Great War
The Great War
The Great War
Peter has a life-long interest in the Great War, touring the Western Front from the late 60s.He was amongst the first to graduate with an MA in British First World War studies from the University of Birmingham in 2006, and obtained his PhD there under the supervision of Professors John Bourne and Peter Simkins in 2013.
Infantry battalion commanders
Peter's PhD topic led to the publication of his book British Infantry Battalion Commanders in the First World War (2015).
Psychological coping in the trenches
Psychological coping in the trenches
As a trauma psychologist, Peter went on to research resilience in the soldiers of 1914-18.
This led to his book Glum Heroes - Hardship, Fear and Death: Resilience and Coping in the British Army on the Western Front (2016).
The Hundred Days
The Hundred Days
The final Hundred Days campaign of 1918, where the British Army was the spearhead of the allied advance to victory, has received less attention from historians than it deserves.
Peter addresses this in his book The Battle of the Selle (2017).
The learning process
The British Army learned to fight a new type of warfare 1914-18.
Peter explores this process in his book A Complete Orchestra of War
(2019) - a new history of 6th Infantry Division.
He follows a different theme of the learning process in his biography of inventor Major Conrad Dinwiddy The Resourceful Gunner
(2018).
Death and burial
Identification and burial of the dead was a massive task that went on between 1918 and the start of the Second World War.
Peter examines this process in a series of articles, and in his book Norwood and the Great War, a review of some 600 burials and commemorations in West Norwood Cemetery, south London, published in 2022.
The officer corps
In addition to his work on infantry battalion command, Peter follows the development of the British Army officer corps through a family of six officers who served between 1880 and 1950, in his book Dardanelles to Dunkirk, published in 2022.
In 2022, Peter, with the Western Front Association, has published analysis of the health of veterans in the post-war period as pictured in the pension records
Peter offers lectures on a range of topics to interested groups
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Peter offers lectures on a range of topics to interested groups
