Daniel Francis

Reading the National Narrative

Live Blogging the Great War

Sep 3, 2014

Walter Draycott was a pioneer settler in the Lynn Valley neighbourhood of North Vancouver. When World War One began he drilled with the local home guard and in November 1914 travelled east to Montreal and on to England where he joined his new regiment, the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. By Christmas he was at the front and he spent the next four years serving overseas.

Draycott kept a daily journal his entire life, including the war years. The journals are in the collection of the North Vancouver Museum and Archives, which are now posting the war entries at a new website, "Walter Draycott's Great War Chronicle", day by day, exactly one hundred years after they were written. The site will grow to include, along with the diary, photographs and battlefield drawings, readings from some of the daily entries and contextual essays, along with other resources.

An unusual opportunity to re-experience the war through the eyes of an ordinary soldier.