Rev Edward Stanley Moss ⁸²⁰

  Research Notes:

Michael Moss notes:

I searched for my grandfather the Reverend Edward Stanley Moss on the web and found him a whole website devoted to the Moss family in Australia. This was not only unexpected, but very strange. The first to come to Australia was the Reverend William Moss, you will find his name in the Australian Dictionary of National Biography. A radical he left Sussex after the Chartist protests in the early 1850s to settle here in Melbourne and was followed by other members of the Moss family, including remarkably his parents. It was a surreal experience on Monday to walk along Chapel Street, named after the chapel William Moss built and look for family graves in the cemetery at St Kilda.

oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh An interesting dissertation by Michael Moss which was sent as an e-mail states:
To the cold and youthful observer there is a strange fascination about the Age of Victoria. It has the odd attractiveness of something which is at once very near and very far off; it is like one of those queer fishes that one sees behind glass at an aquarium, before whose grotesque proportions and sombre menacing agilities one hardly knows whether to laugh or to shudder; when once it has caught one's eye, one cannot tear oneself away. 2
Strachey wrote these words in 1914 in his preface to his Eminent Victorians. We could say the same today of the First World War. I was brought up in the shadow of the war. Every summer until I was eighteen, when my grandmother died, we spent our summer holidays in Northumberland. My bedroom at the top of the house was a sort of shrine to my grandfather who had been killed in June 1918, when my mother was just a year old. 3 His portrait in army uniform stared down at me, along with a picture he had purchased of one of the gates to Boulogne that I still have. All I knew was that he had been a Congregational minister in Newark-on-Trent in the midlands of England and that his family came from Edinburgh. My grandmother hardly ever spoke about him; but then few people mentioned either war in my childhood. My grandmother ' s friends were mostly unmarried and wore engagement rings as silent testimony to their loss, many fighting with the Northumberland Fusiliers alongside Anzac troops on the beaches of Galipoli.. As children it seemed impertinent to ask questions. It is only recently that I have come to understand what Virginia Woolf meant when she wrote - 'Then suddenly like chasm in a smooth road, the war came ' , cutting their generation off form a time when 'the earth was still horizontal and the buildings perpendicular ' The history of conflict is composed of grand narratives and individual stories of courage, fear and tragedy. Like many widows my grandmother kept a bundle of papers and photographs to commemorate the chasm in her road in June 1918. I only read them with any care when I began to think about what I might say this evening. In some sense they are not remarkable, letters from his friends to my grandmother mourning his death, a touching little plan showing where his body lay in the cemetery at Ebblinghem to the east of Calais; and in other ways they are if not remarkable then deeply moving, his vision in his notebook of a new Britain, letters that tell of great courage in the face of the German 1918 spring offensive and his care and love. This is the stuff of family history and the interplay with the Great War that did so much to shape the world in which we live.
My grandfather was born at Portobello in Edinburgh in 1884, the eldest son of Joseph Burns, a colliery agent, and his wife Helen 5 . My grandfather is in the middle in front of the maid. Later they moved to Inveresk to the east of Edinburgh. My grandfather attended George Watson ' s School, one of the city ' s best known privately endowed academies. At Inveresk he became a close friend of Alexander George Mitchell, my grandmother ' s brother who had been sent home from North Shields in Northumberland on the north east coast of England to be educated. When he left school my grandfather went to work as an apprentice clothier with James Middlemass & Co in Edinburgh, before deciding to enter the ministry along with his friend George Mitchell. Congregationalists in 1906 they enrolled as students at the Nottingham Congregational Institute and while there my grandfather served as an assistant at nearby Burton Joyce Congregational Church. He was ordained and inducted as minister of London Road Congregational Church Newark on 13 and 14 November 1910, 6 when his great friend George Mitchell, now a United Free Church minister in Dundee, preached. His sister, my grandmother Mary Cant Mitchell who had trained as a teacher, came south to be his housekeeper. In February 1912 they were married on the smooth road before the chasm of war. My grandmother was given away by her cousin Alexander Mitchell, a solicitor and banker, as her father Thomas Robertson Mitchell was according to the newspaper reports dead. In fact he had abandoned his family and run away, reputedly to here in Australia, leaving his wife with a young family and a brewery to run. 7
My grandfather quickly gained a reputation as an exceptional preacher and a prominent member of organisations concerned with social improvement, particularly the Boy Scouts. 8 He had two children, my mother Helen born in March 1917 and her sister Elizabeth born two years earlier. 9 With so many members of his congregation at the front and his younger brother James, a conscientious objector, serving as a stretcher bearer, my grandfather decided in the spring of 1917 to accept a commission as an Army chaplain. He preached his farewell sermon on the last Sunday of August in which he declared emphatically that ' Britain' s cause was just ' and that 'peace - true peace- might be bought to this troubled land ' . Like most other men leaving for the front he had his photograph taken in his well cut new uniform. The following day he was on his way to France and my grandmother and her two baby daughters never saw him again. They left Newark and returned to North Shields where my grandmother was to remain for the rest of her long life.
My grandfather Burns was posted to the Royal Artillery with which many men from Newark were serving. Like many of his contemporaries, he quickly proved himself both resourceful and courageous. As Captain H. H Carter of the Royal Army Medical Corps wrote after his death: 10 'He was absolutely fearless & insisted on visiting any battery if they had been shelled. This was no headless running in to danger because the fact that the "padre" came willingly & cheerful under the circumstances always put heart into the men ' . He wrote home: 'Don't worry about me. I'm a proud man to be here with these men ' . On 23 March 1918 he had embarked for fourteen days leave, but everyone was ordered to return to their units to meet the German ' Michael ' offensive on the Channel Ports. In these dark days when it was possible the war might be lost my grandfather preached a sermon, in which he proclaimed his vision for the future of Britain, not in grand Imperial style but in terms of social justice and equity:11
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh We know what this war has already cost our Army and our Country. I will not dwell on that. But I say: Our Country must be itself in the days to come worthy of the great and horrible sacrifice which has been made for it. To use Eugene Casalis's [a French soldier] words: we hope confidentially for the rebirth of that Britain for whom it will be worthwhile to kill and be killed. We dream of the Britain of tomorrow -that young Britain which is awaiting its hour. It must be a consecrated Britain.
Now I confess that sometimes I am despondent of my country; and I have asked myself more than once whether or not our Britain is worthy of the sacrifice her sons have made for her. Is she? Is she worthy of all the blood which has been shed for her in this War? No, Sirs, she is not! Not at least the Britain that now is - not the Britain at any rate of the profiteers, not the Britain of the slum landlords, not the Britain of the grasping employers whose only aim is to pay the lowest wages possible, not the Britain of the cheating workman whose only thought is of scrimped work and high wages, not the Britain of the brothel and the public house. Such a Britain is by no means worth of the sacrifice of her sons.
But the Britain that is to be, the Britain clean and free, the Britain sober and industrious, the Britain in which all classes shall work together for the common good, the Britain in which God shall be honoured and his laws of justice and brotherhood and equity obeyed - such a Britain is worthy of all the sacrifice that has been made, and indeed of any sacrifice that can be made. It is that we fight for, ay and will gladly die for.
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh On the morning of 7 June, learning of a gas attack on a forward position near Ebblinghem he rushed forward to offer help and, according to my grandmother, left his tin hat behind in his haste. While riding pillion on a motorbike he was struck in the head by shrapnel. He never regained consciousness. His commanding officer wrote to my grandmother: 12 'He was such a splendid fellow -as brave as a lion & loved by every officer & man in the Brigade, & he spent his whole time & energies in going about amongst the men & cheering them up & helping them in their difficulties. The great point about him was that he was a man first & a padre afterwards ' . There were other tributes, a letter from his brother James, the stretcher-bearer, from the 58^th Scottish General Hospital in Rouen with a photograph. 13
For my grandmother and my mother and her sister, the bundle of papers and photographs was as much as a beginning as an end, which would tie them and even me to the military cemetery in Ebblinghem. It is a tiny village on the busy road from St Omer to Hazebrouck near the Belgium border. The cemetery, like all those left behind by the German sudden advance and then helter-skelter retreat in 1918, is small and sits on the ridge above the village. 14 Along with many other children who had lost parents in the war, my mother visited Ebblinghem at least twice in her childhood 15, - 'The gardener was so kind and it was he who took the trouble to plant the pansies, Betty and I planted lovely white begonia plants near the stone and we are hoping they will grow. We loved to go to the quiet little place and we are looking forward to going again ' . 16 I went for the first time a year ago and found the experience much more moving than I had anticipated. Rudyard Kipling commemorated such a visit in his short story 'The Gardener ' , which ends with a tribute to another man mistaken for a gardener, who knows without asking that Helen is looking for her son: 17
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh man knelt behind a line of headstones - evidently a gardener, for he was firming a young plant in the soft earth. She went towards him, her paper in her hand. He rose at her approach and without prelude or salutation asked: "Who are you looking for?"
"Lieutenant Michael Turrell - my nephew", said Helen slowly and word for word, as she had many thousands of times in her life.
The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass toward the naked black crosses.
"Come with me", he said, "and I will show you where your son lies."
When Helen left the Cemetery she turned for a last look. In the distance she saw the man bending over his young plants; and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener.
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh It is difficult not to be touched by these lingering monuments to the Great War. In common with so much else today the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which looks after all these war graves, has gone online as both an act of commemoration and to satisfy the endless curiosity of the family historian.18
Rather than rummaging through bundles of old fading papers we now instinctively rummage on the web, hoping Google will find something to satisfy our appetite. Although as children we sometimes speculated what might have become of the runaway brewer here in Australia, my father nor my grandfather ever mentioned that most of the Moss family had come here to Melbourne in the 1850s. I only discovered this quite by accident when invited to give a lecture on public history and because I am an archivist I naturally turned to family history and why not my own Moss family, about which I knew little. I searched for my grandfather the Reverend Edward Stanley Moss on the web and found him a whole website devoted to the Moss family in Australia. 19 This was not only unexpected, but very strange. The first to come to Australia was the Reverend William Moss, you will find his name in the Australian Dictionary of National Biography. A radical he left Sussex after the Chartist protests in the early 1850s to settle here in Melbourne and was followed by other members of the Moss family, including remarkably his parents. It was a surreal experience on Monday to walk along Chapel Street, named after the chapel William Moss built and look for family graves in the cemetery at St Kilda. 20
I published an article in which I explored the family history phenomena - A Choreographed Encounter, which found its way on to the web through Glasgow University ' s institutional repository. I should not have been surprised when this yielded not lots of invitations to help distressed ladies in west Africa, but emails from family members that I had never met or known. It is the tractability of the web that makes it such a powerful distribution channel. You can launch a search here in Australia and turn up material of interest anywhere in the world. Its speed and tractability make it possible to sustain communities with a common interest (technically known as epistemic communities) in a way which was much more difficult in the world of postal services and analogue collections. This is why family history has taken to it with such enthusiasm and now come second only to pornography as the biggest constituency of internet users. This is why there are as many silver surfers as there are teenage tweeters.
One of those who contacted me was Gareth James Cameron who lives in Kent, his branch of the Moss family returned to England from Australia by way of India, but that is another story. He sent me a copy of a memoir written by my Moss grandfather ' s aunt Sarah Anne Moss, who only emigrated to Melbourne when my grandfather was nine. 21 What is fascinating about this document is that, although her brother my great grandfather George, a schoolmaster, had deserted the Baptist faith in which he had been bought up and become an Anglo-Catholic, they were still in touch. She noted in 1915 'He writes to me occasionally and always appears to enjoy news from Australia ' . Her younger brother Frederick, another schoolmaster at Maldon in Essex and a Labour councillor, kept in much closer contact, as her mother was living with him. At least one of his sons came out to Australia and served with the Australian army during the first world war. When quizzed about the First World War, my father always said his father was too old and anyway as headmasters to a man all his brothers were in reserve occupations, both of which are true with one exception.
The story was the family by age and occupation had escaped the horrors of war, apart from my father ' s eldest brother who as a boy scout had been sent to guard a reservoir in case of a Zeppelin attack in 1918 at the age of thirteen. No one ever mentioned Great Uncle Joseph, who had given up school-teaching and become a labourer. He volunteered at the age of forty-six as a minelayer. Although long since dead when I was a child, his family lived in Bristol when I was growing up there, but no one ever mentioned them. Again I only found out when his grand-daughter, Bronwyn, read a Choreographed Encounter on the web.

Aunt Sarah ' s memoir also contradicts the tale that the Mosses did not go to war. Two of my grandfather ' s cousins were killed. The first to die was Cyril Frank, who fell at Loos in September 1915. He and his brother Frederick William had only volunteered earlier in the year as part of Kitchener ' s army. According to his aunt - 'He was always of a bold dashing spirit, afraid of nothing, and he with a comrade of kindred spirits, fought their way through the German wire entanglements, and were the first to throw hand grenades into the enemy trenches, he was the first to fall, and never did a German shell do a more dastardly deed than take the life of Cyril Moss ' . Nevertheless it was his brother Frederick who won the Military Cross for acts of exemplary gallantry in August 1916. On learning of his brother ' s death his elder brother Arthur Dudley, who was working as an electrical engineer at Burwood, immediately volunteered to join the Australian forces. He was killed at Villers-Bretonneux, near Amines in Picardy in May 1917 leaving behind a young widow just like my grandmother Burns far away in Northumberland. Apart from being commemorated at the national war memorial where his name will be projected on the outside wall at nine minutes past one on the 14^th of November, his name is also engraved on the Masonic memorial at Baulkham Hills. Frederick William Moss survived the war and emigrated to America where he became vice-president of Standard Oil under John D Rockefeller. Again I only know this because of the reach and power of the internet.22
These relics of heroism and young lives lost are what the architect of the Australian War Memorial Charles Bean consecrated as 'sacred things ' to be preserved and made public as a commemoration.23 The home page of the Australian War Memorial cites Charles Beam heartfelt inscription - 'Here is their spirit in the heart of the land they loved, and here we guard the record which they themselves made ' , but just what is being commemorated - simply the name, Arthur Dudley Moss, who gave his life. In much the same way as my grandfather Burns ' name is inscribed on the scroll of remembrance at the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle.
Apart from the references in Aunt Sarah ' s memoir, I have discovered the rest by simply surfing the web. I am only doing what millions of other family historians are doing every day. A little more about 2^nd Lieutenant Arthur Dudley Moss can be learned from the AIF (Australian Anzacs in the Great War) project database. 24 He was a member of the Church of England, he was married, he was an electrical engineer and lived in Trebartha, Burwood on the outskirts of Melbourne. He embarked from Sydney on board HMAT A18 Wiltshire on 22 August 1916 and he has no known grave. Charles Beam would have applauded the use of the web as a means of making known such facts, bald as they are, to a much wider public as records lay at the heart of his vision of the memorial - to me in Scotland or you in Australia that two men, to whom I am closely related, were killed in the Great War. The internet holds out the possibility of much more, of the co-creation of a record. In much the same way as people bring flowers of remembrance, a practice we now know extends back thousands of years, they can add context to bald biographical details, photographs, letters, mementoes or in Arthur Dudley ' s case the entry in Aunt Sarah ' s diary. This has become popular and is termed as 'crowd-sourcing ' . It has drawbacks. There will be more information about some than others, but that is nothing new. As Samuel Johnson observed over 250 years ago: 25
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh It is frequently objected to relations of particular lives, that they are not distinguished by any striking or wonderful vicissitudes. The scholar who passed his life among his books, the merchant who conducted only his own affairs, the priest whose sphere of action was not extended beyond that of his duty, are considered as no proper objects of public regard, however they might have excelled in their several stations, whatever might have been their learning, integrity, and piety. But this notion arises from false measures of excellence and dignity, and must be eradicated by considering that, in the esteem of uncorrupted reason, what is of most use is of most value.
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh In fact crowd-sourcing will help redress the balance in favour of those 'whose sphere of action was not extended beyond that of his duty ' . Moreover it will avoid the selectivity imposed on the 'archive ' by well-meaning or not so well-meaning civil servants and archivists, which Michael Piggott explored so poignantly in his essay - 'War, sacred archiving and C E W Bean ' . There are inevitably issues around funding and mediation, editorial intervention to correct errors and delete unwelcome content. There is, however, evidence to suggest that the communities of episteme that are formed on the web can be self-sustaining and self-regulating, for example Wikipedia, or at least inexpensive because it is so tractable. Many family history sites are owned by such communities and enjoy an independent existence.
In the background there are questions about the pre-occupation with family history and investments that are made by public and private organizations to service what is now a massive international market. It is now for many much more than filling in boxes in complex and ever-extending charts, but can it be characterised as more than 'history-lite ' for those only interested in themselves? When I first sought to equate public history with genealogy, a distinguished, but not very perceptive, academic historian attempted to tarnish it with the brush of the sinister use made of genealogy by the Nazis. It is true that the ahenpass looks very like a modern family history notebook, but even in Germany, despite everything that happened, family history is now popular. 26 The use made by the Nazis of family history to single out those of pure Aryan blood should alert us to the fact that many of the records we use to trace our family histories originally were anything but benign. They were used to control and even oppress and kill, taxation records, poor law and prison registers, lists of catechists and emigrants and so on. They still are. When people registered to vote for the first time in the recent Scottish referendum were discovered not to have paid tax for many years, they were immediately sent the bill.
How do we begin to explain why so many people engage with their family history? It is hard to believe that it is a quest for identity in an atomised world. My family at least on my father ' s side was atomised, like any many others, when most of them left for Australia in the 1850s. Aunt Sarah ' s memoir makes it clear that contact was maintained, however slow and irregular the postal service. There is a confluence between Samuel Johnson ' s 'false measures of excellence and dignity ' and Charles Beam ' s concept of the sanctity of the archive as expressed in the National War Memorial. There is something compelling about the need to commemorate, which has long antecedents going back to those 40,000 year old hand prints on the walls of caves scattered across the globe. 27 Egyptians at the time of the Pharaohs, believed that as long as a person ' s name was recorded on a memorial and still spoken, they were still living. The opening page of the Shoah database records chillingly a sentence from a victim ' s last postcard from Vilna in July 1941, 28 'I should like someone to remember that there was once a living person named David Berger ' . His wish was granted when his girlfriend who escaped to Israel, donated the postcard as a memorial to the Masuah Archives at the Institute of Holocaust Studies. This is the reason that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission tends the graves of the fallen and the new national memorial arboretum with its wall of remembrance at Alrewas in the United Kingdom has become so popular. 29 Not everyone agrees. When Charles Sorely was killed in 1915 this haunting lament was found in his pocket. 30.
you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,
"Yet many a better one has died before."
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his forevermore.
Karl Popper was equally appalled by the scale of the human tragedy, but at the same time endorsed David Berger ' s final wish by dedicating his Poverty of Historicism: 'In memory of the countless men and women of all creeds and races or nations or races who fell victim to the fascists and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny ' . Justice Albie Sachs of South Africa described poignantly his own personal encounter with himself in the archive, his prison file - the evidence that his torture really happened. In an interview with him Henry Kreisler, of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and the creator of the Conversations with History blog, explored the interplay between the individual intensely subjective experiences and the group. Sachs responded by describing his recovery from the bomb attack that left him blind in one eye and with only one arm: 31
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh you still have those moments of unconsciousness fading in and out. Communicating with them, hearing a voice. Telling one ' s self a joke that, as it happened, revived me from fainting again. And that slow, long recovery that ' s very personal. But then also the knowledge that I ' m part of a community, a group, that what got me there wasn ' t just a purely personal idiosyncratic thing. That I ' m in history. There are thousands of others out there crying for me, laughing for me, cheering me on. I ' m doing it for them. It ' s about something. It ' s about the world out there. It ' s not about becoming famous or becoming rich or being powerful or enjoying sex. It ' s about who you are in the world. And that was very, very sustaining.
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh This conjunction of 'fading in and out ' and being 'in history ' precisely describes the whole tapestry of family history.
Such a perspective takes us to the question of the place of the individual in history that has troubled philosophers since at least the eighteenth century. Popper ' s Poverty of Historicism is a powerful defence of individual moral rights against historical determinism, based on the ideas of Hegel, that in his view legitimised totalitarianism. Writing before the Second World War and perhaps with the sacrifices of those who had died on the battlefields in mind, the philosopher Hilda D Oakeley reached a similar conclusion:
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh . . . it is the value of the individual which must never be lost sight of in the endeavour to find some intelligible principles in history. Hence the rejection of any philosophy of history which is deaf to the voices of the individuals of the past in their countless millions, in its exclusive attention to a far off goal in which all will be well with history.
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh This concept of man as a moral agent acting in history is problematic, leading to unhelpful notions of binary opposition between the individual and the state or between freewill and determinism. This in a way is what Charles Sorely was getting at, they had died and for what?, just so at the going down of the sun and in the morning we could remember them? Such nihilism was not my grandfather Burns's noble vision of a better Britain. Michael Oakeshott, recognising that not every individual could be arbiter of his own history, postulated the notion of 'anteindividualism ' where the state controlled lives depriving the individual of moral rights, citing as examples Calvin ' s Geneva and Hitler ' s Germany, and we might add the appalling atrocities being committed by ISIS in the name of Islam.32
The most powerful defence of the individual as an historian was made over eighty years ago by the American historian Carl Becker in his ground breaking and controversial paper, 'Everyman his own historian ' .
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh If the essence of history is the memory of things said and done, then it is obvious that every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history. Of course we [professional historians] do what we can to conceal this invidious truth. . . .Normally the memory of Mr. Everyman, when he awakens in the morning, reaches out into the country of the past and of distant places and instantaneously recreates his little world of endeavour, pulls together as it were things said and done in his yesterdays, and coordinates them with his present perceptions and with things to be said and done in his tomorrows.
oxrdrdashrdrw150rdrcf3rsp300rdrsh Becker developed his argument, not from family history, but the every day activities of life, buying and paying for household necessities. He postulated that the tasks involved in checking and authenticating invoices and receipts, embodied the skills of the historian. Becker, by drawing attention to the historian at work in each one of us, demolished a then prevalent 'scientific ' determinism or structuration in historical thought, and opened the way for a relativism that troubles some historians. He left it to others to return to the place of the individual experience in history. This perspective on the past finds expression in subaltern studies that had its origins in South Asia, what Ranajit Guha calls 'The Small Voices of History ' ' that are otherwise drowned in the cacophony of statist commands ' . Think of the current student protests in Hong Kong. 33
Relativism confronts us at every turn when we depart from the comfortable familiarity of the analogue world and enter the web. Just try searching for terrorism in Google Australia and then try Google Pakistan. As the bomb-making instructions leap up on the page, you can hear the sirens coming towards you. This is the flip side of selectivity or privileging that troubled the curators of the Australian War Memorial when they began to collect records after the war and troubles me when my great uncle, the conscientious objector, is not to be found amongst the names of those who served their country in the Great War. My clever friends at Constant Verlag in Brussels have produced Logo-Wiki 34, which shows in real time how wikipedia content is redacted and manipulated. It is frightening, not because it has never happened before, it has, but because of the tractability of the web. However the sheer scale of the web makes it unlikely that every scrap of evidence will be deleted. Search engines do not find everything, just enough to satisfy our curiosity. In exactly the same way that neither archive or library catalogues index everything. For the archivist and librarian the scale of the information resource out there presents a colossal challenge.
When my grandfather was killed in 1918 Sister Potts, who at his side when he died, wrote to my grandmother - 35 '. . . there will be a cross with his name and Regiment to mark his resting place. Any personal belongings he may have had will be sent to you from headquarters but this usually takes several weeks ' . Some of the letters I have quoted and photographs I have shown were amongst those belongings. Today the widows of a soldier killed in action are more likely to receive a mobile phone or a computer, which will contain much more information than ever before.36 This does not just apply to the personal papers of individual combatants, but to all operational information and even to non-combatants. 37 I recently was in a taxi in London. The driver came from Kabul. I asked about his family and if he was concerned about them during the Taliban regime. 'No', he replied, 'I could ring my mother on her mobile'. The world has gone digital.
Photographs may include details of where they were taken captured from ambient metadata, but just like old photographs in my grandparents albums little or nothing to explain who the people were and the circumstances in which they were taken. Email messages are normally components in long threads and may individually contain little information about what they are about and in my experience are not held in containers that resemble files. Unlike the bundle of papers and photographs I have inherited and can read 38, it is unlikely that in a hundred years time a mobile phone or a computer will boot up. The content will only be readable if active steps are taken to preserve it. This almost certainly means storing it on another device - a server somewhere. Technically this is achievable and the costs are falling, but and it is a big but the content presents other obstacles.
It was until recently assumed naively that there was a digital black hole and that very little digital content at least from the early years would survive. Archivists put about alarming stories of the danger to our heritage unless steps were taken to rectify the problem. As it turns out nothing could be further from the truth, in fact masses of material survives on a scale that is almost unimaginable. One of the reasons is that the digital has fundamentally changed the way we work, we do things differently in the digital and by default it keeps stuff. Some practices are extensions of what we did in the paper world, others are radically different. In many bureaucracies the carefully constructed minute has been replaced by email threads, which are littered with trails that go nowhere as increasing numbers of people are unnecessarily copied in. However hard information managers try, much of this content is never systematically filed, because those responsible for running filing systems have long since been declared redundant and filing is tedious, adding little value to busy frontline staff. What the archive is likely to inherit is a large and chaotic collection of what can be best described as stuff. You can see this for yourselves, providing you are not an American citizen, by looking at the contents of WikiLeaks. I can assure you that reviewing a jumble of digital stuff for sensitive content leaves you reaching for analgesics after an hour. Technically it would be possible to keep it all, but that comes with a heavy price as every piece of information will need to be reviewed for sensitive content if any of it is to be disclosed in the way that paper files are made available after in the United Kingdom now twenty years.
Most sensitive content is not about state secrets or military deployments, it is personal information about us that in some circumstances may be deemed to affect the well being of children and relatives. In Europe the data protection regime is getting tougher and in most European countries must be kept closed until it can be safely assumed individuals are dead, in the United Kingdom a hundred years and in Scandinavian countries 110 years. This is a very long time. There is also agitation for individuals to exercise a right to be forgotten, to be redacted - crossed out from the pages of history. The ancient Egyptians did this by chiseling out names from their memorials.
In the paper world it is easy to take the risk of inadvertently disclosing information, as it is will only be discovered by chance. Once records are made available digitally online ubiquitous search engines make it all too easy to find such information as my own family history searches amply illustrate. This takes information management and archives in to the brave new world of risk management and the appetite information owners have for risk, which includes you and me.
The probability, impact and appetite for these risks will inevitably vary from one organization and circumstance to another. In the worst case scenario the release of names of informants, collaborators and agents in war zone is clearly unacceptable as children and even grandchildren can get killed. In the United Kingdom such records are rightly closed for 120 years. It is not possible to conduct sensitivity review automatically, except at a very simplistic level - bank account details or insurance numbers. Even Google is using manual procedures to comply with EU regulations. With colleagues at the National Archives and at Kew, I am engaged in a project using information retrieval techniques to semi-automate the process by flagging items that reviewers should look at. The danger is that unless this problem can be resolved content will be closed for 100 years as a precaution as some commentators have warned.39 This would mean that records relating to the circumstances of my grandfather's death would not be released until 2017 as it could possibly cause distress to my mother who was born in that year.
If all content has to be reviewed for sensitivity keeping everything will only increase the danger of precautionary closure. The regular transmission and disclosure of records in archives under the rule of law is a cornerstone of open liberal democracies. Archives are not just there to feed the insatiable curiosity of family historians, they are fundamentally there to allow government to be called to account, albeit in the court of history. The information commissioner in the United Kingdom has made it clear that this is radically different from 'open government ' , which is the executive releasing information it would like to or does not much care about. Precautionary closure can only be avoided if some means can be found of selecting content to be preserved and at the same time as far as possible avoiding bias. There are tools, mostly based on sophisticated mathematical models, that could be used, for example to weed out all the false positives and multiple instantiations. We anticipate because of changes in the way we work, the increase in the range and nature of scholarship and demand from family historians that much more will be kept, perhaps 20 instead of 5 per cent of content. Tools will also be needed by users. The very nature of digital content precludes conventional listing, unless you have unlimited resources and can list every single instantiation. The user will need to learn new techniques to analyse and interpret what we can expect to be what my good friend Tim Gollins dubs a supernova of data. It was he who discovered by asking awkward questions that much more survives than anyone imagined.
In the background there are two related concerns about the storage of digital content. A name carved on a war memorial or documents kept locked away in an archive or in a cupboard can be expected to survive for a long time with little intervention. 40 This is not true of digital content that has to be actively managed by those with technical skills to help preserve it for long periods and to build the tools to select what should be kept, review it and access it. Archivists, librarians and private owners will no longer have the keys, these will be in the hands of the technologists. What archivists, librarians and private owners will continue to have is the critical knowledge of the content and how it is used. One of the reasons that the archival and library community was slow to recognize the challenges of appraisal, sensitivity review and access was a pre-occupation with technology and not with content. If they were interested in content it was more often than not an attempt to defend the old ways of doing things, rather than grapple with the changing information landscape. A consequence has been that ethnographers and anthropologists have contributed more to our understanding of changes in office practice with the advent of the digital than archivists or librarians.
And then there is the cost of preserving a mass of personal data, mostly but not exclusively for family historians, closed for approaching a hundred years. Does this represent a reasonable charge on the Exchequer and are families going to be willing to pay to keep personal papers for similarly long periods of time? They cannot escape data protection regulations as personal papers contain content that discloses details and images of third parties. 41 My great uncle ' s photograph of staff at the 58^th Scottish Field Hospital has pictures of some of his colleagues that under a strict interpretation of the rules could not be made public until the year 2000. Although far more survives in a digital medium than we imagined, will perversely much more disappear though tightening regulation, neglect or the expense of storage.
We have come a long way from where I began in the Age of Victoria and the chasm in the smooth road brought about by the Great War, but such long closure periods make it seem very near, as it was to me when I lay in bed in the attic of my grandmother ' s house. In some ways Lytton Stratchey ' s metaphor of 'those queer fishes that one sees behind glass at an aquarium, before whose grotesque proportions and sombre menacing agilities one hardly knows whether to laugh or to shudder; when once it has caught one's eye, one cannot tear oneself away ' is as apposite today as it was in 1914. 42 The digital has grown into ' grotesque proportions' and because we cannot touch or feel it we can only sense it, as it were, 'behind glass at an aquarium ' and 'once it has caught one's eye, one cannot tear oneself away ' or at least those of us who have to grapple with these issues. I believe passionately in this anniversary year of Magna Carta in the 'rule of law ' , it is what England has given the world. What we must ensure that under the rule of law the archive with all its faults and loose-ends holds the evidence in whatever medium that makes it possible to call the government to account, even if long after the event as historians are doing and will be doing across the world over the next four years in trying to explain the fault line of the Great War. When I consult the files from the time, as I have done recently for an essay on war savings 43, I know instinctively that they are what they purport to be, as I know that my grandfather ' s sermons are his, I want to be certain that the digitally born records of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Syria will survive and be open for inspection in 2114.

  Noted events in his life were:

• connection. ⁸²⁰ My connection to Michael Moss is as follows:
Michael Moss (c1940)
His father was William Henry Osmund Moss (c1900)
His father was Edward Stanley Moss (c1860)
His father was George Thomas Moss (1825)
His father was George Moss (1793) & he also had Annie Moss (1823) who married John Dunn (1823)
They had Henry Dunn (1856)
He had Victor Dunn (1897) who married Janet Buntine (1880)
Her father was Benjamin Buntine (1868)
His father was John Buntine (1827) who married Janet Armstrong (1837)
Her father was Thomas Armstrong (1791) & he also had Jane Armstrong (1816) who married Christopher Dixon (1812)
They had Janet Dixon (1853) who married Harry Hiscock (c1846)
They had Frank Hiscock (1873) who married Emily Wallis (1875)
Her father was William Wallis (1849) who married Victorine Groube (1851)
Her father was Rev Horatio Groube (1814) & he also had George Groube (1847)
He had Edith Groube (1880) who married Percy Howe (1866)
His father was Robert Howe (1833)
His father was Frederick Howe (1805)
His father was James Howe (1777)
His father was George Howe (1741) & he also had Sarah Howe (1775)
She had Alexander Moss (1811)
She had James Moss (1846)
He had Laura Kershaw Waldock or Moss (1864)
She had Winthrop Larkinson (1889)
He had Dulcie Larkinson (1926) who married Colin Davies (1925)
She had me- Robyn Bray (nee Davies) (1950)

Edward married.