The Front Line Letters of ‘Tommy’ Wyer ― Part One
There is an assortment of evidence that enables us to tell the story of a soldier of the Great War.
There is the military record: a name, a number, a regiment and a date of death. There are medal rolls, casualty lists and official forms. And there are the memorials, where eventually the individual is reduced to a few lines of lettering etched in cold, hard stone.
This has been the starting point for the stories in my Lost Fenland Generation series. Through military records, census returns, local memorials and the surviving evidence of the war itself, we have tried to recover something of the men behind those names—to understand where they came from, the circumstances in which they were lost and the lives they left behind.
Very occasionally, however, we are also presented with letters; personal letters sent from the battlefield to loved ones at home. And in such cases it is these few sheets of paper that change everything.
For they bring back the voice of a man who otherwise survives only as an entry in a ledger. They can reveal what he noticed, what troubled him, what he remembered, and perhaps most importantly, what he thought his family at home needed to know.
For John Thomas Wyer, known as ‘Tommy,’ we are fortunate to have several such letters.
They do not form a diary of the war. But that’s okay, for they were never intended to. They are simply occasional brief messages home, written at intervals during 1917 and early 1918. But when they are placed alongside the war diary of his battalion, something remarkable emerges.
The battalion diary may indeed tell us, in stark detail, what was occurring in a specific area of the Western Front. The young soldier’s letters, however, tell us something of what it was like to remain a young fenland labourer while all of that was happening around him.
And between the two lies the story of one agricultural worker of Lincolnshire who left behind the familiar world of farms and horse-drawn waggons and found himself in the blood-soaked trenches of the Western Front.
Before the letters
John Thomas Wyer ― referred to by his nickname ‘Tommy’ from this point ― was born in Kirkby Underwood in 1883, the son of Thomas Wyer and Mary Ann Marshall. His father was a labourer and parish clerk; his mother came from nearby Rippingale.
Tommy was their second child, born into a family whose roots ran deep through the small villages of the south Lincolnshire fenland.
The census returns give us three brief glimpses of him as a boy and young man before the war.
When the census was taken in 1891, Tommy (then aged 7) was at the home of his maternal grandparents, John and Caroline Marshall, in Kirkby Underwood.
Given that both Tommy’s parents and his grandparents lived in the village’s five-cottage complex of seventeenth-century alms-houses known as the Bede Houses, he was probably only visiting his grandparents that evening, rather than living with them.
What we can say with greater certainty is that, ten years later, he had crossed the fields and lanes to nearby Aslackby, where he was living as a servant with the Bailey family. His occupation at that time was recorded as waggoner on a farm.
On 2nd April, 1911 the census of that year noted him as living at Sempringham Cottage in Folkingham in the household of John Charles Stancer. By then Tommy was twenty-seven. He remained single, and was once again listed as a farm waggoner.
Collectively, the census’s therefore tell us something more than where Tommy slept on three particular nights. They tell us something about the world from which he came.
He belonged to that generation of agricultural labourers for whom employment often meant moving from one village to another, living in another man’s household and becoming part of another farm’s workforce. The occupations recorded against his name — servant, waggoner, farm waggoner — place him firmly within the agricultural life of that part of Lincolnshire.
There is no indication here of a life lived in one place. Instead, what we see is movement through necessity: Kirkby Underwood to Aslackby, and on to Folkingham. Farms, horses and waggons. And before we continue, it is worth keeping that young man in mind, because something of him survives in the letters written years later from France.
You see, Tommy never became a different person simply because he put on a khaki battledress. His letters remain filled with the concerns of a young man whose world remained firmly centred upon people and places at home.
The excellent South Lincolnshire War Memorials research has shown that Tommy enlisted into the 9th Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment in April 1916, and after only four months service he embarked for France where, in the September of that year, he was transferred to serve with the 8th Kings Own Lancaster Regiment.
His first experience of the Western Front was not without terrible consequence.
In October 1916 he was wounded in the leg while engaged on perilous night work-party duties. Later that year he became sick with ‘inflammation of the connective tissue of the foot’ ― sometimes referred to as ‘trench foot‘ ― and was eventually sent to hospital in Fazakerley, England.
Finally, after several months away from the front, he was classed fit for light duties, and in June of 1917 returned to France. And it is at this time that his surviving letters begin to take us inside his story.
14th June, 1917: A Shilling for Tobacco.
On 14 June 1917, Tommy wrote to his mother and father. It is a remarkably ordinary letter, in which he begins, as he so often does, by hoping that they are all well.
“I now write a few lines hoping your all well as it leaves me at present …”
He then tells them about his journey, one that was to take him back to front line service following his hospitalisation in England.
He reveals that he had started on Sunday at twelve o’clock and reached London at about seven. He then had to wait, presumably before embarking on the next leg of his journey to France. While waiting, he did some sightseeing. He mentions the heat.
There is nothing to suggest that he is returning to the battlefield of Flanders. Instead, Tommy simply tells his parents about his journey.
And then comes a little story which might almost have belonged to another time and place.
Whilst waiting for his train he met a woman who had some connection with people at home. They would later share a carriage for the journey south.
She told him that Tom Shields was her uncle. Although Tommy did not know her at first, there was clearly a family connection, and during the time they had at Bourne he showed her around.
She was, he tells his parents, “a very nice woman“. He explains how she bought him a newspaper and gave him a shilling so that he could buy some tobacco.
It is one of those small incidents that official records could never have preserved: a soldier travelling to France, a chance meeting, and the recognition of a name from the familiar world of home. There was the gift of a newspaper, a shilling for tobacco, and in return, a promise that he would let the ‘nice woman’ know how he was getting on, by informing Mrs Wells.
Such a moment says something about the world Tommy was leaving behind. He may have been returning to active duty and the horrors that entailed, but for a little longer at least, he was still moving through a landscape of familiar names, acquaintances and connections.
The war had not severed those relationships; if anything, the distance and the dangers made them doubly important.
Behind the Letter
The battalion diary provides a remarkable counterpoint.
While Tommy was making his journey back towards his battalion, the 8th King’s Own were already in the trenches around Monchy and were involved in operations connected with fighting around Hook Trench.
The diary records that the battalion had completed a relief during the early hours of 13 June. The following day, 14 June, saw an attack by men of the Gordon Highlanders and Suffolk Regiment against Hook Trench. The objective was reached, followed by continued artillery activity and the consolidation and support of the newly won positions.
Whilst Tommy’s service record places his return to France on 10 June he does not rejoin the 8th King’s Own until 29 June. We are therefore unable to place Tommy himself within the action at Hook Trench. The diary does however tell us what was happening around the unit to which he was returning.
Through the official war diary, the reader learns of the front line activity ― attacks, bombardments, working parties and casualties. Tommy’s letter is its antithesis, for in it he speaks of his journey, of a chance meeting at Bourne, kind words, a newspaper and tobacco.
Both are true. And from this point onwards, these two very different accounts ― battalion diary and soldier’s letters ― will come together to form a single, unified narrative.
3rd October, 1917: A Slight Tap
By the autumn, Tommy had been back with the 8th King’s Own for several months. It is here that the tone of his next surviving letter shifts.
On 3 October 1917 he wrote:
“I am lucky for what I have gone through this last week.”
It is a simple sentence, and one which disregards a mass of significant detail. He tells his parents that the battalion has been been in action and goes on to explain his good fortune:
“… we have been attacking but I only got a slight tap on the thigh and on the hip …”
We don’t know the cause of the ‘slight taps’, only that their relevance was trivialised to the point where they were regarded as no more than an inconvenience.
Then, with an astonishing level of empathy, his attention turns to the enemy soldiers.
” … the Germans were like mad men they come running to us with their hands up and no wonder at them the bombardment they have to be under.”
Here, in what is a revealing degree of understanding and compassion for his fellow man, regardless of his uniform, the war begins to break through the protective ordinary language of Tommy’s letters.
Nonetheless, despite the unimaginable suffering of front line service, Tommy continues to write to his mother and father in the same, understated, conversational manner.
He tells them he is lucky.
Battalion Diary — ‘This Last Week’
The battalion diary gives Tommy’s phrase, “this last week,” a much greater weight. What appears in his letter as a passing reference to recent events can, when set against the official record, be placed within the hard reality of the Western Front.
During the closing days of September, the 8th King’s Own were operating around Bullecourt and the Hindenburg system.
The diary records the familiar rhythm of trench warfare: patrols moving out into the darkness, artillery fire answered by German shelling, men moving between positions, and preparations for operations whose significance would have been far clearer to those in the trenches than it can ever be to us reading the record a century later.
The atmosphere was a world away from the journey Tommy had described in June. Now the landscape had narrowed to trenches, dug-outs, heavy shellfire and the constant possibility of death.
By the beginning of October, the battalion was moving through the area of Barastre and towards Mory, part of the continuing movements and preparations that would carry the men into another period of front-line activity.
Yet Tommy’s letter does not attempt to describe the events in military terms. Instead, he gives his parents something infinitely more immediate and, in its own quiet way, more important: He was alive.
He had come through the fighting. He had been hit, but not seriously. Above all, he wanted his parents to understand that he had been lucky. And there is something profoundly revealing in the modesty of that reassurance.
The official record speaks in the language of war: trenches occupied, patrols conducted, shells fired, movements undertaken.
Tommy reduces all of that to the simple fact that mattered most to the people waiting at home. He had been struck, but he was all right.
For the historian, the diary provides the framework within which these events can be understood. For Tommy’s parents, his letter must have provided something quite different — a few lines of evidence that their son was still there, still able to write, and still able to tell them that he had been fortunate.
That distinction between the two perspectives is becoming central to Tommy’s story. The battalion diary records the war as experienced by a military establishment. Tommy’s letters reveal it as it was lived by a young man.
For the moment, however, there was reassurance. Tommy was alive, he was writing, and from his own account there was little reason for his parents to fear for him.
But the letters that follow in Part Two of this narrative begin to reveal a different story.
Part Two will pick up the story in the November of 1917. The weather is cold and wet. Tommy is tired. The battalion has been back in the front line, and although he still writes in the familiar manner of a son keeping his parents informed, the war is beginning to press more heavily through his words.
As we shall see, the change is subtle. There is no dramatic declaration of despair, no single letter in which Tommy announces that he has had enough. Instead, the accumulated experience of the trenches begins to show itself in what he chooses to write — and in what he no longer seems able to disguise.
The war diary will continue to record the movements of the 8th King’s Own, the trenches they occupy and the actions in which they are involved.
But from November onwards, Tommy’s letters begin to give us something the official record cannot: the voice of a young man becoming weary of a war he is being asked to endure.
Tommy’s story continues in Part Two: ‘From your Ever Loving Son’
Author’s Note:
My thanks to Jamie Lawrance of the South Linconshire War Memorials website, for kindly supplying the photograph of Tommy in uniform. This became the definitive reference from which the canon images illustrating this post were created.
Thanks, too, to Rebecca Wyer of Kirkby Underwood for providing copies of Tommy’s letters. Also for supplying valuable family background information and photographs of the Bede Houses and Tommy’s parents.
The images accompanying these articles have been created or tailored using AI. While I have taken care to achieve a generally authentic impression of the period, they should not be regarded as historically accurate representations. These images are intended simply to illustrate and complement the narrative—to help bring people, places and circumstances of the past to life—and should be understood in that spirit.
Well written, and moving.