Inside the church of a small Somme village is a memorial to a British division that fought and suffered there in the opening phase of the Battle of the Somme.

What was this division?

Who were the men who placed this memorial?

And what does it tell us about the experience of the Great War?

With the end of the special Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force episodes, Season 8 of the Old Front Line is coming to an end.

But I wanted to put out a couple of bonus episodes until Season 9 starts properly in September.

And these, and this one included, will be short episodes focused on a particular theme or subject.

And in this one, we're going to look at a divisional memorial event.

on the Somme, the Somme battlefields.

But which one?

Tucked inside Free Corps Church on the north wall of the church is a plaque to the 17th Northern Division commemorating their whole parts in the Great War and testifying to the losses that they had but in particular their sacrifice in capturing the village of Free Corps and the surrounding ground at the start of the Battle of the Somme.

I've often said how there is a connection between a good old Comrade Association after the war, the publication of a divisional history, and a memorial placed on the battlefields.

And that certainly seems to be true here today.

In the case of the 17th Northern Division, it's less clear how the Old Comrades Association worked, but they had an excellent divisional history published in 1929, written by an author that I'm not familiar with called A.

Hilliard Atteridge.

And he used the surviving papers that he was given access to by veterans who'd served in the division.

He used the war diaries, which were then not publicly available.

And he produced a pretty good divisional history.

Not every division published their history, but this is certainly one of the better ones with good narrative and some history.

good maps.

It doesn't have many appendices with lists of commanders or units or casualties, but it contains a lot of that kind of information within the main text.

So that's kind of two factors.

There's some kind of old comrades association with the 17th Northern Division, and then they publish in 1929 a divisional history.

So coming on from that was a long-term project, it seems, to get some kind of memorial on the battlefield.

A lot of units did this, didn't always succeed.

There are case files in the National Archives that show some memorials were rejected for all kinds of reasons.

And a lot of them took kind of familiar shape and form with columns or bronze statues of soldiers or some aspect of the war.

There were more unusual ones like the water trough to the 66th Division in Le Cateau.

But what the committee that was formed Out of the divisional history and out of the old comrades, what they decided to do with the 17th Northern Divisions Memorial was to place a plaque within Free Corps Church.

Now I was reminded of this, having seen it quite a few times over the years, researching the battlefields when I was living on the battlefields, but I was reminded of this recently again when I picked up a small pamphlet called Somme Souvenir.

bearing the flash of the 17th Northern Division, which is a narrow red stripe with two white dashes, one short and one long, essentially the top of each of the numerals of the number 17.

And the pamphlet details what they did on the pilgrimage to unveil this memorial and who was there.

And we shall return to that pamphlet.

But first, who were the 17th Northern Division?

Well, first of all, what is a division?

We've had podcasts about military formations.

And essentially, the division was a self-contained division It had infantry, three infantry brigades at the beginning of the First World War.

Each of those had four infantry battalions.

And in addition to that, it had support troops.

It had artillery from the Royal Field Artillery, Royal Engineer Field Companies to give it engineer support on the battlefield.

There were three field ambulances of the Royal Army Medical Corps to look after the wounded.

There were Army Veterinary Corps units to look after the horses.

There were motor transport units of the Army Service Corps to move around supplies, equipment and everything else, and lots of other ancillary units that helped keep the division in the field.

So it became its own fighting unit, self-contained, and it was the basic kind of formation that the Army used to plan and execute battles on the front line.

If you want to know more about the division, you can go back to one of those earlier episodes where we looked at this in some greater depth.

Now in terms of the history of the 17th Northern Division it was formed at Wareham in September 1914 and the division was part of what was known as the Second New Army.

The First New Army formed in response to Lord Kitchener's call for 100,000 volunteers had filled up very very quickly so a Second New Army was created for the next 100,000 volunteers and again that filled up pretty quickly as well.

The units in this division were drawn entirely from northern command regiments, the majority of them from Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Like most second new army divisions, part of that second new army there was an initial lack of uniforms and equipment for the men so when you look at contemporary photographs of all the units within this division in the early months the men are still wearing their civilian clothes or a mixture of Kitchener's Blues the blue serge uniform produced for men of Kitchener's army and they look a bit of a kind of ragtag or bunch of men often with weapons that don't fire and a lot of the training during that period was physical training it was marching it was boxing it was obstacles all that kind of stuff but not real soldiering until they got weapons uniform webbing equipment or the 1914 pattern leather equipment which was issued to a lot of kitcheners units i don't think they really saw themselves as proper fighting units And the majority of men in these battalions as part of this division did not get service rifles, proper service rifles, until March of 1915.

Among the weapons at the artillery units, because it's not just the infantry that have these problems, all of the units within the division do, but in the artillery units, they were issued with two outdated Franco-Prussian French 90mm howitzers.

I mean, as a gunner in the Royal Field Artillery, What do you do with that?

And probably not a lot of ammunition, if any ammunition, for them.

So those are the kind of problems that wartime-raised units like these had.

Eventually, these problems were overcome, and the division landed in France via Southampton, which was a common route to France at this period of the war, concentrating near Saint-Omer on the 17th of July, 1915.

From here, it moved across into Belgium, into Flanders, to the front line at Ypres in Ypres-Saint, where it was to remain for the next nine months.

Moving up through Ypres, several battalions were attached to the 46th North Midland Division, a territorial unit which was already in the line, and they occupied the trenches in the Sanctuary Ward to Hoog sectors along that Menin Road to get acclimatised to trench warfare and understand trench warfare and do training with these units that had already been there for some time.

But then fighting broke out in that sector on 30 July 1950 and units of the 51st Brigade in the 17th Northern Division were in the line when the Germans attacked nearby, for example, when they used flamethrowers for the very first time against British troops, against units of the 14th Light Division, Rifle Brigade, Kings Royal Rifle Corps.

But they were not yet in a major operation.

And from that sector, just east of Ypres, the 17th Northern Division took over a new sector just beneath the Messines Ridge to the south of Ypres.

a front that was gradually extended by the end of 1915.

And by this time, from arriving in France in July through to the end of that year of 1915, the division had lost more than 2,000 men killed, wounded, sick, missing, simply by holding the trenches at Ypres, which were then in what was considered to be a so-called quiet sector.

So you can see that formations like this could lose significant numbers of troops just by holding the line.

Remaining in the Ypres Salient, there was heavy fighting that the division was involved in at the Bluff in February and March of 1916 along the old Ypres-Commines Canal.

And there again, they lost over another 2,000 casualties in the fighting in that area.

Testimony to a short, sharp battle that nevertheless would cost significant casualties.

And their lines in that part of the Ypres Salient would change hands during that battle for the Bluff several times during that engagement.

So this was giving the units within the division some real battle experience.

Not a major operation, but nevertheless fighting the enemy at the sharp end of the war.

Towards the end of March 1916, the division left this sector and moved across the border to the area around the town of Armentières, home of the famous Mademoiselle, until it went into training then near a village called Tilk, several miles behind the lines, in fact, quite some distance behind the lines.

And a lot of divisions in preparation for moving down to the Somme did do this.

in that late spring, early summer of 1916.

But it's arguable, really, as the kind of training that they had, did it really do them any good when they got to the Somme?

A lot of it was based on the principle that the enemy was going to be destroyed, and they were kind of going through the motions of advancing across a battlefield, capturing a line that was already destroyed by the guns.

That was not what was going to play out on the Somme.

So were they prepared for what really happened?

I mean, that is a matter of some debate.

But in June 1916, the division moved south to the Somme.

So before the Battle of the Somme began, and on the opening day of the battle, the 1st of July 1916, it was officially in reserve, but one of its brigades was involved in the fighting around Freecorn.

That was the 50th Brigade.

They were at a point in the line where the line made a kind of a dogleg turn to the east.

On their left flank was a position called the Tambour, where there'd been a lot of mining operations earlier in the war, and there were quite a few craters there.

And tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers had prepared mines that would be blown there on the morning of the 1st of July, 1916.

And on the right, their position faced some German trenches just south of the village of Fricour, which were considered to be so well-sighted that any attack there would be absolute suicide.

So the idea was to try and to capture the village of Freecore.

However...

When the battalions moved forward at zero hour, they came under terrific fire from the German positions.

And the leading battalions from the 17th Northern Division, the 10th Battalion, the West Yorkshire Regiment, the 7th Battalion, the East Yorkshire Regiment, came under withering fire and both suffered heavy casualties.

And if you've been to that part of the Somme battlefields at Free Corps, out in the fields there is Free Corps New Military Cemetery and is dominated by those two cat badges, the Rocking Horse badge, of the West Yorkshires and the cap badge of the East Yorkshire Regiment.

Another unfortunate incident that occurred on that first day of the Somme involved men of the 7th Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment, the Greenhowards.

Major Ralph Kent, who was a company commander in that unit, was seen to lead his men over the top against a particularly strong German position in that well-sighted part of the German defences south of Free Corps and against all orders from his commanding officer, he led his men into no man's land.

This company was practically destroyed in the first 20 yards by a single A single German machine gun.

Surprisingly, as a result of this, having really kind of betrayed his men, disregarded his orders, led them to almost certain death, Major Kent was not court-martialed.

Instead, he was transferred to the 1st 4th East Yorkshire Regiment and was killed near Reams in 1918.

Casualties in that 50th Brigade that attacked on the first day of the Battle of the Somme amounted to 1,155 officers and men, with few gains.

So it was not a successful operation, but the fight for Free Corps was not over because it hadn't been captured on that first day of the Battle of the Somme, and the fight would then continue.

So the village of Free Corps, using units from the division for attack after attack over the course of the next few days, the village was eventually liberated, and then the fight continued beyond it towards Contour Maisel, the next village, roughly to the kind of northeast, and then eastward towards a large expanse of woodland, the Bois de Mamet, Mamet's Wood.

And that, of course, was a fight for other units for another day.

But the division stayed in the line until the 11th of July 1916, when units of the 21st Division, which had served alongside on the first day of the Somme, relieved it, and when it came out of the line at that point, in those 11 days since the first day of the Battle of the Somme, since the 1st of July 1916, it had suffered 4,789 casualties.

So not insignificant for just a short period of time.

It then went into rest near Amiens, in the villages in that area, away from the front, and the divisional commander, Major General T.D.

Pilcher, was dismissed by the corps commander because of his division's failure to take Contal Maison.

But I think after the knocking that it got in the beginning of that Battle of the Somme, the first phase of the Battle of the Somme, for a division tired, exhausted, having suffered heavy losses, was it a good thing to try and continually push it forward like that, to take new objectives, more objectives?

This became part, I guess, of the learning curve that came out of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, often at such high cost.

So that's the division's history.

That's its history as a formation until it took part in the initial fighting at Free Corps on the first day of the Somme.

It went on to fight in many other locations as well, of course.

But this was its first action with heavy losses.

So perhaps it's not surprising that that's where the eventual committee that met to discuss the idea of this memorial, that's where they wanted the memorial to be.

And this is a common factor when you look at the divisional memorials and some of the unit memorials that are placed on the battlefields as we know them today.

Many of them are in locations where that unit went into action for the first time or where they went into action for the last time.

I mean some units are lucky to have multiple divisional memorials, like the 18th Eastern Division, with one at Trones Wood to commemorate the early phase of the Battle of the Somme, another one on the ridge at Chappvale to commemorate the capture of that ground in September of 1916, and a third one on the Menin Road at Clapham Junction to commemorate their part in the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917.

So, There is a kind of reason behind these memorials, their placement, and it connects to their history.

And for this committee, looking at the memorial, a plaque that would be placed on the wall of a church in that key village of Free Corps, that was the most obvious place to do this.

And this was now getting on to 20 years since the armistice, more than 20 years since the Battle of the Somme, and probably this was one of the last divisional memorials to be placed on the battlefields before the outbreak of the Second World War.

So the pamphlet I mentioned at the start of this podcast was seemingly published to commemorate the unveiling of the memorial and I'll put a photograph of it onto the podcast website.

It shows that when the party of 50 old soldiers who were part of this committee went there to the Somme, It consisted, this party, of veterans of all ranks, from private up to Brigadier General, and the latter being Brigadier General Clement Yapman, CMG DSO, who had once, during the war, commanded the 50th Brigade of this division from the end of the Somme period through to the beginning of the Battle of the Lys in April 1918.

and he had lost a son during that period of April 1918 up on the Western Front during that Battle of the Leas.

So he not only had served in the war himself, he understood that sense of loss that came with deaths on the battlefield from his perspective of a commander, but also his perspective as a father as well.

The party had crossed from Victoria Station to France via the old boat train.

And then it ended up on a train that took them to Amiens for the night, which many of them kind of relived memories of that.

And then they headed out onto the battlefields where they visited the Chapval Memorial.

They stood on that ground there, saw those endless lists of names, many of them men from their division.

They went to Delville Wood.

They had lunch in Albert, the Hotel de la Paix, which is on the Perron Rose, still a hotel today, still there, before they got out to Freecorps.

And once at Freecorps, they initially visited the isolated grave of Major Raper of the 8th Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment who'd been killed at Freecore on the 2nd of July 1916.

Now he was an officer who'd been in one of the assaults on the village of Freecore, helped capture, liberate it, whatever we're going to call it, and he'd been buried in an isolated grave which in 1938, July 1938 when they've gone there, this is still there.

It's not there today his grave was moved after World War II into Free Corps Bray Road Cemetery pretty much directly opposite where he was buried and when this party of men went to see his grave they crossed the road and they went to Free Corps Bray Road Cemetery which contains the graves of many of the men of the Greenhowards including men who had once been commanded by Major Kent who led them to their deaths on the first day of the Somme and there's a Celtic cross in there that replaced an earlier memorial to the men of the Greenhowards who died on the first day of the Somme.

It was amazing weather during their trip in that summer of 1938.

And after they visited this Comrades Cemetery, they assembled just up the road at the Free Corps War Memorial.

And I think this was a nice thing to do because they paid tribute to the local men who'd fallen in the Great War.

It wasn't just about their sacrifice.

They were part of an Allied army and the French were were an essential part of that and British veterans often like to remember that and recognise it and commemorate it and these men did that by laying a wreath at the Free Corps War Memorial.

They then walked up Rue Major Raper which is a street named after that major who had the isolated grave and then they walked up to the church door at the top of the hill where the local curé met them and led them inside.

The mayor of the village was also present, various representatives from organisations locally including the Imperial War Graves Commission and the church was also packed to the gunnels with local people as well which shows how they were interested to take part in these commemoration services as well.

They didn't see it as separate to their lives, they saw it as part of their lives and wider community and were very pleased to be invited and very pleased to take part.

Brigadier General Yapman unveiled the memorial himself with buglers playing the last post outside the church and God Save the King being played on the church organ.

Quite incredible, really, the whole thing.

And in their little booklet, they concluded at the end of this service that time was now pressing and the party of pilgrims had to regretfully turn their backs on the little church and village of Freecore, comforted by the conviction that that at last, after an interval of 20 years, fitting tribute had been paid to the memory of the old comrades who did not return.

And that was really at the heart of what this was all about.

Not nailing their colours to this mast, but remembering those who never returned.

And that sentiment is something that you see in many veterans' accounts of this period.

Now, all of this is just a footnote in the history of the Great War, a footnote in the history of the Battle of the Somme and those wider battlefields of Picardy, but perhaps something that happened many times in that interwar period right across that landscape of the Great War, and it's so rarely recorded.

So to have this little pamphlet to tell this story is quite something.

And it resonated with me for a couple of reasons, really, because...

Firstly, I used to stay often in the Hotel de la Paix, mentioned in this account, where they met to have their lunch and toast their fallen comrades.

Back in the day when I stayed in, in the 1980s, it was run by the charming Michel Dutrois, incredible character.

And when I was staying there then, it really had changed a little since the 1930s.

So it's quite nice to imagine Brigadier General Yapman and his band of old soldiers toasting their fallen comrades there.

And secondly, at the back of this book, I came across a list of those who went with the party.

It listed all those who were there.

That's how I know that there were veterans in the rank of private through to brigadier general.

And when I scanned the list of names, there he was.

Captain P.

Howe, MC.

And it jumped straight out at me.

Philip Howe was a Great War veteran whom I knew.

and perhaps he's known to some of you as he features in Martin Middlebrook's First Day of the Somme book.

Born in Sheffield, Philip Howe served with the 10th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment at Free Corps on that first day of the Somme.

He was wounded in the fighting there and later decorated with a military cross for his bravery on that day.

His wound was relatively slight.

He made it back to the British trenches, perhaps the only officer still standing at the end of the day in that battalion, a battalion that was pretty much wiped out on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

And he always described that day, that 1st of July 1916, as the most interesting day of my life.

And it was nice to find his name in that pamphlet.

and that he'd returned to Free Corps more than two decades after he'd fought there in 1916.

Perhaps once the ceremony was over, he snatched a moment to stand by his men's graves in the cemetery in those vast open fields near the village, where in rough grass Skylark's nest would have sung high in the heavens above him on that summer day in July 1938.

Another war was just round the corner for Philip Howe.

And decades later, I would speak to him before his death in the late 1980s and then be inspired to walk his battlefield, the battlefield of his men, not just once, but many times over the years.

Those crisscross paths, those names we find in the most unexpected of places, or perhaps they find us and take us back, always, to the old front line.

www.oldfrontline.co.uk patreon.com slash old front line or support us on buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash old front line links to all of these are on our website thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon