A day that ought to be remembered by North Staffordshire

LAST Saturday saw the 100th anniversary of a battle fought on September 29, 1918 by the men of North Staffordshire which helped to bring an end to the Great War.

This battle was not the typical one of bloody stalemate, but to use the words of the regimental war diary, an advance carried out with dash and enterprise using lessons learnt in the years of war.

The storming of the great German defensive barrierthe Hindenburg Line - by men of North and South Staffordshire Regiments – goes down as one of the greatest feats of arms carried out by the British Army, described by one military historian as equally to the Battle of Agincourt.

The Staffordshire men who won the day did it by crossing a formidable obstacle, the canal at San Quentin, on a foggy early autumn morning.

A journalist for the national newspaper the Observer who was present captured the moment: “The Midlanders - boot makers, miners, laceworkers, potters who had never pretended in their lives to heroism or poetry, or the traditions of a crack regiment - went at the canal at San Quentin with mats, rafts, lifebelts, wading, swimming, floating, they crossed the water and stormed over the astonished enemy and clean through the Hindenburg defences. Their days work was the immortal epic of the ordinary man”.

The immediate impact of the successful assault was to undermine the boast of the German High Command that the defence could not be broken and as a consequence the enemy began to sue for peace which led to the Armistice several weeks later.

It is a day that ought to be remembered by their proud North Staffordshire descendents. Councillor Bill Cawley Leek West