Letters

These letters were the inspiration for children’s contributions to ‘Letters of Lockdown’.

You can find information about the whole project on the ‘With Love’ exhibition page, as well as a display of submissions from members of the public in response to original archive documents.

Though the project has now closed for submissions, we have left these letters here for you to use in your own time.

These special letters from The National Archives’ collection covered the themes of separation, kindness, strength and hope.  We provided an image of the real letter as well as background information about it with letter-writing prompts to help inspire your own writing.

Separation

Noor Khan was a British secret agent for SOE (Special Operations Executive) during the Second World War.

Kindness

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) was a South African anti-apartheid political leader.

Strength

This letter was written by Princess Elizabeth (later to become Elizabeth I) to her sister Mary I.

Hope

This is one of many letters sent by staff of the Great Western Railway Audit office at Paddington who had enlisted to fight in the First World War.