A family historian who made his grandfather’s Great War memoirs into a book is to see his story transformed into a play to commemorate the centenary of the end of the conflict.
Allan Mott’s grandfather David John Polley (1885-1953) served in the 63rd Royal Naval Division Machine Gun Battalion, nicknamed ‘the Suicide Club’ because of the short life expectancy of those at the Front. David survived and in the 1920s wrote an account of his experiences from his diaries.
Allan, from Warboys, Cambridgeshire, first came across his grandfather’s manuscript after his mother’s death in 1977. In 1997 he published a book based on David’s accounts, The Mudhook Machinegunner (published by Galago Books but currently out of print), corroborated by war diaries held at The National Archives. Since compiling the book, Allan has had many of his grandfather’s comrades identified and even met a survivor, the late John O’Neill, who was 101 at the time.