Once forgotten in the British military archives, the 200-year-old love letters finally saw the light of day, thanks to a Cambridge University professor.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Notes from beyond the grave and never received.
00:03 250 years after they were written, a batch of letters to French sailors have finally been opened and studied.
00:09 The sailors were captured by the British at the height of the Seven Years' War in the 18th century and held in UK prisons.
00:16 Dozens of letters were sent mainly by wives and mothers who didn't know of their men's fate.
00:21 They languished in the British National Archives until a French professor working at Cambridge University discovered them.
00:28 I immediately understood that these were not official letters from diplomats, aristocrats or great bourgeois,
00:35 but letters from people in common.
00:39 My heart rate accelerated and I understood that it was a unique object.
00:47 It was my greatest emotion as a historian to this day.
00:50 The letters give a fascinating insight into the lives of families during the late 1700s.
00:55 Some expressed love and fidelity to absent husbands and fiancées.
00:59 It's thought some of the senders died without seeing their loved ones again.
01:02 [WHOOSH]