It has been a labour of love and intensive research, and her biggest work yet.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Local historian and author Margaret Clark will be releasing her new book, Manning Valley Volunteers in the Great War, in coming weeks.
The book comes in two volumes, and like the old Sydney phone books the volumes are titled A-L and M-Z. The letters represent the initials of surnames, and the volumes had to be separated out because there are many hundreds of men and women who served in the Great War who are listed in the compendium.
"I've profiled every single person that I've been able to identify from the Manning Valley in the First World War. Not just the men, it's the nurses who went as well, and the men who went as munitions workers to England," Margaret explains.
Related: Postcards from the Western Front
Margaret set herself the task of attempting to research every person from the Manning Valley who served. There were more than 800 people. More than 600 of them made it into her book. The others were unable to be identified.
As well as research through Trove, the Australian War Memorial, the AIF Project and the National Archives, Margaret has relied heavily on letters that were sent home, some of which are in the archives of the Manning Valley Historical Society. Some of them have been reprinted verbatim, and some of them have been paraphrased.
What stands out to Margaret is the writers' ability to endure and get on with things.
"I think it's their ability to cope under adversity, and the mateship. And the acceptance, I think, that they're there for the job and they're going to see it done. And there's no hatred as such, or very rarely, for the enemy," Margaret says.
I was just reading one recently about a guy that turned up at the field ambulance and said 'I think I'm going to lose my foot', and was told 'well, you have'!
- Margaret Clark
"There's a little bit of discontent from time to time about how they're put into situations where really they shouldn't have been because they're just going to die knowing they're not going to achieve anything. But they are aware."
Margaret tells of Anzacs at Gallipoli stopping to bury their dead with the Turks. And when cease fire stops at 5 o'clock, the guns start up again.
"They actually tried to communicate with the Turkish soldiers. One soldier commented that he tried to give a cigarette to a Turk, who took it, but then a German officer told him to drop it," Margaret says.
"So these sort of little anecdotes which you don't hear about normally in the history books, are the little stories.
"I was just reading one recently about a guy that turned up at the field ambulance and said 'I think I'm going to lose my foot', and was told 'well, you have'!"
Margaret's book will be for sale at the Wingham Museum for $25 per volume - a price that only allows her to recover her printing costs.
Wingham RSL Sub-branch president, Terry Gould is hoping to have Wingham High School students read out some of the letters from the book at the Anzac Day Ceremony at Wingham Town Hall in 2019.