Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
commemorates the 90th anniversary of Armistice

http://www.oxforddnb.com/

*Freely available in almost all UK public libraries, with direct home access for library members*

From 3 November, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography invites you to remember the lives of men and women who shaped the First World War and its aftermath as the 90th anniversary of Armistice approaches. http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/armistice/

Visitors to the Oxford DNB’s Armistice gallery will be able to read, for free, the life stories of 36 individuals arranged in six categories—Women and War; the Trenches; the Fallen; Empire; Land, Sea and Air, and Remembrance— reflecting different aspects of the 1914-18 conflict.

The gallery features the remarkable stories of front-line soldiers, sailors, and airmen such as William Coltman, the war’s most decorated other-rank soldier; Noel Chavasse, the only man to receive the Victoria Cross twice during the conflict; John Cornwell, the boy-hero of Jutland, and John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the ‘Man with the donkey’, who rescued injured troops at Gallipoli.

The gallery also features military strategists such as Gerald Boyd, commander of the forces that breached the Hindenberg line in September 1918 and so brought the war’s end in sight; nursing staff including Edith Cavell, executed by the Germans in 1915 and commemorated by a statue in St Martin’s Place, London; and writers such as Wilfred Owen, Vera Brittain, and the patriotic poet Jessie Pope who captured the differing attitudes to war.

At the centre of the gallery is the Oxford DNB’s ‘biography’ of the Unknown Warrior, an unidentified British soldier whose body was buried in Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920 as a symbolic representative of the British and dominion servicemen who died in the Great War.