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A bound collection of 11 complete years of Monthly church leaflets, from January 1910 December 1920, 132 months in all. Approximately 528 pages, most leaflets are 4 pages, occasionally 6. Bound in hard-wearing contemporary black buckram, lettered and simply decorated in gilt to the spine, the cloth is slightly marked, bumped and rubbed, and the boards are bowed. The text block is speckled to all edges, with green endpapers front and rear, it is slightly toned, marked and lightly foxed, the degree of the age toning varies depending upon the paper, which was often of poorer quality in the later war years and post-WW1. With some interesting provenance, formerly the property of socialist Labour MP, Eric Samuel Heffer, with his ownership inscription in ink to the front endpaper. An Anglican Catholic leaflet, perhaps chiefly of interest for the Rev. Leadley Brown's monthly letter to his congregation, which gives insight into his own life, the activities of the parishioners, and local and national affairs during the period of Great Unrest of the late-Edwardian period and throughout the First World War. For instance, the 1911 Liverpool General Transport Strike, in which 2 people were killed and 365 injured by police and soldiers, and Winston Churchill sent a Royal Navy Cruiser to the Mersey, prompted Brown to devote the whole of his September 1911 letter to the subject and end with a fervent plea: "that the strike method may never be employed again". There are also references to sectarian divisions in Liverpool, and "the Protestant Bogey". During the War Rev. Brown visits various military training camps, including spending six months living in tents and huts serving as Chaplain of the Oswestry Camp in autumn and winter 1917-18. Each month there are reports of wounded and killed parishioners, e.g.: "Second Lieutenant W. F. Grierson writes that he met a bomb with his face. Some of it remained there and had to be removed. […] Willie Robinson writes warmly from Mesopotamia. He affirms that the heat is such that the hens have to be given ice every morning or they lay hard-boiled eggs!!", showing the church acting as a social hub keeping people on the home front connected to friends and family serving abroad. Following the declaration of peace in November 1918, the "influenza epidemic" receives several mentions, with many people "poorly", some deaths and references to school closures for several weeks at a time due to the teachers being ill. A rare and important ephemeral survival, giving remarkable continuous local insight into the lives of a tightly knit group of people, across a particularly difficult period of world history.
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