Gethin Matthews has been able to study the Welsh wartime experience through a collection of letters written by three of his relations. They proved to be not only rich in information but extremely moving, says Claire Vaughan
When Gethin Matthews, a senior lecturer in history at Swansea University, discovered the existence of 100 or so letters written by three brothers – Richard, Gabriel and Ivor Eustis – to family back home in Swansea during the First World War, he knew they were something special. Not only did they feed into a research project he was working on, but the siblings were related to him. However, among the letters was one that he found deeply unsettling.
“I’ve always been interested in Welsh history, so it’s natural for me to want to know how my family fit in. I’ve amassed a lot of information on all of my lines: 15 of my 16 great great grandparents were Welsh, and one is of Cornish ancestry – the Eustis branch.”
Gethin’s initial area of academic interest was the Welsh overseas, but his focus has been on the Welsh during the First World War for the past decade.
“Back in 2010, no Welsh historians were looking at the war, so I thought I’d build up my expertise in the area as we headed towards the centenary.”
He knew of the three brothers – his grandfather’s cousins – but didn’t know any details about them. In fact, he had no idea that they’d served in the First World War until 2010. “I was running a project with the aim of getting material out of Welsh family archives and digitising it.” A few years into the project, a serendipitous meeting brought a stash of letters to Gethin’s attention.
“Quite by chance in 2015, I met a chap called Ian Eustis and we discovered that we are quite closely related; he was my father’s second cousin. One day Ian said to me, ‘I’ve got something I think will be of interest to you.’ And he came to see me with a box containing 100 letters written by the three brothers during the war.” It was a real ‘wow’ moment for Gethin: ”In all the work I’ve been doing, it was very rare to find a family that had preserved more than a dozen letters – it was all very exciting.”
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Gethin set about studying the missives. “Because they were so detailed, the brothers’ personalities came through. You got to know their relationships within the family, and how they changed as individuals between 1914 and 1918. To be
