The Wipers Times: The Complete Series of the Famous Wartime Trench Newspaper

by Malcolm Brown (Introduction), Ian Hislop (Foreword)

In February 1916, Captain F. J. Roberts of the 12th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters produced the first edition of the trench newspaper The Wipers Times . Often produced in hazardous conditions, at one point only 700 yards from the front line, it acted as the voice of the average British soldier, relaying his experiences, grief, and anger during the entire conflict. At times irreverent, at times hysterical, its humor and satire provide an excellent insight into life in the trenches in the First World War.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War I

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Malcolm Brown is a best-selling popular military historian. Originally a television producer specialising in military documentaries, he has been a freelance historian at the Imperial War Museum since 1989. Brown has researched and written extensively on the First and Second World Wars. He is a regular contributor to BBC History Magazine, and lives in Reading.

Reviews

[Anthony Buckley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is more a book to dip into than to read from cover to cover. So I shall be reading it for a while. The "Wipers Times"(it acquired different titles over time)was a humorous newspaper produced on a purloined printing press in the trenches of the Great War. Humour, notoriously, does not last from generation to generation, but somehow the wit of these soldiers comes up fresh. The paper took its name from the much fought-over battlefield of "Wipers" (Ypres)where, incidentally, my own grandfather was killed. In his forward, Ian Hislop says these men were laughing in the face of death, but theirs was not a gallows humour, but rather a friendly cheerfulness that lacked rancour. An astonishing document.

[Stella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unique and important