We are delighted to be able to announce a major new 'perk' of membership of The Western Front Association.
Using the technology that we have available via the association's 'Searchable Magazine Archive' we have just made available over a hundred back issues of the WFA's in-house members' magazine 'Bulletin'.
The first issue of Bulletin, penned by the WFA's founder John Giles, was produced on a typewriter back in January 1981.
Over the years it has expanded from the simply sheets of paper stapled together in the corner, to a glossy high quality publication in full colour.
Over the 44 years of Bulletin there have been eleven editors of the publication. Early issues were compiled either by John Giles or his wife Marjorie (some eleven or so editions in total) with later editions being produced by Tony Farquharson (nine editions) Stan Grosvenor (eleven editions) James Brazier (24 editions) and Ralph Lomas (the present editor, with over 50 editions 'under his belt').
Above: Some of the editions over recent years.
The recent ability to have magazines fully searchable online has proven to be very popular and the logical step of scanning early bulletins and creating a digital (and fully searchable) archive was put in motion during the last year. To date (December 2024) we have scanned and now made available the first 106 issues of The Bulletin, with the remainder likely to be made available in the first weeks of January.
The one matter we wished to avoid, however, was the online publication of addresses and phone number of individuals who contributed to the publication who may not have wished their contact details to be made available.
Rather than trying to obtain the permission of literally hundreds - possibly thousands - of individuals the decision was made to 'redact' all possible personal information from within the body of the magazine (apart from those who set up specific adverts for products or services). This has proved to be a slightly more complex operation than was envisaged, but that aside, the publications are now available exactly as they were originally produced.
Above: Bulletin Issues 96 to 106
The additional benefit of this is that all magazines can be searched by key word or phrase. So within the magazines currently available, members can locate instances of key words very easily. Searching for 'Passchendaele' gives us 270 'hits', Zonnebeke appears 80 times and 'Asiago' on 22 occasions. Care should be taken however to search on possible alternative spellings: Assiago (an incorrect spelling) appears once, with 'Richtofen' three times. (Richthofen - the correct spelling - can be found numerous times.)
Other words that can be searched for appear as follows: KOYLI (39 times) Salonika (98 times) "Black Watch" (using inverted commas to eliminate 'Black' (singular) and 'Watch' (singular)) appears 88 times and 'Givenchy' 40 times with 'Cuinchy' eleven times.
So, for members wishing to undertake research or simply browse the archive, we invite you to log on to the members' area, click 'Searchable Magazine Archive' and take a look at the past issues of 'Bulletin'.
If you are in any doubt about the value of the Searchable Magazine Archive, early feedback was published in November last year here: Searchable Magazine Archive: Early Feedback
Here are some useful videos showing how to obtain the best results from the Searchable Magazine Archive:
- An overview of our new Searchable Magazine Archive
- A tour of the various buttons that you can use on our Searchable Magazine Archive
- How to undertake a multi-word search
List of past editors of the Bulletin:
- John Giles, Marjorie Giles
- Paul Foster
- Peter Gilhooley
- Kenneth Stevens
- Terry Cave
- Tony Farquarharson
- James Brazier
- Peter Clayton
- Stan Grosvenor
- Ralph Lomas