New Digital Archive: The Watson Collection12.12.2025 {en}

The Watson Collection, part of the University of Oxford’s Their Finest Hour project, is now available to view online.

The archive contains over 2,600 digitised letters, diaries, photographs, artefacts, and memoirs from Frank and May Watson. Frank, an RAF serviceman, was captured in Java in 1942 and spent the rest of the war in prisoner-of-war camps in Southeast Asia and Japan. May remained on the British home front, recording her experiences in diaries and correspondence while also seeking news of her husband through official channels, the Red Cross, and other organisations.

The survival of substantial records from both sides of a marriage separated by war is unusual. The material documents life in captivity and on the home front in parallel, offering insight into wartime communication, religious faith, community life, and the everyday demands of living through the Second World War.

The Watson Collection forms part of the broader Their Finest Hour Online Archive (theirfinesthour.org), a 2022-24 project that digitally preserved 25,000+ stories and objects from the Second World War shared by the UK public.

If you have any questions or comments about the collection, please feel free to email theirfinesthour[at]ell.ox.ac.uk.

Further information: https://theirfinesthour.english.ox.ac.uk/watsoncollection.

Source: New Digital Archive: The Watson Collection, H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US.