YOU couldn’t tweet from the trenches.  You couldn’t text, email or Facebook. You just had to postcard. Younger readers will find it amazing that 100 years ago a soldier would buy an attractive piece of card and write, using a pen or pencil, a message on it.

Then he would purchase a stamp. He’d lick the back of the stamp, stick it on the card, and go and search for a postbox. The card would then physically travel across the sea and over the land until, days later, a postman would push it through the recipient’s front door.

It is so much easier and so much quicker to send a text or a tweet out into the ether, and then receive an immediate response.

But a text or a tweet cannot be as beautiful and enduring as First World War silk postcards sent from the trenches.

These “silks” were as fashionable as tweets, and about ten million of them were sent.

The earliest were handmade by French or Belgian women just behind the frontline.

The Northern Echo:
A ‘remembrance from a soldier’ card also sent by Pte Mawlam

When they became popular, factories in Paris started mass producing the silk designs which the women then hand-glued to the cards.

A very clever piece of additional marketing was that the silk design concealed a little envelope. The soldier could then buy another appropriately designed card to go inside the envelope.

The cards on this page were sent back from the trenches by Private Fred Mawlam of Bentley Wynd, Yarm. He was 17 when he joined the 3rd Welsh Regiment, and he was wounded near Boulogne.

His sisters, Clara and Florence, and his niece, Gwendoline, received the cards and treasured them because, 100 years later, they are still in beautiful condition.

They belong to Gwendoline’s son, Lynden Clark, of Fairfield, Stockton. “I can remember my great-uncle Frank coming to our home numerous times during the Second World War because we had a farm, and he came for eggs and butter,” says Lynden.

The Northern Echo:
The message inside the postcard, sent by pte Mawlam

“He was a rep for WD & HO Wills, the tobacco company, and he came in a Riley car.”