Postcard, 'Souvenir from France'

This embroidered postcard was sent by a soldier of the New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion to Miss Sybil Mary Lee (1872-1956) during the First World War. Miss Lee was a missionary with the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand. In 1915, she was granted six months leave of absence to visit England, but quickly found work visiting Maori soldiers at Wandsworth and Walton-on-Thames hospitals and stayed for two and a half years.

The message on the back of the postcard indicates that the writer had recently arrived on the battlefront in France: 'Kia Ora Miss Lee, A souviner [sic] from some one in France. We are all well and still enjoying ourselves immensely in a far away strange country. Every body are all well especially myself. They all remembered a kind New Year and best wishes. Scarce of news at present. Later. Kia Ora Koe Na Tou Hoa, Kara' (the writer could be Private Karaitiana Te Ohaere from Tokomaru Bay).

During the First World War (1914-19), French women and girls embroidered silk postcards for soldiers to send home to their wives, mothers, sisters and girlfriends. Hundreds of thousands of men from the British Empire, including New Zealand,were stationed in France. The anxieties of separation and distance fuelled a thriving cottage industry of postcard making.

They are not ordinary postcards. Delicate silk embroidered with flowers, flags and messages of love and affection, were attached to card, but were obviously not robust enough to be franked and sent as normal postcards. Instead, they were carefully sent in their own envelopes, or safely tucked into letters. They were meant to stay pristine and beautiful, to be cherished by the recipient.

This beautiful souvenir of France is in extreme contrast to the ugliness of the war, and indicates one of the ways soldiers sought momentary respite from the horrors around them, and to keep their lives linked to those left behind.