Echoes from the Past
The magazine of Re-enactment and Historical interpretation

Lest We Forget
By Lynda Davies



With apprehension I waited with my one bag, as requested, full of kit to wear on  a short holiday  to the Somme.  My partner and I were to be picked up near Poole by our guide for the four day break, Jim Power.  He runs a limited number of trips each year to the Somme battlefields by minibus.   He is driver, tour operator and guide in a series of friendly  trips to some of the places you can’t take a large  coach. His tours have a flexible agenda to meet the needs of individual visitors.

So I waited  apprehensively with my one bag, (space is a consideration on a minibus) wondering quite how I’d let myself be talked into this.  As a history graduate I  suppose that I had had an interest in the causes of WWI, but that was twenty years ago. My partner is interested in the progress of the war and in particular the actions involving the  Yorkshire “Pals” Battalions raised on our local coalfields, but I didn’t have such a current interest and the thought of being cooped up in a minibus for four days with people I might hate was beginning to sink in.  I waited in the rain, depressing myself by thinking about what I remembered of “small family hotels” and French plumbing arrangements. Expectations are always worse than reality!

The group at Thiepval memorial


In fact  the holiday was very different!  We met some wonderful people, had excellent accommodation, food  and alcohol. We  went touring with an expert in his field who worked very hard to make sure everyone, at every level, got what they wanted from the trip.    We came away with both knowledge and some new friends.

We had arranged the trip by e-mail after looking at Jim’s website. When we booked we were sent a full page reading list ( optional) and later a briefing pack, 25 pages of information and maps, including a short biography  of the travel  company.  We had been impressed by the efficiency of the booking system, and the fact that your money, paid up front, goes into a trust fund until you have been on the trip. We felt our money was safe with him!  Jim also arranges self drive tours and we met one of his groups out there.

If you live in Dorset or West Hampshire, Jim will pick you up from home on the way to the ferry terminal at Portsmouth.
From then on in you eat together, travel together and ( usually) party together.  On the ferry  going out and at the hotel, accommodation includes en suite bathrooms.  The schedule is  quite hard going (especially if you party until the early hours) but it is also flexible.  You can catch up your sleep on the bus!  Jim keeps a small café in the back of the van : tea, coffee, chocolate biscuits and sweets, no extra charge.


 

The Trenches at Newfoundland Park
Each  day’s itinerary was discussed at breakfast.  It wasn’t totally “fixed” there was space for special side trips, or extra time a certain places.  Some of the people who have been on Jim’s trips have been looking for the graves of relatives, or for the places where they fought.  Most times Jim is able to help them to find those special places and to allow them to spend time there. Some people like to “scavenge” – look for bits and pieces in the ploughed fields which were fought over.  This can be dangerous.  We drove passed several stacks of shells waiting to be picked up by the bomb disposal team.

On Day One we went north from Albert to the Thiepval battlefield and Memorial to the Missing, then to Newfoundland Park, Hawthorn Ridge mine crater,   Serre and Sheffield Memorial Park.  On Day Two we went East and visited the Ulster Tower Memorial, La Boiiselle ( Sausage and Mash Valleys), the  Lochnagar Crater, the German Cemetery at Fricorp, Delville Wood, Longueval, Poziere, and “Mucky Farm”.  On Day three we looked at the Musee de Abris   which is underground in Albert before heading back to Le Havre with a packed lunch from our favourite“french” resturaunt run by  “ex-pat” Avril Williams, in Auchonvilliers.  Avril has excavated the cellar of her house, which was on the front line in 1916, and pieced together its history, but that’s another story!

Lochnagar Crater


For me the highlights of the tour were Thiepval Memorial and Delville Wood. The sheer scale of the Memorial to the Missing is truly awe-inspiring.  It is seen for miles around, towering over the fields of blood, but it only when you approach it on foot that you comprehend the size of the monument and the fact that each panel of the monstrous

           

The German Cemetary at Fricourt            The new Memorial to the Barnsley Pals at Sheffield Park
edifice is covered with the names of the missing, thousands and thousands of them ( 73,357)  And that’s not all. Those are  only the British troops who have no named grave, who went missing on the Somme in 1916, from just one year of the war!   Delville  Wood was different, quiet, peaceful, yet you could walk the trench lines and know that thousands of men died there for a tiny piece of land that was so

contaminated with ammunition and phosgene that it is still dangerous to farmers.  For my partner,  Serre,  and the German Cemetery at Fricourt were  his  best times.  Serre cemetery contains the memorials to many of our local “Pals” regiments.  The German Cemetery was poignant and so different from the British ones we visited.  The War Graves Commission was given the land on which the British soldiers are buried and commemorated.  The German government had to buy the land for the graves of their dead.  At Fricourt only a token number of graves are represented, the majority of the  dead ( 17,000 of them) have only their names on a memorial.  It is significant that many fewer visitors, a majority of them British, or from the old Commonwealth,  have signed the visitor’s books there.

The excavated entrance to Avril Williams Cellar


I can recommend the tour.  Despite the weather, which was awful, I learned so much that you could never learn from books or maps.  It can be an emotional trip,  to imagine the sheer scale of the events, the fields, the skirmishes, to walk the ground,  to picture the carnage,  to see the old photographs,  to view the fields of crosses,  to remember the dead, its all very intense but very worthwhile.

Tour by  Jim Powers of:
Somme Battlefield Tours Ltd., 19 Old Road, Wimbourne, Dorset BH21 1EJ
 Web Site

 Suggested Reading:
“Somme” by Lyn Macdonald
 ( Paperback)
“Battllefront:1st July 1916. The first Day of the Somme” (Public Records Office 1996)–  about the Accrington Pals Battalion
“The Somme Battlefields”  Martin and Mary Middlebrook.(Penguin 1991)
 


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