Norah Gribble's "Book of Julian"

Thanks to the wonders of Bookfinder http://www.bookfinder.com/ I have now manged to track down a copy of Norah Gribble's "Book of Julian". It is a fairly weighty quarto volume, published privately, documenting the all too brief life of Julian Royds Gribble VC. It was assumed that he had died on a first world war battlefield, but it was later discovered that he had been captured and was a PoW. Before he could be released however he succumbed to the flu pandemic.

Norah, his grief stricken mother, seems never to have been able to come to terms with her son's death and in 1923 published this biography, including all the letters he had written to her as a child. It is almost too poignant to read.

Norah, a member of the Royds family and my great grandmother's first cousin, was painted by Singer Sergent when she was younger. The Taubman museum in Roanoke, Virginia now owns the picture and has named their cafe after her. http://www.taubmanmuseum.org/

It is difficult for us now to understand this kind of suffering. My grandmother lost her twin brother in WWI but her way of coping seems to have been the opposite of Norah's. According to my mother she never spoke about him.