Photographers
Tom Aitken
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| First World War 'Official Photographs' > Photographers > Tom Aitken > (84) N.587 - Two British Tommies have an impromptu game of nap among the ruins of a shattered town |
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| Permanent URL | https://digital.nls.uk/74549148 |
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| Description | British soldiers playing cards in a ruined town near Rheims, in France, during World War I. The devastation caused by the fighting on the front line, yet also conveys the attitude that the British government were keen to promote at home, that life must go on. Two British soldiers are pictured casually playing cards in a waste ground that was once a town. They are surrounded by broken furniture and the shells of buildings. The card game nap, short for Napoleon, is a British game similar to whist. Thought to have originated some time in the late nineteenth century, it is no longer widely played but would still have been popular during World War I. [Original reads: THE FIGHT OF THE WOODS NEAR RHEIMS. Two British Tommies have an impromptu game of nap among the ruins of a shattered town.'] |
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| Description | Tom Aitken was a newspaper photographer from Glasgow who was assigned in December 1917 as a war photographer along with David McLellan and Armando Consolé. McLellan's work also features in the National Library of Scotland’s Haig Papers. War photographers held a hybrid position during World War I, being part of yet not ultimately responsible to the military. |
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| Description | Photographs by named photographers. |
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| Description | Black-and-white photographs mainly of the Western Front during the First World War. Official British war photographers took many of them for propaganda purposes. Unless otherwise stated, titles are the photographs' original captions. From the papers of Field Marshal (Earl) Haig (1861-1928). The Haig Papers also contain Douglas Haig’s diaries. |
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| Shelfmark | Acc.3155 |
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