At the end of season 8 of the old front line, we featured some bonus episodes, one of which

looked at the memoirs of Great War veteran Malcolm Vivian.

Malcolm was a fascinating and engaging man,

and we became good friends in the mid to late 80s,

just as I was about to go to university.

Living in Saltash, in Cornwall,

and coming from what he always said was the oldest Cornish family, the Vivians.

I went to see him on many occasions and he wrote to me frequently, often pages and pages detailing his memoir. Sometimes letters would come two, three, four times a a week now the extracts from what he sent me

that i included in that previous podcast and i'll put a link to it in the show notes for this episode

seemed to hit a bit of a chord with you the listeners and many of you asked if I'd ever thought about turning his letters

and accounts into a book. I mean, that would be wonderful, but publishing is a bit of a hard world

right now, particularly stuff to do with the Great War. And as I've said a few times of late,

there is this thing called the old

frontline podcast that gets in the way of these kind of things. But of course, what the podcast

enables me to do is to take material like that and quickly, more readily share it with an audience

like yourselves.

So considering how popular that episode was,

what I've done is to go back into that material that I have for Malcolm Vivian

and I've made another selection from it.

And again, this is only a small part of what he sent me and what he told me over the years

that I knew him. So I'm sure it is something that we will return to again in an episode like this

for the podcast. Now, one of the things that Malcolm would often talk to me about was how heavy artillery

...