Photographic Album.
BULLEY, Corolyn. Superb photograph, ephemera, and souvenir album of service with a YMCA canteen and entertainment group in the First World War. France, Luxembourg, and Germany: 1917-9
Landscape quarto cord-tied album, black cloth over light card boards, black heavy paper-stock mounting pages. Stuffed with a large collection of letters, clippings, photographs, various ephemera - menus, programmes, trench papers, tickets - and objects - insignia, medallions, artificial flowers - and including Bulley’s Boy Scout Diary containing brief daily records for her time in France, 20 June 1918 - 5 January 1919. Some what rubbed, and a little soiled externally
Remarkable “trophy cabinet” of souvenirs accumulated by a commensurately remarkable woman during her adventures overseas with the YMCA in the Great War. Born in Canton, Ohio in 1892, Corolyn Bulley was the daughter of the vice-president of the local works of the Bolton Steel Company, Reginald Hargreaves Bulley, apparently an interesting character himself, a keen amateur ornithologist, and pioneering cyclist, the owner of the first ordinary, or “penny farthing” in Canton. In 1904 the family moved to Syracuse, NY, when Reginald became became the superintendent of the Halcomb Steel Company. Corolyn graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1913 becoming a journalist on the Syracuse Ledger. In 1917 she was sent to Ottawa to interview her maternal first cousin, John Raffles Cox, known as Jack, a Canadian government geologist, who had spent the last four years as a geologist with the Canadian Arctic Expedition to Coronation Gulf, and the two fell in love. Patriotically, John had enlisted immediately on his return from the Arctic, and was sent to France with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, serving for the duration with the 6th Siege Unit Canadian Artillery, his brass cap badge present here. Corolyn, who had some basic nursing training attempted to accompany him to the Front, but was refused permission. A copy of her letter of recommendation from the major commanding the Camp Hospital at Syracuse present here, together with the letter from the Major Alleyne von Schrader [father of Randell Jarrell’s wife, Mary], declining her application to join the staff of Base Hospital #33, as “there is no authority to permit nurses aids [sic.] to accompany base units to France”. She then immediately applied to the National War Work Council of the YMCA and was accepted “to serve in the Canteen of the YMCA huts overseas”. Her letter of acceptance present, together with her YMCA certificate of identification with signed photo; a wonderful collection of YMCA insignia, the enamel service pin, cloth service chevron, various shoulder service insignia, and her ‘Entertainment YMCA’ armband; her heavily-stamped passport; and her aluminium “dog tag” in the name of Jane Bulley. Corolyn was evidently “also known as” Jane, perhaps it was the - surely surmountable - difficulty presented by the correct spelling and pronunciation of her name that led to this expedient, even her passport has been made out to “Carolyn”, and a number of the mentions of her in Bryn Mawr yearbooks are similarly misspelled.
Once in France, Corolyn fell in with a like-minded group of YMCA women, and began to concentrate on arranging entertainments for the troops. Her activities are rather well summarised in a short piece on her published in the Syracuse Herald - clipping laid in - which quotes extensively from a letter to her parents; “Miss Bulley is a YMCA worker, whose part consists of playing the piano for movies, making an impromptu talk upon occasion, and playing a role in a humorous sketch written by the group of entertainers which includes Neysa McMein, well-known illustrator. Miss Bulley has been in France since June. She describes an entertainment given for the marines … ‘We gave our poor little show in the biggest hall we have ever played in. It was jammed, with about 2,000 men all crowded in like sardines, into the windows from
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