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Overview
This white paper and cloth sheet map of France, Amiens and Arras, was produced in 1912. It is an example of a map carried by a junior British officer on active service during the First World War.
As an early First World War map, it was made at a relatively small scale, at 1/80,000. British Army Trench Maps developed from the shift from movement to a static situation of trench warfare on the Western Front. This shift required the production of larger scale maps so that units in the trenches could use them to locate enemy defensive positions and to accurately build a picture of the type of ground held by the enemy. New maps were produced from a new survey of the ground on the British fighting front from January 1915.
This map was used by Lieutenant George Middleton Turner (15th Royal Warwickshire Regiment, United Kingdom). Turner annotated the map, recording the number of times he visited towns and villages depicted on the map. After travelling widely through the 1920s, he settled in New Zealand. He retired to Nelson and died 1973