My father, Frederick George Blake Archer (LHS), his sister Nora Emma Rose Archer, and Arthur William Archer (RHS) at the wedding of their father’s younger sister Kate. I believe Kate lived in March, Cambs after her marriage. I think Kate’s married surname was ‘Nurse’. Nora looks about 7 or 8, so if that’s right, this is 1915/16, right in the middle of the Great War with Germany, and these three children had twin-sister siblings, Olive and Elizabeth, aged 1-2. These children’s uncle Ernest Archer (brother of their father, William Archer) is living in Holland, not, I believe, actively involved in the war, though living relatively near some of the fighting. And their Uncle Percy Gilder (their mother (Lizzie)’s half-brother), whose home was in Hinckley, Leicestershire, is a soldier and in July 1916 or soon after, was to die fighting in the disastrous ‘Battle of the Somme’, the family’s only wartime casualty, I believe.
(Added 2.2.15): It’s significant, I think, that Fred and Arthur, though separated by only two years in birth, married twelve years apart - Arthur in 1924 and Fred in 1936 - in the middle of the roaring twenties in Arthur’s case, and in the middle of the abdication crisis with war looming in Fred’s case, you might say. More significantly, they married on opposite sides of the earthquake in Archer affairs, when their father inherited a fortune from his Uncle James Archer in about 1925. As a result, Arthur apparently benefited very little directly from the new wealth of the family because he had left home when the funds arrived, whereas Fred had at least ten years of life in an affluent home with servants, before he married. And Nora likewise benefitted from the good fortune, as she was about 17 in 1925, and although in the latter years of her time at Milham Ford School at Oxford, she was in nice time to be funded through a degree course at Somerville College (was it?), at Oxford University. And likewise Nora’s younger sisters Elizabeth and Olive, in terms of funding availability for training. But it was too late for Fred and Arthur, who left school, I suspect, like their father, at about age 14, in about