Dear Mother: Dear Mother: Dear Mother: A Story from a Statistic Stanley Charles Booker October 2021 Several years ago, BGS history teacher Barry Williamson and his year 9 class made a discovery; they bought to life the story of an exBGS boy, who was killed in France in 1916 during the First World War. The story begins on a cold February afternoon, about 20 years ago in Bristol. The class were studying the Great War as part of the History syllabus. That afternoon, Barry took them up to the Great Hall to see the memorial that honours the Old Bristolian Boys who died in the Great War. They all stood there for a few minutes, scanning across the long list of the fallen before Barry told them to ‘pick a name’. Slowly, the kids looked through the then 121 names on the plaque and, at complete random, chose one. It was Stanley Charles Booker.
Barry had figured it would be easy to collect raw material on any of the boys from the school archives. He had some homework in mind; ‘I wanted them to see the war through the experience of one individual and explore what his death meant for his family’. He
Bristolienses - Issue 62
set them the task of summarising whatever material they found about him. They discovered that Booker was born on the 17th of January 1893, at 41 Pembroke Road. In 1903 he enrolled at Bristol Grammar School where he excelled as a student. When war broke out in 1914, Stanley left his studies at St John’s College, Oxford and enrolled in the army. The exercise would have ended there had it not been for the persistence of several pupils who insisted they search for more information. They were hooked. Barry reluctantly agreed, explaining that few families kept such papers after the first generation, and they were unlikely to succeed. He could not have been more wrong, and this story is the result. The class scoured archives across Bristol, pursued contacts until eventually connecting with Booker’s distant cousins in Paignton. They informed Barry of a box they had discovered in their attic. A box of full of material and possessions, Stanley Booker’s possessions. – all collected by his mother after the war – everything from school’s reports, his cap badge, penknife, photographs and most notably, 55 long letters that his mother kept from his time on the front line. This story of unbelievable chance unearthed a life and forged a story from a statistic. I was first told about Booker early on in 2020 whilst sat opposite Barry at the Westbury Tavern; we had planned a catch up over a few drinks, but I was transfixed as he told me about Stanley, and our beers had gone flat long before a first sip. In my head, I envisioned a film. I had no idea of what sort just yet, but I knew that a story and discovery of such chance could not go untold. Would it be a film
about Stanley’s life and tragic death or one about its miraculous discovery? Perhaps both? It was difficult to decide. Nonetheless, I was hooked by the story long after we had left the pub. Later that year, I enrolled at Edinburgh University to study Film & Television, so this project complemented my course well. I placed it on the back burner and began thinking of rough directions the story could go. Barry and I spent hours sending letters back and forth from Bristol to Edinburgh; I wanted every detail of information to take into my planning. I thought at first a film about Booker’s life and death on the front
lines of Richebourg-L’Avoue in 1916 would suffice. However, as I learnt more it became apparent that there was more to this film than what appeared on the surface. It had to
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