author
F. A. Bolwell
1888–1971
A British First World War memoirist, he is best known for a vivid firsthand account of fighting with the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment on the Western Front. His surviving public record is sparse, which gives his writing an unusually direct, unpolished sense of lived experience.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Project Gutenberg lists F. A. Bolwell under the fuller name Frederick George Albert Bolwell, and credits him as the author of With a Reservist in France. That book is a personal account of the campaigns in which the 1st Division, I Corps took part, including Mons, the Marne, the Aisne, First Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, Festubert, and Loos.
Bolwell’s writing stands out because it comes from the perspective of a reservist who was there, not from a distant historian. The book also notes that its sketch maps were made by the author, which adds to the sense that he was recording events carefully for readers who wanted to understand what the fighting was actually like.
Beyond that, reliable biographical details about his life are hard to confirm from the sources found here. Even so, his work remains valuable as a clear, ground-level memoir of the early Western Front and of the experience of serving with the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment during the First World War.