The Last Summer of Peace: Walter Preston’s Letter from Paris

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Walter Preston in uniform, First World War

A hotel letter written just four weeks before war was declared shows a Newbold Verdon First World War veteran enjoying the warmest of welcomes in France.

On Saturday 5 August 1939, Walter Preston sat down in a Paris hotel and wrote to his wife and son back in Newbold Verdon. It is a short, affectionate letter, and nothing in it hints at what was coming. Less than a month later, Britain would be at war.

Walter was in Paris on a British Legion visit running from 4th to 7th August; the Archive holds the printed itinerary and instructions alongside Walter’s letter. It is easy to see why he went. He had served in the First World War with the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, and the Archive holds both a write-up of the regiment’s campaigns and a letter of reference written for him in February 1916 by the Rev. Jaques of Newbold Verdon. On the 25th anniversary of Britain’s entry into the First World War, the Legion was sending veterans across the Channel in a show of Anglo-French solidarity.

“Hope you are both alright,” he begins, “am always thinking about you & wondering if everything is all going on alright.” Then: “We have been treated A.1 up to now.”

Landing at Calais, the party found “such a great spread” and a welcome from the Lord Mayor and Council, with a regimental band. Paris repeated the greeting. That day they had visited Versailles, where, Walter writes, it was “beyond all words, even all the school children turned out with flags & lined the Palace yard.”

It conjures up a remarkable picture: French schoolchildren waving flags for a party of British ex-servicemen. None of those children had been born when the guns fell silent in 1918. The scene is cheerful, and with hindsight, haunting.

The rest of the letter is the ordinary news of a man far from home. Sunday, he says, will be “a very big day”, running from 6.30 in the morning until 10 at night, when the party would return to the hotel for supper. The hotel itself delighted him: a “real tip-top hotel”, with a telephone for every bed “to ring for early cup of tea”. He signs off “Your loving husband, Walter”, followed by a row of kisses.

Remembrance was part of Walter’s life before and after that trip. The Archive holds photographs of him at an inspection of flag bearers before the war, and of the Armistice Sunday parades at the village war memorial in the 1930s. When war came, he served the village as an air raid warden. A photograph from around 1948 shows Walter standing at the war memorial once more.



This Remembrance Sunday, as the village gathers at the memorial, Walter’s letter is a quiet reminder of what the day is for. It was written by a man who had already known one war, weeks before a second, and the memorial names those who never came home from either. In August 1939, nobody in that Paris hotel could know how short the peace would be.

From the beginning of November, the Archive’s Remembrance board will be on display opposite the war memorial, and you can view Walter’s letter and other Armistice documents in the Archive Catalogue on our updated website. If you have photographs or stories from Newbold Verdon’s Armistice Sundays, we would love to hear from you.

Explore the documents in the Archive Catalogue