About
Welcome to The Serving Soldier - for the first time providing online access to unique original documents and photographs held by the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London.
The Serving Soldier is working towards providing access to thousands of nationally significant historical archives revealing the broad interests, talents and accomplishments of servicemen and their families at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their role as peacekeepers, technical innovators, explorers, colonial administrators and veterans is revealed through diaries and first hand accounts, scrapbooks, reports and photographs. Wartime propaganda, social programmes and sporting fixtures can be searched – from car races at Brooklands to hockey matches in the Himalayas.
Britain's contribution to previous conflicts in Afghanistan and the North West Frontier provide vivid testimony relevant to today’s serving soldiers that will help inform their experiences of this contested region. The project will include a podcast of a theatre training performance that is being developed using these sources, which will be published soon.
Please search and browse Serving Soldier as new material will be added regularly.
For further information on our collections, please visit the King's College London Archives and Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives webpages
In these collections...
The Serving Soldier Collection Library contains themed selections of photographs and other archives drawn from up to fifty of the eight hundred or so personal paper collections held by the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London which have been selected for digitisation as part of the Serving Soldier project - a rich and and varied body of archive material that illuminates the colourful and eclectic careers of servicemen from the 1880s until 1945.
Collection Library material includes personal diaries, correspondence, photograph albums, detailed reports and memoranda, maps, posters and oral histories exploring war, peace, diplomacy and casting light on the many alternative careers pursued by servicemen - for example as explorers, inventors, writers and artists.
Among the many themed collections are snapshots of daily life in the British Empire, examples of sometimes shocking photography of the ill-fated Gallipoli Campaign during the Great War, and details of the often complex British involvement in the troubled North West Frontier region and Afghanistan.
How to use this material
We encourage the use of images in teaching and research: Please right click images to copy/save and embed in your classroom presentations.
All images are also available at high resolution for publication: Please contact Archives at the Liddell Hart Centre for more information.
To explore full catalogues of the collections from which The Serving Soldier is drawn and learn how you can visit the Liddell Hart Centre in person, please visit Archive Catalogues at King's Collections.
The Serving Soldier has been jointly funded by King's College London and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of their Digitisation Programme ›
