A few of A. J. Turner’s draft letters
After the best part of twenty years I’ve finished but was it worth it? I’m not the best judge of that. The discovery of a collection of letters from one member of my family to another, recording events in my home town of Lowestoft during WW2, coincides with so many of my own areas of interest that I am biased.
When my grandmother died in 1993 I discovered that, with my uncle, I was joint executor of her will which included having to sort the contents of her home, some of which had been there since my great grandfather had bought the house in 1916. Added to that, it was a rambling house extended on several occasions over a number of years to its present size of five bedrooms. It had a cellar and two-storey outbuildings of stables, coach-house, groom’s quarters, hay-loft, etc., most of which had been used to store the overflow of the house contents, so the extent of the task might be appreciated.
About two years into the task I came across what we eventually established were the drafts of letters from my great grandfather to his son, my grandfather, sending him local mainly war news news from Lowestoft, one of the most heavily bombed English towns per head of population. Those drafts are now edited but it has taken some while. Fortunately it was the sort of task that could be taken up again when time permitted. Further background information and contemporary references have been added so that they make sense to those outside the family, images have been added and they all can now be be found at: Letters from Lowestoft