On 19 April 1915, Ethel Andrews, a young woman from Sherborne in Dorset, wrote to the foreign secretary to ask about her brother. Pte Gordon Gray had been captured at the battle of Ypres on 2 November, was being held as a prisoner of war at a camp in northern Germany, “and I have not heard from him for so long,” she wrote to Sir Edward Grey.
“I send him a parcel every week which costs me 5s4d, & I do feel so broken hearted because I have not heard if he have received one. I should be more than grateful if you would kindly do something for me.”
A few months earlier, Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war, had been sent a letter by Henry C MacBryan, from Box in Wiltshire, asking about his son, Lt John Crawford William MacBryan, also a prisoner of war in Germany. From the soldier’s heavily censored letters, it was clear “that he is deteriorating in both mind and body”, his father wrote.
