Dear old girl

A collection of letters from Pte Dick Armer to his wife Mabel who he frequently referred to as "Dear old girl". His three children were Billie, Marjorie and Dorothy who was born while he was away. Dick had promised to "write every day" and, with few exceptions, kept his promise. The letters were written during WW1 from Camp Borden in Canada, on the train to Halifax, on board ship to England, from Witley Camp and France. Scroll to the bottom of the entry and click on comments to leave a message

Greet your old hubby at the armouries

Steriopticon slide of the London Armouries, probably taken around 1910.

Delta Armouries Hotel 2009

About Camp Borden

Historic marker at Camp Borden

Off duty at Camp Borden. This is a found photo and has no relation to Dick Armer other than that it shows boys in 1916 at Camp Borden. I believe the soldiers shown are from the 133rd Btn Norfolks Own. More information at

http://preview.tinyurl.com/3hcteyy

Next letter 16th of August 1916

Was it worth 5 days C. B?

We were treated worse than dogs

Also written on the same day------

Looks like his pen ran out of ink and he finished it in pencil?

Try and keep a brave heart - undated Camp Borden

8 August 1916 - We get innoculated again this afternoon

Back when you could send a letter for a fair price --- 2 cents.

The following picture (Library of Congress) is from Valcartier, but I imagine the process was very like what Dick experienced. I like the look of apprehension on Jack Canuck's face.

The Originals

The original letters were found to be in exceptional condition considering their age. They seemed to have been stored in the dark and dry location. Very little foxing or water marks.

When originally received by John Brennan at Strathroy District Collegiate Institute, they were in a box and in their envelopes in random order.

A museum assistant on work training from SDCI sorted the letters by year and month, but not by day. They were filed in acid free folders. Accordingly as you can see by the photo, they had to be sorted by day of the month too. This usually took about half an hour for each month to make sure they were in chronological order.

Very little had to be done to the letters other than unfold any that still were folded and place them on the scanner.

After they had been scanned, the clip protector was initialed with a "D" for digitized and the letter re-filed in order. The month folder was initialed to indicate it had been scanned too. The scans were saved in pdf format that allowed all of one letter to be in one file no matter how many pages were written. The Strathroy Caradoc branch of the Middlesex Library kindly let us use their scanner-computer work station. I finally decided to change the day of the week I scanned from Wednesday to Thursday as that was kiddies song day. One Skinny Marink a morning is enough.

To place the letters in the blog, we open the pdf file, select a page at a time, save it to "clipboard" and then reopen the individual page in Photoshop Elements. The page is then given a quick edit to orient it on the screen and to improve contrast. The result is saved as a jpg file which can be uploaded to the blogger site.

If anyone has any other questions about the process we use, please leave a comment below.

Again we owe so much to the descendants of Richard and Mabel Armer, the library staff, the museum staff who coordinated the scan, the history department in the Currie Room at SDCI and many others.

Sarge