How can an article for a society newsletter take all day to write. Yes, I’ve made some food and done some washing up, but mostly I’ve been sat in front of a computer screen hacking away at a few hundred words and altering a few photographs. Then there were the replies to emails, a couple of emails to write and some comments to read. I’m being gradually forced towards the conclusion that I’m a very slow writer.

The postcard I am writing about shows a shop wrecked in the bombardment of Scarborough in December 1914. It mentions that the wife of the shop’s proprietor was killed by the shop doorway.

The shop is Joseph Merryweather’s grocer and sub-post office. It was hit by a shell and Emily Merryweather was killed as she helped two customers take refuge in the cellar. Mr Merryweather was covered in debris. It must have been one of the worst days of his life. He seems, based on other photographs, to be the man in the apron, at the right of the picture. In 1939 he was still in the grocery trade and in 1945, he died, at the age of sixty. As I have started to say recently “that’s younger than me”.

Emily Merryweather

The shop is now an Indian Restaurant.

Mrs Merryweather’s younger brother was killed later in the war. He had emigrated to Canada, married and had two children. When war broke out he joined the Canadian army, having served in the British Army before the war, and wqas killed at the battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917.

And finally, the man who wrote the postcard? Pte \William Boalch. He was from |Guernsey, but served with the Royal Irish Regiment, as his address on the card shows. The Guernsey Militia mainly served overseas with the Royal Irish, because they had been so impressed by them when they had been based on the Channel Islands before the war. This was all new to me, but having noted from his records that there were a lot of men from the Royal Irish Regiment who transferred back to the Guernsey Light Infantry, I did some digging. Boalch himself, was wounded by a gunshot in the left arm and chest at Guillemont, during the Somme battles of 1916. He had spent ten months on the Western Front and would not return to the front, though he was kept in the army until the end of the war.

That, I thought as I tracked the details down, is a lot of stories for one small card, and most of them didn’t end well.

Apart from the name and address of the sender and the fact that six postcards cost 2d there is little of interest on this card – maybe a lesson to all us bloggers.