Tag Archives: Everyman

Arthur Linfoot was an enthusiastic reader of “Everyman”. See Everyman for more details.

26 August 1914; Wednesday

August 1914, ,

Busy all day. Finished in good time. Nothing very much from the front. Russian Army marching on Posen & Koenigsberg. Some very strong appeals being made for recruits. Prospect of the War lasting at least 6 months. Received photographs from “Everyman”1. One of Asquith, Carlyle and Carson. After 4 days fighting against overwhelming odds the British retire in good order. British lost 5/6000, Germans lost very much more.

  1. Everyman: see Everyman and Arthur Linfoot’s Library. ↩

4 May 1914; Monday

May 1914, , , , ,

Got up about 7.45. Busy all day. Alf off work. Finished shortly after 5 o’clock. Played the piano, read Everyman, did a bit Pelman1, and had walk last thing. Went to the Berlitz with Joe and got copies of the prospectus. Berlitz2.

Read about Alsace-­Lorraine3 & Maeterlinck4 in Everyman5. Charlie came home bad6. Dorothy not well.

  1. “Pelman”: See note on 6 January. ↩

  2. Berlitz: ALL refers at the end of some diaries to ‘improvement’ in French and German, he attended evening classes in German at some stage, and as entries in the 1917 and 1918 diaries show, he studied French both privately and in Army classes; curiously, however, while he occasionally used German jocularly in later life, he never spoke French. ↩

  3. Alsace-­Lorraine: Germany’s seizure of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870 after the Franco-­Prussian War was (with the possible exception of the financial reparations also demanded by Germany) the greatest single cause of resentment in France towards Germany before WW1. This anger also led to France’s first attacks in WW1 being aimed, disastrously, at recovering these provinces. [Quite irrelevantly – my brother CWL told me when very young that our grandfather CWL had his arm broken when playing at school at ‘the Franco­Prussian War’; he was 14 in 1869/70.] ↩

  4. Maurice Maeterlinck (1862 – 1949) was a Francophile/francophone Belgian dramatist and essayist (copies of his “The Life of the Bee” and “The Blue Bird” are still found) who lived all his adult life in France – though not in Alsace-­Lorraine. ↩

  5. Everyman: see Everyman and Arthur Linfoot’s Library. ↩

  6. “Bad”: in North-Eastern English idiom means ill or unwell. ↩

1 March 1914; Sunday

March 1914, , ,

Got up rather late. At chapel and School as usual. Sacrament at night. Had walk in the afternoon. Raining at night so we didn’t go far. Played the piano a bit. Read a bit Everyman1. Father keeping a bit better. Mr Whittaker very unsatisfactory.

  1. Everyman: I cannot trace a periodical published in 1914-18 under this name; ‘Everyman’ may have been a column in a weekly magazine such as ‘John Bull’; ALL had a letter published in ‘Everyman’ in November 1917. See also: Arthur Linfoot’s Library ↩