Dorking in the Great War
by Kathryn Atherton
Dorking in the Great War is the story of life on the home front in a typical English market town and its surrounding villages. It follows the people of Dorking from the run up to war in 1913/14, enjoying their village shows, garden parties and women's suffrage debates, through recruitment and enlistment parades, to the installation of memorials in churches, schools and on village greens. It tells the stories of individuals who played a significant part in the war, or who were in themselves significant - like the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, the millionaire Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, and the boy soldier, Valentine 'Joe' Strudwick - and of the experiences of those left behind, the women working in gunpowder factories and at railway stations, the teachers struggling to run schools in the face of freezing conditions and mass sickness, and children out picking conkers for the war effort, as well as of the outsiders who found themselves in a small Surrey town: Belgian refugees, billeted troops and East End refugees from zeppelin raids.
