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Interview with Jonathan Ali
Interview with Jonathan Ali
When music hall star Vesta Tilley placed her hand on the shoulder of a young Percy Morter as part of a recruitment campaign, he couldn’t have for one minute imagined that this simple act would resonate among his family for generations to come. When Percy was home on leave in early 1916 he told his family he feared he would not return. He fears were realised when he was killed at the Somme a few months later. Kitty, by then pregnant, was so traumatised she couldn’t remember the birth of their son.
Years later, in 1964, she took part in a ´óÏó´«Ã½ documentary re-living the harrowing moment she found out Percy would not be coming home. But her surviving family have never seen the footage of this traumatic account. Nor did they ever really know the full extent of what she had been through and how much it had affected her.
It took an intensive and long search to find Kitty’s family – she married four times, on each occasion changing her name. But World War One At Home tracked Kitty’s family down - connecting their stories a hundred years apart - with moving and emotional results.
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