A family in World War One and how their lives change when their two sons go to war.
Everything in this film happened to one family, and the evidence for it is in a box. The Crowders were nurserymen and seed merchants at Thimbleby in Lincolnshire, four generations in the same house, and what survives of their war is an unpublished archive of letters, memoirs, photographs and objects. The film is built from that archive rather than from a plot, and it is narrated by the daughter, Grace.
A drama telling the true story of a family in World War One and the impact on their lives as their two sons go to war.
Tell Them of Us is a moving and unforgettable portrait of a Lincolnshire family during the First World War. It is both unique and universal. It is a tale of two brothers, William and Robert, and their sister Grace.
Told from the home front, it is based on an unpublished archive of letters, memoirs, photographs and artefacts from the Crowder family.
The two brothers arrive at the war differently, and the difference is the period in one stroke. William volunteers for the Lincolnshire Yeomanry in 1915, to his parents' dismay and his sisters' naive approval. Robert is simply called up, says so standing in the hall, and there is nothing anybody can do. After that the film is mostly about the post. Parcels go out: a pork pie, socks, a cardigan, another shirt because their mother cannot stop sending shirts. Letters come back saying the days fly and he never feels low, and Grace admits she never entirely believed that last part and would never have said so to her mother.
Then the letters stop, and the film becomes a study of a particular kind of Edwardian courage: a mother writing to strangers. She works down a list of officers and other ranks, one name leading to the next, asking anybody who was there what happened and where her son is buried. She is answered honestly. An attack, a machine gun, a common grave that cannot be located, no more information available. As Grace puts it, she had half the British army running round for her. Thousands of families did exactly this, and most of them got exactly this.
An hour and seventeen minutes, directed by Nicole Loven for Crow's Eye Productions.