Resonance 17/11/14

Bruce Bairnsfather and the Christmas Truce, 1914.

Visiting the ceramic archives at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, my eye was taken by a small group of pieces decorated with cartoons by Bruce Bairnsfather. Whilst serving with the BEF on the Western Front in1914, Lieutenant Bruce Bairnsfather of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment gained fame and popularity for his ‘Old Bill’ cartoons, which were published as ‘Fragments from France’ in ‘The Bystander’ magazine, and subsequently printed onto Staffordshire pots and plates.

Bairnsfather published his wartime memoirs in the book ‘Bullets and Billets’ in 1916, and he is one of a number of authors and diarists who describe the extraordinary events of Christmas day 1914, when an unofficial truce extended along much of the western front. (A rather sugar-coated interpretation of this famous event is depicted in the current Sainsburys tv advert.) This image of Bairnsfather, taken in 1914, perhaps gives a more accurate impression of the realities of a soldier’s life in the trenches in mid-winter.

It is widely recorded, by Bairnsfather and many others from all ranks and from both sides, that several football matches took place in no-mans land during the truce, though reports of the scores vary. Sadly, the most commonly reported scoreline is a 3-2 win for the Germans!

I am using this event, the Christmas Truce Football Match, as the subject for my first piece of work for the Resonance exhibition. More of this will follow in my next blog.

Stephen Dixon