This now and then image shows a joint wedding that took place at St Peter’s Church, St Leonards on Monday 3^rd May 1915. Two daughters of Mr and Mrs L. A. Smith, who lived in Horntye Road, St Leonards were married on the same day. Ethel Mabel Smith was wed to Private Albert Read of D Company, 7^th South Wales Borderers. Their youngest daughter Eleanor Constance Smith married Ernest Necklen of Castle Hill Road, Hastings.

I like to search for related topics when writing about photographs. Here I thought I would look for information about marriage trends during the war. I expect many thousands of words could be written about the psychology of relationships when a country is at war. I couldn’t find an article that seemed quite right though, but there are interesting related articles out there. For instance the concerns about getting engaged to strangers via letters to the trenches and the possible reasons behind the boom in twin births during WW1 in France. A more poignant article is about the effect that the numbers of men killed during the war had on the prospects of marriage for many women afterwards. Being the Daily Mail the article is sensationally named ‘Condemned to be Virgins‘.

This image is part of a series of Then and Now images I’ve created for East Sussex Council’s World War 1 commemoration website. The website is focussed on the contribution that the men and women of East Sussex made towards the war effort.

The two photographs used to create the image are below. You can view the top image full size on my Flickr page by clicking on it.