Llewellyn Gwynne was an inveterate diarist. For almost every day of his adult life, he wrote about what he saw and did. The sixty-nine volumes in the Cadbury Special Collection of the University of Birmingham together with the eight volumes in the Special Collection at Durham University, along with a considerable amount of other material that have survived, have provided an invaluable insight into the life of a Church of England cleric, army chaplain and colonial bishop in the first half of the twentieth century. The diaries also represent an almost unrivalled example of reflection on the First World War by someone who served in France continuously between late August 1914 and February 1919. The entries reproduced in this work cover just over a year whilst Gwynne was serving as a member of the Army Chaplains’ Department (AChD) with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France and Flanders. These entries, from the start of July 1915 to the end of July 1916, spanned the second year of the First World War. It was a period that was to see great changes in the British army. It was also to see a change in the way chaplains of the Church of England were administered in the BEF, and Gwynne's rôle in overseeing them.

The importance of Gwynne's diaries to the understanding of army chaplaincy in the First World War

Few of the men who went to France with the initial deployment of the BEF in August 1914 returned to Britain in 1919 having remained in the same post throughout. There was one such, the Reverend Dr J. Simms, an Irish Presbyterian army chaplain. He had been about to retire at the end of a career in army chaplaincy when, in August 1914, he was appointed to be the principal chaplain to accompany the BEF on its initial deployment. His post was the only one for a chaplain that was specified in the mobilization tables for the BEF. The precise reasons for this situation are now lost but it was likely that they were the result of the unresolved tensions that existed within the army about the organization and function of the chaplains. Simms's task was to provide administrative oversight for such members of the AChD as were to accompany the troops as chaplains.