In the second of our bonus episodes, we look at the memoirs of a siege battery gunner in the Great War, Malcolm Vivian, a First World War veteran who I first met 40 years ago.

And this is some of his story.

Welcome to the second of our season eight bonus episodes.

The main podcast season is over before we return for season nine in September,

but these episodes are something extra to round the season off,

but with it, a little bit shorter than the main podcasts.

In this bonus episode, we return to the subject of Great War veterans, something that

is at the heart, really, of the old Frontline podcast in so many ways.

If you've been listening to this podcast for a while,

you will know that back in the 1980s and 90s,

I was very, very lucky to interview a substantial number of First World War veterans,

over 350 of them.

And I was living then in Sussex, so close to Kent and Hampshire as well,

which was a big retirement area for people from all over the UK. And at that time, in what was

then around about the 70th anniversary of the First World War, there was a huge number

of veterans alive. And it wasn't easy to necessarily track them down in those far off pre-internet

days to track anybody down. Wasn't an easy prospect. But there were a few ways of doing it martin mirabuk for

example in the back of his first day of the song book listed all of the veterans that he'd

interviewed for the research and for some reason and when i asked him about this many years later

he couldn't really explain it for some reason he listed the town and the county where they were living at the time that he spoke to them.

And using phone books, you could track these guys down.

And I would go to my library, made a list of all the ones that were in Sussex, for example,

...