Perhaps, as the notable historian Richard Holmes has more soberly suggested, the real derivation was an 1815 War Office publication which used the name of ‘Private Tommy Atkins’ as an example to show soldiers how to fill out their Soldiers Pocket Book.8
Whatever the true reason, the term ‘Tommy’ or ‘Tommies’ became a well-known generic and affectionate name for British soldiers throughout the war.
Finding the Thuillier Photographic Plates
The astonishing discovery all started with a healthy journalistic hunch. In a series of articles in May 2009, London’s Independent newspaper published images of some glass negatives of First World War soldiers. Most of the photographs were of British ‘Tommies’ and a handful depicted Allied soldiers from the far corners of the then British Empire. The accompanying articles said the photographs were rescued from a rubbish heap somewhere in northern France. The high-definition, near-century-old images generated great interest both in the United Kingdom and overseas and were by far the most visited items on the Independent’s website in that period. Intriguingly, the articles, written by John Lichfield, shed no light on who took the photographs – saying only that the photographer was ‘unknown’. The Independent stories recorded that the small cache they published had probably been stored in the attic of a barn at Warloy-Baillon, only a short distance from the original battlefield front lines. Warloy-Baillon was the site of an Allied clearance hospital during the war. In 2007 the barn was renovated and the plates were thrown into a rubbish skip but they were ‘rescued’ by passers-by. Dominique Zanardi, proprietor of the ‘Tommy’ café at Pozières, uncovered the Warloy-Baillon photographic plates with the help of a local photography enthusiast Bernard Gardin. Zanardi told the newspaper that the photographs were possibly the work of two separate photographers, but that attempts to find the location where they were shot or the photographers’ descendants had failed.
When the Independent stories were published online I was enthralled by the images – especially by the small number of images of Australian soldiers among them. There were also a handful of images held in the Australian War Memorial archives which, intriguingly, showed groups of men, clearly in a different location, photographed in front of the same distinctive canvas backdrop. Were there more? I and my colleagues wondered.
PLATE 14 A 1918 image of a group of Royal Fusiliers. The soldier seated on the ground is a machine gunner.
Outside of the war photographs taken mainly by British official photographers, there are relatively few high-quality images captured around the Western Front in France and Belgium during the First World War – especially images of the life immediately behind the lines in the rest and training areas like Vignacourt. Unlike at the Dardanelles, where many Allied soldiers took cameras into the front lines, on the Western Front the British command strictly banned servicemen from taking cameras into battle zones. From early in the war, authorized military photographers took most photographs but even these were limited for reasons of security. The images published in the Independent fuelled speculation that there might be more images like them taken by French locals or others not in an official role. Were there more photographs to be found? It seemed a reasonable prospect for further investigation.
The real hero of this story is Laurent Mirouze, a Loire Valley antiques and furniture dealer as well as a published historian and experienced journalist. Late in the 1980s, one of Laurent’s friends, who knew of his passion for military history, mentioned that he had seen some beautiful photographs of First World War soldiers on the walls of a council building in the small Picardy town of Vignacourt, just north of the city of Amiens. Sensing a good story, Laurent decided to drive the few hours from his home to Vignacourt to take a look. There, hanging on the walls of the tiny council offices, were the most extraordinary pictures featuring Allied soldiers, mainly British and Australians. Only about twenty pictures were exhibited, but Laurent eventually tracked down the photographer who had printed them from the original plates, a Vignacourt resident, Robert Crognier.
PLATE 15 Robert Crognier. (Courtesy Madame Crognier)
PLATE 16 Laurent Mirouze inspecting some of the Thuillier plates in 1989 before they disappeared. (Courtesy Laurent Mirouze)
When Laurent visited Monsieur Crognier at his home in 1989, he was astonished to discover that the photographs he had seen displayed at the local council offices were just the tip of an iceberg. There were thousands of pictures on photographic glass plates, he was told. He learned of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier and Monsieur Crognier told him the plates were still in the possession of the family. (Monsieur Crognier was a nephew of Louis and Antoinette, and he had reproduced the images from the plates with the permission of Roger Thuillier, one of their sons.) Monsieur Crognier explained to Laurent that the collection was housed at the time in a family home in Vignacourt and, while he let Laurent take photographic prints of several hundred of the plates, he never disclosed the precise location of the full collection. As it turned out, this was an entirely separate collection from the photographs later published by the Independent.
Laurent realized very quickly that the plates were hugely important not only to British but all other First World War Allied countries’ military history. They were also a cracking good story for this aspiring military historian. He had himself photographed reviewing the plates, thinking – not without good reason – that he would have media and military historians beating a path to his door to view the collection. With the permission of Robert Crognier, Laurent wrote an article in France and England, revealing the discovery and publishing some of the images.
PLATE 17 Two Royal Fusiliers. The soldier standing wears the stiff service cap and the soldier seated the softer cloth cap introduced after the war began.
In the spring of 1990 Laurent also rang the Australian Embassy in Paris, formally writing to them and sending them copies of some of the pictures so they could see for themselves. ‘I said there’s hundreds of them – could this be of any interest to you?’ Laurent recalls. ‘But I could feel very clearly that they were not very interested in the story. A shame!’ Laurent laconically comments today, ‘Maybe these people are not interested in the First World War.’ Laurent never heard back from anyone at the Australian Embassy, nor did he get much interest from British researchers. Despite this, he made one last effort to alert military historians to his discovery by publishing a story about the Thuillier collection in a British military magazine, Military Illustrated, in November 1991. Absurdly, nobody ever contacted Laurent Mirouze. So he got on with his life, thinking no one was interested.
But there was someone else also trying to track down the Thuillier plates. Peter Burness, a historian from the War Memorial in Australia, is a tenacious military history investigator and a passionate First World War buff. In about 1990 a small commemorative pamphlet published in Vignacourt had landed on his desk. It featured a small sample of the prints of Allied soldiers which had been retrieved from the Thuillier plates by Robert Crognier. The pamphlet even helpfully told readers that these pictures were a fraction of the 3,000 or more images taken by Thuillier and his wife. ‘The photographs