AV News 190 - Novembert 2012
Making of ‘For the Sake of Example’
Keith Leedham FRPS
When I got interested in AV some 35 years ago, I and a friend Dave Windle, not
having enough sequences to put on a show on our own, went round the clubs
together. His interest then moved to video and we went our own ways
photographically. Some while after that he got interested in the First World War
and visited the war graves in France. He was so moved by the men who were
shot at dawn that he wrote a poem called 'For The Sake of Example'.
Moving forward to 2012 I saw a brief snippet of a programme about The
National Memorial Arboretum in which they showed the Shot at Dawn memorial.
I was so moved by it that I
needed to see it for myself.
I had been invited to
Judge the Wilmslow Guild
annual AV competition and
we stayed with Howard and
Suzanne Gregory for a
couple of days. When it
started to snow getting to
the NMA from Howard and
Suzanne's home became
more challenging. We were
not sure that we would
actually get there but when
we did we were the only people there and I took what pictures I thought I would
need for a sequence. I had already asked Dave if I could use his poem.
When it started to snow a
day or so after we got
home I was off to Mundon
in Essex, about 15 or so
miles away from where we
live. There is a field of
trees there that somehow
had been poisoned back in
the 60s and they have
never been taken down.
This place is a must for
photographers and I took
all the shots I needed to
represent the soldiers in
the poem. Then I went on
to the internet to find out more of what had happened back then. When you read
the stories you cannot help but be moved by so very many tales of injustice. 307
of our men were shot by our troops for so called cowardice and most were
suffering from shell shock. I found three stories that fitted my needs, edited them
down and printed it off. I asked Dave if he would read his poem and my
daughter-in-law Kate's father Jon to read the stories.
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