Goodbye, Carrie, I Must Leave You

Name: Goodbye, Carrie, I Must Leave You
Price: £12.95 GBP
Author: Jill Duffield
ISBN: 9781504939539

by Jill Duffield

Formats

Softcover

£12.95

Hardcover

£23.99

Softcover

£12.95

Book Details

Language : English

Publication Date : 09/04/2015

Format : Softcover

Dimensions : 6x9

Page Count : 274

ISBN : 9781504939539

Format : Hardcover

Dimensions : 6x9

Page Count : 274

ISBN : 9781504939546

About the Book

A window into love, marriage, family, and war at the start of the twentieth century, this book presents original letters from a British Army sergeant to his young wife. Some, written in Bermuda in 1899, cover the couple’s courtship, engagement, marriage, and migration to England. Others are from South Africa, where James Hill served from 1900 to 1902 in the South African War. He seeks to reassure his wife, Carrie, of his safety and expresses his concerns for her. Carrie, newly arrived in Britain, stayed with her paternal grandparents near Chatham, where her first child was born in 1900. She treasured the letters for the rest of her life. Carrie’s own voice is silent. Her feelings, preoccupations, tasks, and entertainments are mediated by Jim as he responds to the contents of her letters in his replies. The silence of her destroyed letters compounds her lifelong verbal silence about her early life in Bermuda. The letters and background commentary will explore family relationships and the impact of migration across continents at a time when gendered roles were assumed to be fixed but in reality had to be negotiated.

About the Author

Jill Duffield is a retired teacher of politics and social studies (Modern Studies in the Scottish curriculum). She taught in Edinburgh and Fife and then was an educational researcher at the University of Stirling, investigating the impact of social circumstances on children’s learning. She lives in Edinburgh and is mainly occupied with family matters, church, and politics.

Customer Reviews

"It was not only interesting but a pleasure to read the book. The correspondence is a remarkable survival in itself and a window on courting practices and turn of the century respectability quite apart from the material about the conduct of the last stages of the Boer War when the imperial might of the UK failed for so long to subdue a male population no larger than that of Brighton.
Important, too, is the light the collection throws on the ebbs and flows of a nascent globalisation. That it would have involved transfers of Atlantic populations of the very particular kind involved in Bermuda would, I guess, have been difficult to predict. On the other hand, the unusual form and reasons for the transfer in this case say a lot about the uncovenanted effects of imperialism, many of which are yet to be fully understood.
And the late Victorian/early Edwardian army ? what came out very clearly, I thought, was its bureaucratic character of merit promotion and its insistence on educational standards simply inconceivable in the pre-Crimean period. The description of the behaviour of the irregular Brabanters who conducted, and ?the general? who condoned, summary executions is no doubt not the sort of events reported in the newspapers. [It is, of course, possible that James Hill recorded a somewhat garbled account but that he seemed to accept the probably of such behaviour says something about contemporary mindsets.] Interesting that his route out of the army was via the Halesowen drill hall and that he was later recalled and commissioned to be part of the logistical backbone of the 1914-18 army
The Boer War is, of course, a forgotten war and eclipsed ? particularly at the present time ? by the attention given to WW I. Rather like the Iraq invasion from 2003 it divided people at the time though with the added impulse of the jingoism encouraged by a Conservative government largely in office for the period 1886-1906. It exposed how guerrilla war makes everyon

R. M. Morris
"It was not only interesting but a pleasure to read the book. The correspondence is a remarkable survival in itself and a window on courting practices and turn of the century respectability quite apart from the material about the conduct of the last stages of the Boer War when the imperial might of the UK failed for so long to subdue a male population no larger than that of Brighton.
Important, too, is the light the collection throws on the ebbs and flows of a nascent globalisation. That it would have involved transfers of Atlantic populations of the very particular kind involved in Bermuda would, I guess, have been difficult to predict. On the other hand, the unusual form and reasons for the transfer in this case say a lot about the uncovenanted effects of imperialism, many of which are yet to be fully understood.
And the late Victorian/early Edwardian army ? what came out very clearly, I thought, was its bureaucratic character of merit promotion and its insistence on educational standards simply inconceivable in the pre-Crimean period. The description of the behaviour of the irregular Brabanters who conducted, and ?the general? who condoned, summary executions is no doubt not the sort of events reported in the newspapers. [It is, of course, possible that James Hill recorded a somewhat garbled account but that he seemed to accept the probably of such behaviour says something about contemporary mindsets.] Interesting that his route out of the army was via the Halesowen drill hall and that he was later recalled and commissioned to be part of the logistical backbone of the 1914-18 army
The Boer War is, of course, a forgotten war and eclipsed ? particularly at the present time ? by the attention given to WW I. Rather like the Iraq invasion from 2003 it divided people at the time though with the added impulse of the jingoism encouraged by a Conservative government largely in office for the period 1886-1906. It exposed how guerrilla war makes everyon

R. M. Morris
"It was not only interesting but a pleasure to read the book. The correspondence is a remarkable survival in itself and a window on courting practices and turn of the century respectability quite apart from the material about the conduct of the last stages of the Boer War when the imperial might of the UK failed for so long to subdue a male population no larger than that of Brighton.
Important, too, is the light the collection throws on the ebbs and flows of a nascent globalisation. That it would have involved transfers of Atlantic populations of the very particular kind involved in Bermuda would, I guess, have been difficult to predict. On the other hand, the unusual form and reasons for the transfer in this case say a lot about the uncovenanted effects of imperialism, many of which are yet to be fully understood.
And the late Victorian/early Edwardian army ? what came out very clearly, I thought, was its bureaucratic character of merit promotion and its insistence on educational standards simply inconceivable in the pre-Crimean period. The description of the behaviour of the irregular Brabanters who conducted, and ?the general? who condoned, summary executions is no doubt not the sort of events reported in the newspapers. [It is, of course, possible that James Hill recorded a somewhat garbled account but that he seemed to accept the probably of such behaviour says something about contemporary mindsets.] Interesting that his route out of the army was via the Halesowen drill hall and that he was later recalled and commissioned to be part of the logistical backbone of the 1914-18 army
The Boer War is, of course, a forgotten war and eclipsed ? particularly at the present time ? by the attention given to WW I. Rather like the Iraq invasion from 2003 it divided people at the time though with the added impulse of the jingoism encouraged by a Conservative government largely in office for the period 1886-1906. It exposed how guerrilla war makes everyon

R. M. Morris
"It was not only interesting but a pleasure to read the book. The correspondence is a remarkable survival in itself and a window on courting practices and turn of the century respectability quite apart from the material about the conduct of the last stages of the Boer War when the imperial might of the UK failed for so long to subdue a male population no larger than that of Brighton.
Important, too, is the light the collection throws on the ebbs and flows of a nascent globalisation. That it would have involved transfers of Atlantic populations of the very particular kind involved in Bermuda would, I guess, have been difficult to predict. On the other hand, the unusual form and reasons for the transfer in this case say a lot about the uncovenanted effects of imperialism, many of which are yet to be fully understood.
And the late Victorian/early Edwardian army ? what came out very clearly, I thought, was its bureaucratic character of merit promotion and its insistence on educational standards simply inconceivable in the pre-Crimean period. The description of the behaviour of the irregular Brabanters who conducted, and ?the general? who condoned, summary executions is no doubt not the sort of events reported in the newspapers. [It is, of course, possible that James Hill recorded a somewhat garbled account but that he seemed to accept the probably of such behaviour says something about contemporary mindsets.] Interesting that his route out of the army was via the Halesowen drill hall and that he was later recalled and commissioned to be part of the logistical backbone of the 1914-18 army
The Boer War is, of course, a forgotten war and eclipsed ? particularly at the present time ? by the attention given to WW I. Rather like the Iraq invasion from 2003 it divided people at the time though with the added impulse of the jingoism encouraged by a Conservative government largely in office for the period 1886-1906. It exposed how guerrilla war makes everyon

R. M. Morris
"It was not only interesting but a pleasure to read the book. The correspondence is a remarkable survival in itself and a window on courting practices and turn of the century respectability quite apart from the material about the conduct of the last stages of the Boer War when the imperial might of the UK failed for so long to subdue a male population no larger than that of Brighton.
Important, too, is the light the collection throws on the ebbs and flows of a nascent globalisation. That it would have involved transfers of Atlantic populations of the very particular kind involved in Bermuda would, I guess, have been difficult to predict. On the other hand, the unusual form and reasons for the transfer in this case say a lot about the uncovenanted effects of imperialism, many of which are yet to be fully understood.
And the late Victorian/early Edwardian army ? what came out very clearly, I thought, was its bureaucratic character of merit promotion and its insistence on educational standards simply inconceivable in the pre-Crimean period. The description of the behaviour of the irregular Brabanters who conducted, and ?the general? who condoned, summary executions is no doubt not the sort of events reported in the newspapers. [It is, of course, possible that James Hill recorded a somewhat garbled account but that he seemed to accept the probably of such behaviour says something about contemporary mindsets.] Interesting that his route out of the army was via the Halesowen drill hall and that he was later recalled and commissioned to be part of the logistical backbone of the 1914-18 army
The Boer War is, of course, a forgotten war and eclipsed ? particularly at the present time ? by the attention given to WW I. Rather like the Iraq invasion from 2003 it divided people at the time though with the added impulse of the jingoism encouraged by a Conservative government largely in office for the period 1886-1906. It exposed how guerrilla war makes everyone b

R. M. Morris
"It was not only interesting but a pleasure to read the book. The correspondence is a remarkable survival in itself and a window on courting practices and turn of the century respectability quite apart from the material about the conduct of the last stages of the Boer War when the imperial might of the UK failed for so long to subdue a male population no larger than that of Brighton.
Important, too, is the light the collection throws on the ebbs and flows of a nascent globalisation. That it would have involved transfers of Atlantic populations of the very particular kind involved in Bermuda would, I guess, have been difficult to predict. On the other hand, the unusual form and reasons for the transfer in this case say a lot about the uncovenanted effects of imperialism, many of which are yet to be fully understood.
And the late Victorian/early Edwardian army ? what came out very clearly, I thought, was its bureaucratic character of merit promotion and its insistence on educational standards simply inconceivable in the pre-Crimean period. The description of the behaviour of the irregular Brabanters who conducted, and ?the general? who condoned, summary executions is no doubt not the sort of events reported in the newspapers. [It is, of course, possible that James Hill recorded a somewhat garbled account but that he seemed to accept the probably of such behaviour says something about contemporary mindsets.] Interesting that his route out of the army was via the Halesowen drill hall and that he was later recalled and commissioned to be part of the logistical backbone of the 1914-18 army
The Boer War is, of course, a forgotten war and eclipsed ? particularly at the present time ? by the attention given to WW I. Rather like the Iraq invasion from 2003 it divided people at the time though with the added impulse of the jingoism encouraged by a Conservative government largely in office for the period 1886-1906. It exposed how guerrilla war makes everyone b

R. M. Morris

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