‘How gently my comrades fell to earth’
A century after the bloody first day of the Battle of the Somme, a Lancashire town remembers its sons who fought and died together
Not long after dawn on Friday, July 1, Harry Bond’s nephew, Les, will set off. Leaving his antique Lee Enfield rifle at home, he will walk the streets of the Lancashire town of Accrington, where his forebear once learnt to parade.
By 7.20 sharp, the 70-year-old will be in position. He will listen as a soldier blows a whistle then stand in silence as the name of each Accrington man to fall in the Battle of the Somme is read in turn.
“It will take quite some time,” says Mr Bond.
Exactly a century earlier, his uncle, Pte Henry Bond – Harry to his friends – also rose early. Along a 15-mile front of French meadowland, 100,000 British troops – 720 of them from Accrington and its surrounding towns – were kneeling down to pray, kissing photographs of their relatives or stepping onto fire-steps to peer out toward their fate. At last, it was time for the Big Push.
In the same fields next Friday, a service will mark the centenary of the first day of the Somme, when 57,470 were killed or wounded: the worst day in our Army’s history. The Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry will attend the service, at the Thiepval memorial to the missing, the men whose remains still rest beneath the barley and the sugar beet. To mark the anniversary,
has worked with the Imperial War Museum and Andrew Jackson, an Accrington historian who has traced the town’s war dead since the Seventies, to chart that day’s legacy in just one English town.
Of the 10 battalions that suffered the highest losses on July 1 1916, others lost more men, but Accrington’s was the battalion most closely associated with one single place. By the end of that day, 303 men from Accrington and nearby settlements lay dead in French fields. Back home, a whole town had reason to grieve.
In 1914, people knew Accrington, if they knew it at all, for its bricks and its cotton. When the war broke out that year, a few professionals signed up – a dentist, an architect, a managing director – but most recruits were labourers: brick workers, apprentices and shop assistants. Harry Bond, then 19, was an apprentice engineer.
They were motivated by patriotism, but also pragmatism: the town’s cotton mills were suffering and its biggest employer was beset by strikes. Many were also won over by a new national recruiting strategy, which allowed them to sign up with their friends. The town’s mayor, Capt John Harwood, offered to raise a battalion from Accrington and nearby towns; the War Office quickly accepted. Officially, they were 11th Bn East Lancashire Regiment. To everyone in the town, they were the Accrington Pals.
Back then, 45,000 people lived in Accrington. Within 10 days, 1,076 men – about half of whom came from Accrington and district – had enlisted. Harry Bond signed up on 19 September, five days after recruitment killed 57,470 men, including Harry Bond, whose picture is held by his nephew Les, below. The Accrington Pals will be commemorated at Accrington’s war memorial, ‘I thought: it’s no good, I can’t do anything now, I’d better go back. I looked around me and I was by myself’ began. At least two young men joined the Pals from every recent school class, nearly one from every street.
By 1916, war had assumed a kind of normality: in Accrington. Locals adjusted to new jobs supplying munitions; in the trenches the young men had settled into stalemate.
On the morning of July 1, some of the few young men who had stayed in the town gathered on a well-tended patch of grass in their cricket whites: that afternoon, Accrington was due to take on Rishton in the Lancashire League.
Hundreds of miles away on the pockmarked remains of the Somme’s meadows, the town’s remaining youth were also preparing for their task, as set out by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who would soon be known as the “Butcher of the Somme”. After seven days of artillery bombardment, it was expected to be easy to cross Noman’s-land and take the German trenches just across the fields: so easy that they planned to walk.
At 7.15 that morning, the men shook each other’s hands. At 7.20, Capt A week after 303 men from Accrington and nearby settlements were killed in France, pictures of the dead and wounded began to fill The Accrington Observer Arnold Tough blew a whistle. By 7.30, it was clear something had gone badly wrong. The barbed wire that snaked across No-man’s-land had not been destroyed: bullets were speeding towards the Pals as they struggled across the fields. By 7.50, 584 Pals were dead or wounded. A few hours later, back in Accrington, rain stopped play. It never resumed.
News was slow to reach Accrington. “A blackout descended,” says Mr Bond. “This blanket was thrown over everything and nobody could find out what was going on.”
Rumour thrived. A train pulled up in the town a few days later, or so the story goes. Leaning out of the window, one soldier is supposed to have told locals on the platform: “They’ve all been wiped out.” The
cautioned against “alarmists … running riot with tales of carnage and death”. Even so, its correspondent allowed, “the sacrifice may have been heavy, the dead and the wounded more numerous than we would fain have hoped”.
Slowly, through the words of the wounded, in letters from their hospital beds in London, Leeds and Liverpool, a narrative emerged.
“Men were going down like ninepins,” wrote L/Cpl James Snailham.
“How gently my comrades fell to earth!” reported Pte Walter Clarke.
“I thought: ‘it’s no good, I can’t do anything now, I’d better go back,’” wrote Pte Bob Fisher. “I looked around me and I was by myself. There was nobody there.”
“I felt sick at the sight of this carnage and remember weeping,” added Cpl Russell Bradshaw.
A week later, pictures of the wounded and the missing filled the local paper. “More Pals heroes,” the headline ran, “another list of wounded”. The youngest to fall was 17. The oldest; a 44-year-old father. He had seven children. By September 2, George Mulhall, a labourer in the town’s iron foundry, and his wife, Elizabeth, were still waiting for news. Three of their six sons had signed up to the Pals, but George, the eldest of the three, was ordered to work on munitions. The other two – Albert, 23, and Thomas, 21 – had signed up together and had consecutive service numbers. Their parents had not heard from them since July 1. “Mr and Mrs Mulhall would greatly appreciate any news of their missing sons from any of their comrades,” The noted.
As their parents eventually learnt, Albert and Thomas had died together on that July morning. Thomas is buried in Queen’s cemetery in the Pas de Calais, close to where he fell. Albert has no known grave: his name is engraved on the Thiepval memorial.
When the unit war diary was eventually published, the town learnt that only a few of its Pals ever reached the German trenches.
“Small parties penetrated as far as the German fourth line,” it disclosed, “but were not heard of again.”
Pride mingled with outrage, according to Mr Bond, whose parents would often talk about the aftermath.
“These were our lads,” he says, “and they had been mown down.”
On high ground above Accrington, the war memorial looks across the valley, to the hills beyond. Poppies grow beside panels of green slate that bear the names of all 865 men from the town who fell in the First World War, including the Pals. Above them stands a 60ft obelisk, with a sculpture of a maternal figure, mourning her children.
The memorial was unveiled on July 1, 1922, exactly six years after so many mothers here lost their sons. Around 15,000 mourners, in their best clothes and dark hats, listened as two buglers sounded the Last Post. Many brought wreaths to place in memory of their relatives, but John Harwood, by now an old man, was allowed to lay down the first, in honour of his Accrington Pals. It was his last public engagement.
Outward displays of grief grew less common, but Accrington’s wounds refused to heal. “The effects of that battle have rattled around this town ever since,” says Mr Bond.
“As a child, I would see some of the older fellows with the effects of that war, with injuries to their heads and arms missing. That was quite common into the Fifties. A lot of the women wore black for evermore – the widows and the sweethearts.”
After the war, George Mulhall returned to Accrington. By the outbreak of the next war, he and his two sons, George and John, worked in a mill; his daughter, Mary, was a shop assistant. He died at home in Accrington in 1978, aged 89.
Harry Bond also came home, finding work as an aircraft engineer. As a child, Les Bond used to watch his uncle every Armistice Day, marching through town with the other veterans. His school friends would not believe he was related to a Pal. He never heard his uncle speak about that day.
Time passed. The mills closed: one of them became a garden centre. On the street where the Mulhall family lived, there is now a mosque.
Slowly, interest in the Pals waned. Les still went to the memorial every Armistice Day, taking his children, but the congregation dwindled.
“I’ve been up there when it’s been me, my two kids, someone else and a bugler,” he said. One year, someone suggested an electronic bugle.
Then, as the centenary approached, the crowds grew again. Mr Jackson published a book;
The council opened an exhibition of memorabilia.
Now, around the corner from the “Don’t Forget” card shop, a huge hoarding outside the town hall bears black and white photographs of uniformed troops.
In place of wives and sons, the men are now remembered by grandsons or great-nieces. Most never met their forebears; somehow, though, they feel their town did its bit.
“The outrage is largely gone,” says Mr Bond. “But the pride is left.”