An Appreciation by Professor Robin Prior
I was sitting in my office at ADFA in 1992 or 1993 hard at work marking papers or reflecting on whether the military could be used to forcibly expel those members of the School of Economics who were not members of the Union (all of them) when I heard a voice say: ‘You don’t say enough about the French’. It was Liz. She had been reading some chapters for me on a book on the Battle of Passchendaele. I said ‘Well, they didn’t do much’ at which point she confronted me with sections of the French Official History of the First World War which seemed to indicate that they had done a great deal. ‘This is in the Library’, she said. ‘How big is it’ I replied. ‘It’s only 101 volumes but that includes the appendices and you won’t have to read all of them’. ‘Well that’s a relief’ I said weakly ‘but isn’t there something in English’. “Typical’ she said ‘but no there isn’t’.
It was at that point that I suggested that she might like to write something on which there was nothing in English. And that something turned into ‘A Study in Alliance Warfare: The Battle of the Somme, 1916’, her M.A. thesis. In the course of this work she discovered, to the amazement of all (including her supervisor) that both French and British had liaison officers embedded in the armies of their allies and their reflections and reports told a great deal about Franco-British relations. (By the way it was never Anglo-French in Liz’s world, the French always came first.) Her case study was that of the battle of the Somme and I was later to incorporate some of her work (with due acknowledgement) in my own book on the Somme. About that book Liz remarked that ‘the French are almost entirely absent’. My feeble reply that it was a book about the British Army cut no ice. As a result the French did creep into that book rather more often.
The reports on her thesis were so glowing and Liz so determined that she soon embarked upon a PhD – not a career path often followed by a Research Assistant. But Liz was always more that an RA. She discovered sources for staff, translated them when required and through in a fair bit of analysis as well. My work certainly got the once over to ensure that an Anglo was not doing the French down!
She was now starting to make this field of Fre