Sous-série 39 - Soviet Union Photographs

23 items; Black and white print; manuscript

The file comprises an undated note from Francis Wendell Butler-Thwing titled ‘Impressions of Russia’ enclosing twenty-three photographs of everyday life in the Soviet Union. Manuscript annotations are extant on the reverse of many of the prints. There is some uncertainty over both the provenance and dates of these photographs although it seems likely they were taken in the late 1940s. Francis Wendell Butler-Thwing (1891-1964) was a former British Army officer and a First World War veteran. He was a captain in the Coldstream Guards from 1917 to 1921 and was later a published poet and author. In 1918 he married Lady Gertrude Minna Kerr, an English aristocrat (she was a niece of Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 15th Duke of Norfolk). The circumstances of how Butler-Thwing was able to take (or obtain) these photographs of life in the Soviet Union is unclear, but he may have sent them to Fr. Senan Moynihan OFM Cap. with a view to their potential publication in ‘The Capuchin Annual’.

A photograph of Captain Francis Wendell Butler-Thwing (c.1918) is held in the Imperial War Museum collection and can be viewed at https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205291647

For biographical information on Francis Wendell Butler-Thwing see https://www.greatwarforum.org/topic/119676-fw-butler-thwing-coldsteam-guards/ See also https://www.thepeerage.com/p1504.htm#i15032