After joining up in July 1917, Frank Whitehead completed his basic training at various camps around Filey on the east coast of England. His Company was then assigned to the British  Salonika Force fighting with the Allies on the Macedonian Front. On Saturday, December 8th 1917, while in Marseilles waiting to  ship out, he started keeping a diary.

Frank wrote in a Collins Ruby Diary for 1918, number 263. It is bound in red leather, roughly four inches high by three inches wide and each page covers two days. He wrote in it every day for the rest of the war.

This blog will contain transcriptions of each of his diary entries together with  the additional information we uncovered by researching around the themes and topics that Frank wrote about.

On Friday, December 8th 2017 his first entry will have been written exactly one hundred years ago. As such it will provide insight to an ordinary life a century ago and a window onto world events – not in the broad strokes of history but in the minutiae of its daily grind and sometimes trivial detail.