to do with our evenings, but somehow there is just never time, so I have decided to concentrate on trying to do better some of the things I have already started, such as the piano, wood-engraving etc (though I haven’t got around to this latter yet.)
This past week has been awfully full again. Monday was washday as usual, and then Pat had a friend to tea, the Matron of Fircroft, the post-maternity home of Fulmer Chase. Tuesday was dancing class, the beginning of a new term. There was a much bigger attendance, and
[page break]
as usual Frances prances with the best of them. On Wednesday we had a friend of Pat’s to stay, a Mrs. Slater with whom Pat stayed when she was working in a bio-chemistry lab in Oxford. Mrs. Slater is a most interesting and well-informed person, and I very much enjoyed her visit (lunch on Wednesday till Thursday morning). She is a bit of an expert on antique furniture, and admired our Queen Ann cabinet. I also showed her the oval tray which your Mother gave you for your birthday, and she said it was Sheraton, or at least made between about 1790 and 1820, which confirmed my original surmise that it is a genuine antique; it is certainly very lovely, I should love to know how much your Mother paid for it. She got it from Searle’s second hand store in Barnet, so it is possible that she didn’t have to give much for it. Mrs. Slater has travelled a good bit on the continent and speaks various languages, so we had a lot in common. On Friday I went into Gerrards Cross to collect the films which Pat and I had developing there, and I hope to enclose some of the snaps with this. Unfortunately my camera is still leaking light rather badly, so the photos aren’t too good, but they may give you a slight idea of the house. That was my one and only film, and I am afraid it is very unlikely that I shall get hold of another. In a week or two the Polyfotos of Frances ought to be ready.
I have been doing a good bit of gardening at odd times, have sown more peas, also the runner and dwarf beans, and more spinach and lettuce, and the winter greens. Nothing is doing particularly well because the ground is so terribly dry. We had a little rain this week but not enough to make any real impression.
I quite agree with your suggestion that we should convert the gramophone with an electric pickup. I have already got Peter on to the subject, but in the end decided that it is an unnecessary expense for me just now. We can do it any time, when you come home, and anyway I haven’t got many records – most of those at Lido belonged to Barbara or Mother. Doubtless we shall collect more in time, I hope so at least, but just now there is 200% purchase tax on them so I am not likely to be buying any. Your wireless is working very well, and that is a great blessing. Another of my projects has fallen through, viz fitting an immersion heater in the hot water tank. The electricity company say that they cannot further increase the lead at present, so we shall just have to do without it this summer. I haven’t heard any more from David Haes about the cupboard he is going to make someday for our bedroom, but I don’t suppose it is any use worrying him about it for he is most unlikely to have the timber. He said he would put out [sic] name down on the list, and that is probably all we can do for the present, though I would very much like to have it by the time you come back. I have bought some pinks for the garden and have planted them along the edge of the bed just outside the diningroom [sic] window. They are Mrs. Sinkins, i.e. white ones with a strong scent, and should make an attractive edging if they do well. The house has been full of flowers this week, tulips and lilac from the garden, and big bowls of bluebells from the woods round about. One of the rhododendrons in the front garden is now in bloom, it is a very pale pink. The other seems to be a later variety, I hope it will turn out to be a dark red.
I am awfully sorry to hear of Frank Pepper’s total lack of mail. I am going to write to Olga and will inquire tactfully about Vera. She must be a pretty low sort of toad, the future doesn’t look too bright for them.
All my love to you, & a big kiss to Father-Daddy from Frances. Yours always, Ursula.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Reports arrival of several of his letters and postcard and she is glad he now knows something of their new home. Describes her recent activities of cooking and notes impending visitors. Continues with domestic chat and mentions visit of Red Cross bigwig discussing her volunteering. Writes of daily activity, book she is reading and other domestic gossip. Discusses gramophone and records and notes unlikely to by any as there is 200% purchase tax on them. Concludes with news that they cannot fit electric immersion heater as insufficient power to house. Concludes with intention to enquire about to wife of a prisoner colleague who is getting no mail.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-05-07
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two page typewritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440507
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Chalfont St. Giles
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-05-07
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Red Cross
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20220/EValentineUMValentineJRM440430-0001.1.jpg
093aed023f58d6962cca5c754fdd8a78
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20220/EValentineUMValentineJRM440430-0002.1.jpg
da27ef93ba707f49fd9d6aa78b2fcd65
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
W/O J.R.M. Valentine,
British P/W 450,
Stalag Luft III, Lager “A”,
Germany
[inserted] 2/9 [/inserted]
[stamp GEPRUFT 125]
From Mrs. J.R.M. Valentine,
Felmersham, Bottrell’s Lane,
Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks.
Sunday, April 30th 1944
My darling Johnnie,
Another week of glorious weather – how I wish it would rain! The ground is awfully dry and all the seedlings are so very slow in coming on. I do so want to get some moderately good results out of our first season in the garden, but it doesn’t look as though I shall unless things get moving soon.
On Wednesday of this week Frances and I went into Windsor with Gwen Milliner (Horswell’s daughter) and her little girl Pemma, and her friend Mary Mogy and [underlined] her [/underlined] small daughter Leila, in order to have the three small girls photographed. It is only about 3/4 hour by bus into Windsor, a very pleasant ride, so that it is quite easy to have a day on the river now and then, and we hope to do this some time this summer. Last Wednesday there wasn’t really time, for we had appointments with the Polyfoto place at 3.30, then we had tea and caught a bus back soon after 5 p.m. The photos of Frances won’t be ready for 3 weeks, but I have great hopes that they will be good, for she looked very pleasant and cheerful all the while they were being taken, and in fact thoroughly enjoyed the whole business. Afterwards we went for a walk by the river and wished there were time to take out a boat, but anyway we hope to go again sometime and have a real picnic.
On Thursday another notable event occurred – I went to the pictures! I haven’t been for simply ages, but they were showing Jane Eyre at Gerrards Cross, with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles, which both Pat and I wanted to see, so I went on Thursday and she on Friday. It is a great advantage being together so that we can sometimes arrange an outing for one or the other. On Monday Pat was going into Gerrards Cross for some shopping, and took Frances with her, while I looked after the baby, also quite a nice change. I am getting quite practised at handling a little one again and shan’t feel quite so strange if ever my turn comes again (may it be soon!). On Saturday Irene Galitzenstein and her fiance, a physicist whom Ba used to work with at one time, came out for the day. After a bad start, because I told them to take a bus which we afterwards discovered didn’t run on Saturdays, we had a very pleasant day together, and went for a walk in the afternoon to show them the beauties of our countryside. The orchards and gardens are just full of bloom and blossom, and the woods are carpeted with bluebells, so that it really all looked beautiful. Afterwards Irene tried your new violin, and seemed to think it is quite a good one, specially when the bow is repaired, so I do hope you will be satisfied with it. However, if you get the chance to bring home the fiddle the Red Cross are sending you, which I hope may have arrived by now, do so by all means.
On Friday Pat went to see some second hand furniture which was on sale in the village, and we went with her, for she seems to imagine that I know something about furniture – quite erroneously. Anyway we saw a three piece sitting room suite, couch and two chairs, in good condition, for 30 guineas, and she bought it. The trouble is that she has no real prospect of setting up house – she hasn’t a house for one thing, but then if you wait to get a house before getting any
[page break]
furniture, you’d find you couldn’t get any, so you have to start somewhere. This suite is a sound investment anyway, for she could always sell if [sic] for at least that price. Meantime, storage is the problem, so we have this afternoon re-stowed the garage and now there is plenty of room for it in there. I have slung up your bicycle on the roof, which I ought to have done long ago only I couldn’t manage it on my own, and it all looks quite neat and tidy. I have done a good bit of gardening today too (besides going to church this morning), and have planted out all the maincrop potatoes now. The vegetable garden now contains the following, starting from the end nearest the house: one row each of artichokes, shallots and parsnips, two rows each early and second early potatoes then five rows maincrop dittos. 3 rows onions, 2 carrots, 1 beetroot, 2 salsafy, 1 seakale beet, 1 late onions, then a gap, then early carrots, cauliflower seedlings, then double row broad beans. All these run from side to side, ie. E and W. The next patch is devoted to peas, interplanted with lettuce and spinach, and goes North and South. After that come the currant and gooseberry bushes, which are going to be interplanted with dwarf beans, then come the raspberry canes (which look very flourishing), then the new apple trees and then the fence, against which I have this evening erected the bean poles for the runners, and I hope to grow more dwarf beans in front. The vegetable garden is all on the right of the path, looking from the house, on the left is a herbaceous border for two thirds of the distance, then comes the old established bush apple tree, now covered with blossom, then the seedbed, with a young damson tree, and logans and blackberries round the edge and rhubarb, then the compost heap and last the future marrow bed which Ann helped me to build when she was here, a rectangular wall of turves filled in with compost and I hope some manure if I can get it. I have got six little tomatoe [sic] plants of a new kind in pots, seedlings which Daddy gave me, also 3 cucumber plants. These tomatoes grow in bush form, you don’t have to stake them, and extravagant claims are made for the amount they yield. They are due to be planted (if they live so long) in the bed in the angle of the house between dining-room and garage, where the fruit trees are being trained against the wall, for this is the sunniest and most sheltered spot. I have also got a packet of sweet corn which I thought I would try to grow there. I cut the lawns the other evening, after struggling with our mower for a bit I went across to old Mr. Wallace who lives opposite and asked him for a spanner to try to adjust the thing. It ended up with him bringing his own good mower across and cutting half the lawn for me! It really looks quite nice now, only I haven’t been able to trim the edges for lack of a pair of shears!
Your clothing parcel is now assembled and due to go off next Wednesday. It contains the following: blanket, 2 vests, 2 pants, 3 socks, 4 handkerchiefs, usual toilet requisites, with chocolate ad [sic] 10 lbs. I didn’t know what to do about the vests and pants, for they will be too late for the summer, but thought I had better send them if your others are worn out. The blanket is to replace the rug which went astray, and I do hope it will arrive safely, though I wish you could have left long before that. However the future is very obscure still, so I thought I would be on the safe side and send it. As soon as the parcel is despatched I suppose I shall get a letter from you saying what you really want – it is annoying that mail takes so long that your requests just miss the parcel each time.
[underlined] Monday [/underlined]
Your P.C. of [underlined] 19th March [/underlined] received! That must be a record for speed of transit, I’m [underlined] so [/underlined] thrilled that music means so much to you now, I can see we are going to have a wonderful life together when at last we are reunited. All my love dearest, God bless you, Ursula.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Begins with weather and wishing for rain and continues with description of recent activities including visit to Windsor to get photographs of daughter taken, going to the cinema, shopping, visitors, second hand furniture shopping, re-stowing garage and gardening. List items assembled for his next clothing parcel and concludes with news or arrival of a postcard from him.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-04-30
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two page typewritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440430
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Chalfont St. Giles
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
England--Berkshire
England--Windsor (Windsor and Maidenhead)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-04-30
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20216/EValentineUMValentineJRM440423-0001.2.jpg
f62bb3baeb775f062ae50b50858ffde6
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1281/20216/EValentineUMValentineJRM440423-0002.2.jpg
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine
J R M Valentine
Description
An account of the resource
674 Items. Collection concerns navigator Warrant Officer J R McKenzie Valentine (1251404 Royal Air Force). The collection contains over 600 letters between JRM Valentine and his wife Ursula. It also contains his log book, family/official documents, a book of violin music studies and other correspondence. Sub-collections contain family photographs, prisoner of war photographs and a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of events from 1942 to 1945.
He joined 49 Squadron in April 1942 and flew 10 operations on Hampdens. The squadron converted to Manchester in May when he completed two further operations. His aircraft was shot down on the Thousand Bomber raid of 30/31 May 1942. Five crew, including him bailed out successfully and became prisoners of war. The pilot and one air gunner were killed when the aircraft rolled over and crashed.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Frances Zagni and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-06
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Valentine, JRM
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
Start of transcription
W/O Valentine,
British P/W 450,
Stalag Luft III, Lager A,
Germany
[inserted] 2/9 [/inserted]
[stamp GEPRUFT 109]
From Mrs. J.R.M. Valentine,
Felmersham, Bottrell’s Lane,
Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks.
Sunday St. George’s Day,
April 23rd 1944
My darling Johnnie,
You have now got two birthday presents waiting for you here to mark this year’s birthday, one from you Mother and one from me. Your Mother’s, which arrived by Ann when she came to stay last Tuesday, is an oval tray in some delightful, reddish brown wood, which might be walnut or maple, with an inlaid decoration in the centre, and neat brass handles. I should think it is a real antique, but in any case it is a very pleasing thing, and looks very good in our diningroom, [sic] as well as being most useful. I have, of course, written to thank your Mother. Ann gave you 2/6 in savings stamps, and I shall probably spend this on something for the garden, there is so much we still need, particularly in the flower line. My present to you, slightly late I am afraid but it will be later still when you get it, is a violin. I bought it from a woman in the village who is reputed to play well, and I have taken it to two other acquaintances who play and know a bit about violins and they both say it is quite a good one. The bow needs some repair and I am going to have that done. It is complete in case with mute, spare bridge, tuning fork and so on, and I do so hope you will like it. I feel such a fool knowing nothing of fiddles, but anyway it wasn’t devastatingly expensive, and perhaps you could choose yourself a better one later on sometime. To put your mind at rest about the cost I may as well tell you that it cost £4, which I think is quite reasonable. The woman asked £5 first but I beat her down because the bow has to be seen to.
Ann came to stay on Tuesday morning. It was grand to see her again, she is growing up into a very charming young woman, and her sweet nature seems quite unspoiled. She immediately set to work in the garden, and together we carried out all sorts of jobs that I had been wanting to do but had put off. To start off with we discovered a lilac! I suddenly noticed the buds behind the firs in the shrubbery, so we set to work, cut back a good bit of the fir branches which were stifling the poor lilac, and now it has some light and air and a chance to grow. It is a dark purple one, and over ten foot tall, though not at all bushy of course because the firs are too close to it. Maybe it will do better now. I am so pleased to think we have one. Ann then proceeded to make a rockery edging to the shrubbery with some of the numerous knobbly white stones we have around the garden, transplanting bits of rock plants from other parts of the garden, and we cleared up two other beds at the side of the house which were empty except for grass, and planted Michaelmas daisies, golden rod and such like there. Yesterday after Ann had gone I carried on the good work and dug the border in front of the lavender hedge and planted forgetmenots and marigolds there, and also fixed up the wires for training our espalier and fan-trained fruit trees against the wall of the house. Of course there is a terrible lot to be done just now, lots more potatoes to set out and sowing to do too. The earlier sowings aren’t coming on too well, partly I think because it has been so hot and dry, really like summer this past week, when we ought to have been having April showers. Tomorrow is washing day, so it will probably rain then!
I’m afraid Ann didn’t have a very eventful time when she was here, just housework, garden and babies, same as everywhere! One day we did venture down into the village and had morning coffees, but that was the extent of our devilment.
[page break]
She brought me one piece of good news, that a Swedish friend of your fathers had visited you about 6 weeks ago and had found you in good health and spirits. I was ever so cheered to hear that, it seems to bring you so much nearer to have news of you in March, since most of your letters are about 3 months old when I get them. I was particularly glad too because in your last postcard, dated 6th February, received yesterday, you mentioned that there was a lot of flu in the camp, and I was just beginning to get nervous when Pat pointed out that you couldn’t have got it because you were fit and well 6 weeks ago, or if you had you were better. The atmosphere in the house gets quite tense at 9.15 a.m. every morning, when the postman is due, and when we hear him we drop everything and dash to the door. Of course Pat gets far more letters than I do, four or five a week, but then her husband seems to be in action most of the time, so I am not envious.
You will be pleased to hear that I have at last taken some photos of the house and Frances, and Pat took some of me, and I shall take the film to be developed tomorrow and send you the results as soon as possible. That is my one and only film, so I hope to goodness the snaps are recognisable. I have been saving the film for a year or more now specially to be able to take a photo of our house, if ever we should get one, and now I have done it. The new step ladder has now arrived and the small shoe cupboard for the spare room, and I have given the latter two coats of white enamel, and I’m going to make it a blue curtain to match the curtain in front of the corner hanging fixture. I have also discovered one or two pieces of quite decent timber in the garage, slung up in the roof between two poles, and that is going to be very useful for some of the shelves I need. There are so many things I want to do, and not nearly enough hours in the day to get through them all! I have a lot of dressmaking on hand just now, altering several of Mother’s dresses to fit me, and letting down Frances’s summer clothes. It looks as though the summer dress I was going to make for myself last year won’t get made this year either and will perhaps emerge as next year’s new dress! Very economical method of dressing!
We had a slight contretemps on Thursday evening when the electric cooker ceased to function. I inspected all the fuses I could find and they all seemed alright, so I got an electrician in to look at it, and of course he found another fuse which had blown and soon put it right. I felt rather an ass for not having been able to cope with it, but as a matter of fact I hadn’t any 30 amp fuse wire anyway, so perhaps it was as well I left it alone.
Barbara has written to say that she has bought me an Easter egg from you, consisting of a coloured woollen square to wear as a scarf or headdress. It hasn’t arrived yet, but it really is awfully sweet of her to think of it. I have told her not to do it any more, she really hasn’t any money to spare. Perhaps you will be able to give me my next birthday present in person, anyway. Wouldn’t it be gorgeous? I long for you so much all the time, I long to be able to express all my love for you, and I must admit I long too to have someone to look after me and care for me again too; selfreliance [sic] may be a good thing, but carried to excess it beings [sic] to pall!
Mon. 24/4/44
Many thanks for yours of 15th December [inserted] received today [/inserted] – congratulations on Grammar & Music exam, well, I’ll certainly try to collect the certificate, well done! Do hope the Swedish friends will be able to send you a decent fiddle bow.
All my love to you dearest & a big kiss from Frances.
Ever yours Ursula
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Letter to prisoner of war John Valentine from his wife Ursula
Description
An account of the resource
Describes birthday presents waiting for him for this year's birthday. mentions family member's visit, describes activities and writes of news that Swedish friend of his fathers visited camp and reported him well. Describes anxiously waiting for his letters and reports that she has finally taken photographs of house and their daughter and will send then on as soon as possible. Continues with domestic chat and news of blown fuse causing cooker to stop working. Concludes with family gossip, thanks him for recent letter and congratulates him on grammar and music examination result.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1944-04-23
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Tricia Marshall
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two page typewritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Technical aid
Text. Correspondence
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
EValentineUMValentineJRM440423
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Chalfont St. Giles
Poland
Poland--Żagań
Lithuania
Lithuania--Šilutė
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-04-23
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ursula Valentine
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Stalag Luft 6