This work was originally published by Maynooth University in Ireland in
This is an open access work licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Alec C Tate served with the British army in India before he married Milicent Farren and started a family in Whiteabbey Co. Antrim. Their sons, James and William continued the military tradition and enlisted with the British army with James serving as a Second Lieutenant with the Indian Expeditionary Force. James spent the majority of the war in India during which time the Indian Expeditionary Force was dispatched to Mesopotamia. This letter is part of a collection that he wrote to his parents detailing his movements and his day to day experience. James' letter to his father begins by saying he is glad to hear how he has improved. He talks of how they have a peaceful if somewhat boring existence, and how they long to see the inside of a house. He tells him of how his new bomb idea was rejected and the disappointment he felt after all the work he put into it. He informs his father that he has not made a will and should anything happen to him his father must make arrangements with what to do with what little is left of his property.
The data in these XML files was generated based on a data dump from the Magellan database (https://github.com/Maynooth-Center-for-Digital-Humanities/Magellan). Each database record has been converted to a JSON file (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/json). The element section of the JSON file contains the TEI-encoded contents of the letters. The TEI XML has been cleaned and made well-formed using a Python script (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/src).