Christmas 1914

As soldiers and sailors prepared for a meagre Christmas in 1914, morale was buoyed by the arrival of a new Christmas ‘comfort’. It consisted of a brass tin, popularly thought to contain pipe tobacco, cigarettes, a Christmas card, bullet pencil and photograph of Princess Mary (daughter of King George V). She had initiated the project, and a fund was established to supply and distribute over 2½ million of these ‘comfort’ packages during the winter of 1914/15. And they were not just sent to those at the front or on the high seas but to everyone who ‘wore the King’s uniform on Christmas Day 1914’.

The tins were originally made of brass, but as brass was used extensively in munitions, supplies of the raw material were a problem. This was exacerbated by the sinking of The Lusitania in 1915, when a large consignment of strip brass went down with the ship. So, substitute metals were used for the later boxes. The smoking accoutrements could not all be fitted in the brass tin, so all contents were delivered to the servicemen in a cardboard box. The tobacco was soon smoked but the brass tin became a keep-safe and many families still possess this memory of the first Christmas of the Great War.