Virtual Branch Film

Historian Robert Sackville-West joined the HA Virtual Branch in November 2021 to talk about the topic of his book The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War. By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed dead, lost forever under the battlefields of northern France and Flanders. This, however, was only the beginning of a search that would span a century into the present day. In The Searchers, Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary and moving accounts of those who have dedicated their lives to the search for the missing.

Robert Sackville-West studied History at Oxford University, then worked in publishing. He now chairs Knole Estates, the property and investment company which – in parallel with the National Trust – runs the Sackville family’s interests at Knole, the house in Kent where his family have lived for the past 400 years. Robert is the author of the critically acclaimed Inheritance: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles (2010) and The Disinherited (2014).