Continued production of an independent publication is an incredible achievement at any time, let alone in the time and places which played home to The B-Line office.
In 1942 my grandfather, Geoff Thomason created and edited The B-Line for the men of the 48th Royal Tank Regiment B Squadron. In this endeavour he was assisted by his tank commander, Capt. Henry D. Palmer and Alan Gilmore, who had before the war been a Press Association reporter. Content was principally created by submissions of poetry, interviews, stories and articles from the men in the squadron. The monthly magazine would follow the men of B Squadron through to the end of the war for thirty issues and one ‘souvenir number’.
“B-Lines have been produced in houses, in army huts, in tents, in tank bivouacs and in the open air; in the grounds of a Scottish castle, in a Tunisian orchard, in the arid wastelands of Algeria, in the ubiquitous vineyards of Italy, and in the Senio front line, less than a mile from the enemy.” - The B-Line Souvenir edition.
The 120 monthly copies of the magazine were printed by hand on a duplicating machine with all equipment and paper stock scrounged on a monthly basis, from wherever it could be found. Indeed the majority of the issues were produced on a portable French typewriter - a “present” from the Afrika Korps.
Of the thirty issues produced I hold twenty-eight. Unfortunately it is unlikely that I will ever manage to track down the missing two. Sixty-four years have passed since the last pages rolled out of a battered duplicating machine in Italy, and time moves on each day, eroding links with the past.
The B-Line was featured in Creative Review's Monograph publication in November 2009. An article about it on their site can be seen here.
I wrote my final year dissertation on the B-Line, which goes into much more detail about the publication. It's almost certainly the most detailed account of it anywhere. You can download it here.
I'm hugely attached to my grandfather's B-Lines, and immensely proud of his achievements. If you have any links to the B-Line, 48th R.T.R or want to know more, please do get in touch.
There's a lot of images on this page, but I thought it best to have my whole collection viewable online, Its quite likely that I have one of the only surviving collections of The B-Line in the world.
An article on The B-Line is due to appear in the December issue of The Ephemerist, the quarterly journal of the British Society of Ephemera.
