W.H.B. Court has pointed out: "History free of all values cannot be written. Indeed, it is a concept almost impossible to understand, for men will scarcely take the trouble to inquire laboriously into something which they set no value upon." That has always been the case with my writing. Unless I have strong views on the subject, I don't bother to write about it. The first materials I ever produced concerned the First World War. It was a subject I had felt passionately about for many years. In fact, I can date it to 1956, the year that I inherited from my father the brass medal type object that provided details of my grandfather's death, John Edward Simkin, on the Western Front in 1915. My research into why he died did not give me a value-free view of the war.
