Looking Back with Eric Leaver

THE ANNIVERSARY on Wednesday of the first day of the forlorn Battle of the Somme in 1916 is the most painful one for East Lancashire - marking the day when the "Accrington Pals" battalion was decimated.

That sunny morning 82 years ago, 700 "Pals" of the 11th East Lancs went over the top of the trenches in what was meant to be the "Big Push" to smash the World War One stalemate and rout the Germans from the Western Front.

But they were scythed down like corn - by enemies who were supposed to have been blown away by seven days of non-stop artillery fire. In less than 20 minutes, 235 Pals were slain in the hail of German machine-gun bullets. Another 350 were wounded.

And though it was a misconception that theirs was an exclusively Accrington battalion - most of its volunteers came from nearby Oswaldtwistle, Church, Great Harwood, Rishton, and Clayton-le-Moors as well as from Blackburn and Burnley with a company also being raised at Chorley - there is no denying the impact of the losses on the town whose name the Pals bore. For even if it was a myth that Accrington was the smallest town in the country to raise a complete battalion in reponse to the 1914 call by Army supremo General Kitchener's for a "New Army" of a million men, its proportionate loss that dreadful day was probably the greatest any community in the country had to bear.

Sadly, this sacrifice was destined for decades to be a virtual footnote in the annals of the First World War.

But thanks to six years of painstaking research by Accrington magistrate Bill Turner, that undeserved obscurity was ended when in 1987 he brought out his book "Pals" which gave the battalion the written history and recognition its volunteers had earned at such a huge cost.

Since then, what Bill calls a Pals "industry" - including the erection of the Accrington brick memorial on the battefield, the dedication of the Pals' Chapel at St John's, Accrington and the production of a commemorative plate - has emerged that keeps their memory alive in fulfilment of his belief that they must always be remembered. But now, as the 81st anniversary approaches of their near-destruction before the village of Serre on the Somme, Bill has produced another tribute to the courage that never wavered that bloody morning in 1916.

This is a new book - The Accrington Pals Trail - which follows the footsteps of those volunteers from the day they answered the Mayor's recruiting call in Accrington and drilled in civilian clothes, to their training camps in England and Wales and on to the fateful battlefields of France.

Packed with then-and-now photographs of the locations and pictures from the families of the men themselves and interspersed with eye-witness recollections, Bill's book takes readers on a fascinating trip through the harrowing experiences of the soldiers whose ideals of patriotism and glory he has helped to make into a legend and theirs perhaps the most famous of that war's Pals battalions.

Price £9.95, Pen and Sword Books.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.