Taylorian

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TR I PS

Battlefields Trip – Reflections

I n 1976, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, the BBC commissioned a documentary which visited the sites of this epic encounter. Using the memories of those who fought there, the programme brought to life the events and emotions of a battle that lasted 142 days and which was costly not only in terms of lives lost but also the naive idealism that accompanied war in the 20th Century. The programme reignited interest in the First World War and, under the leadership of Tony Booth, the MTS History Department sought to extend learning about the Great War from the confines of the classroom to the battlefields themselves, firm in the belief that there is no substitute for standing in the shoes of those who were there. So, in 1992, the first day trip to the Somme was launched and, aside from the three-year break caused by Covid-19, the trip has run ever since and made an impact on thousands of Merchant Taylors’ boys. In that time, the trip grew to three days and took in the sites of Ypres, Vimy Ridge and Arras. The 2024 trip departed from School at 2.30 on Thursday, 25th April and arrived in the town of Albert, behind the British lines of 1916, at midnight. The fatigue of the boys was mixed with an excitement that prevented much sleep, but this was no different to those soldiers who had marched up to the front overnight on June 30th to be in position for the attack on the morning of July 1st, 1916. The 8th and 9th Battalions of the Devonshire Regiments had done just this and were in the trenches at Mansell Copse, opposite the village of Mametz – the first of the sites we visited. It gave an opportunity to see the challenges of attacking machine guns carefully placed some distance behind the German Front Line. At the end of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, over 160 of these men were retrieved from where they had fallen in action in no mans land and were buried in the trench from which they attacked. The boys noticed the number of unknown soldiers and understood the impact that near 90% casualties must have had on the local communities that sent their sons to war. We visited similar sites at Mametz Wood, where the Welsh fought hand-to-hand for days and at Newfoundland Park, where the 900 volunteers from the small territory met their fate in the second wave. This was contrasted with the German Cemetery at Fricourt where a more sombre atmosphere was noticed, not least because over 17,000 bodies had been buried in a space the size

Arnaud OMT to his parents. The Arnaud family had sent the letters to the school so that future generations might learn from them, and those of us who have heard the brave, stoic final words of a loving son to his parents cannot be anything other than profoundly moved. The Arnaud family had joined the school in 2016 for its service of commemoration of the Somme battle and this year, Arnav Hastantram laid an MTS wreath at Frederick Arnaud’s gravestone. Part of the Allies’ tactics had been to plant huge mines under the German lines in order to destroy key strongpoints and sow confusion; these spectacular sites at La Boiselle and Hawthorn Ridge never cease to amaze, and the boys struggled to comprehend the scale of the craters created by tens of thousands of pounds of explosive. The mines ultimately failed and the last site we visited was the notorious

of the School’s First XV pitch. In all these cases, the opportunity to walk across the battlefields, to understand the distances involved and see the rugged landscape, triggered the question ‘what would we have done?’ Following a tour of the excavated trenches at Ulster Tower, the scene of a successful but unsustained attack by the Ulster Division, we visited the first of several sites connected to Old Merchant Taylors’. The grave of 2nd Lt Geoffrey Ward was found by Nicholas Detre when he spotted “Homo Plantat, Homo Irrigat...” inscribed by Ward’s parents. We found a further 12 OMT names on the memorial to the missing at Thiepval and listened to the music of George Butterworth, whose body was also never found. We walked from Thiepval to the small Londsdale Cemetery where Mr Hale read out the letters of Frederick

JGT leads a previous battlefields trip