Harold Wrong plucked a flower from the fields of Somme, France on June 30, 1916 and tucked it into a letter he mailed home to Toronto.
“All well with me” he wrote to his brother.
The next day, Wrong was dead. He was last seen going over the top of a trench with a wounded arm and killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
Wrong was a University of Toronto graduate who enlisted with the Lancashire Fusiliers while studying at Oxford University. His father worked at the university and his grandfather was the second premier of Ontario. In the 1960s, the letters Harold mailed home to his family during the war were given to the U of T library and, for decades, no one could figure out what kind of flower Wrong had placed inside the envelope.
“Over 24,000 Canadians passed away during the Somme offensive, during that summer of 1916,” says Loryl MacDonald, associate head librarian at the University of Toronto. “This letter humanizes Harold and places us right there in the trench with him.”
For years, MacDonald has tried to figure out what kind of flower Wrong picked from that French field. She had suspicions it may have been blue cowslip, but it’s a flower that typically blooms in early spring. Harold mailed the flower home in late June.
In early September, MacDonald got some answers. Working with a multi-spectral Imaging system, researchers were able to photograph and analyze over a dozen rare materials in the University of Toronto’s archives. The flower was one of them.
The imaging uses different types of light to see details that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye.
“We were able to use the UV spectrum to see more details of the flowers casing, and the original bloom that had withered and changed its shape as it aged,” says Jessica Lockhart, head of research at the school’s Old Books, New Science lab.
The team then consulted with botanists and looked at old images to determine the flower was indeed a blue cowslip.
It may seem like a lot of trouble to go through, to investigate a dried-up flower but historians say these types of details are crucial to better understanding history.
“The experiences people went through during World War I are getting farther away from us,” Lockhart said. “So if we want to retain the lessons of the past and understand a bit more of the lives of the people who brought us here then we need to go back to the records and documents and stories of that time.”
Researchers hope this technology will unlock clues of more mysterious documents, including writings by Shakespeare and ancient texts. Archivists at the University of Toronto are using it to help date an old Jewish manuscript that may turn out to be the oldest of its kind in the world.
