Lyn Macdonald

For those of a similar name, see Lynn McDonald (disambiguation).

Lyn Macdonald,^[1] (31 May 1929 – 1 March 2021)^[2] was a British military historian, one of relatively few women in the field.^[3] Macdonald was best known for a series of books on the First World War that draw on first hand accounts of surviving veterans.

Life

Macdonald lived near Cambridge, England, and worked as a BBC radio producer until 1973, when she began working on a documentary with the Old Comrades Association of the 13th (Service) Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, who were visiting the battlefields of the Western Front.^[4][5] The first of her influential books took its title, They Called It Passchendaele, from a poem by Siegfried Sassoon. Other works included Somme.^[6] In 1988, she led a party of veterans to the Western Front, accompanied by Sebastian Faulks, who was inspired by the experience to write his novel Birdsong.^[7]

Macdonald bequeathed an archive of about 600 recordings of interviews with veterans of the First World War to the Imperial War Museum.^[5]

Works

• How to be a Supercook and Work as Well (1976).
• They Called It Passchendaele (1978).
• French Cooking Without Tears (1979).
• The Roses of No Man's Land (1980).
• Somme (1983), a history of the legendary and horrifying battle that has haunted the minds of succeeding generations.^[6]
• 1914: The Days of Hope (1987).
• 1914-1918: Voices and Images of the Great War (1988).
• 1915: The Death of Innocence (1993).
• To the Last Man: Spring 1918 (1998).
• Ordeal By Fire: Witnesses to the Great War (editor, 2001).
• At the Going Down of the Sun: 365 Soldiers from the Great War (Lannoo, Tielt., 2001), co-writer with Ian Connerty, Sir Martin Gilbert, Peter Hart and Nigel Steel.