BBC Wiltshire looking for Somme connections

[WW1Wiltshire]

Hello all,

My name is Ashley Heath and I'm a reporter for BBC Wiltshire.

With the centenary of the Somme coming up in the summer, I'm looking for stories which connect Wiltshire to this battle.

I'll be particularly looking for sites in Wiltshire...

These could be ordinary houses where a serviceman was born, or a school building perhaps. A factory where equipment was manufactured would work as well.

It could be a memorial to a particular serviceman or unit with an extraordinary tale.

The reason I'm looking for places in Wiltshire is so that people here can see and touch a living connection to this major WW1 conflict.

Reading this back, I realise that I've centred on men. Whilst I'm sure the majority of stories will be about men, I'm also interested in stories which feature women.

I'm sorry that my request isn't specific. What I'm looking for can be summed up quite well by the phrase, "If it makes your eyebrows go up, then it'll probably make mine go up too!"

If it helps, examples of previous stories I've been involved with for the centenary can be found on this BBC webpage.

If you think of a story which might be of interest, then please do get in touch, either through GWF or via my email: ashley.heath@bbc.co.uk

Many thanks everyone and I look forward to hearing from you in the future.

Regards

Ashley Heath

[Gareth Davies]

Ashley

Good to hear from you again. I will give you a call as I have lots of ways and know lots of people who can help you out.

[Moonraker]

My interest in Wiltshire and WWI has always been parochial, so I don't know much about the county's links with the Somme, but I've searched my notes and found the following:

Soldiers fighting in the Somme area during the Great War noticed similarities with Salisbury Plain. Both have rolling chalk downland and are part of the same geographical feature of the English Channel formation. Colonel Howard Green commented on the similarity in his account of the battle of the Somme, published with John Masefield’s The Old Front Line (Heinemann 1917): "The country north of the Somme is very like Wiltshire. The Somme and its northern tributary, the Ancre, cut deep valleys through the land, which runs in high irregular spurs down to the lower ground. Woods dot the hills and valleys, and on the spurs or sheltering in the re-entrants between them are a number of small villages."

Part of the 1927 film "The Somme" was made on Salisbury Plain, with re-enactments of battles in the area and of Theodore William Henry Veale winning the Victoria Cross. On July 20, 1916, Veale and a private in the 8th Devonshire Regiment went out and dragged a wounded officer, Lieutenant Eric Humphrey Savill, who was lying in the open within 50 yards of the enemy, into a shell hole and then took him water. As he could not carry the officer by himself, he fetched volunteers, one of whom was killed almost at once; heavy fire necessitated leaving the wounded man in a shell hole until dusk when Private Veale went out again with volunteers. When an enemy patrol approached, he went back for a Lewis gun, with which he covered the party while the officer was carried to safety. It was quite difficult for audiences in 1927 to differentiate between the "real" newsreel footage and re-enactments, though certain scenes could not have been filmed during the actual battle because the cameraman would have been the first to die!

Evelyn Southwell and George White met as masters at Shrewsbury School in 1910 (the latter after a brief period at Marlborough College earlier that year ) and left together in 1915, enlisting respectively in the 13th and 6th Rifle Brigade, both being killed at the Battle of the Somme the next year. Several letters from Southwell ("E.H.L.S") when at Perham Down and Windmill Hill are included in Two Men, One Memoir, Hugh E Howson, editor. Other letters include brief references to a visit to Marlborough College and to the death of Old Marlburian Charles Hamilton Sorley. See

this old thread

I've a feeling that the book may be available in electronic form (??)

Lieutenant Edward Wyndham Tennant was born at Stockton House in Wiltshire in 1897, his father becoming MP for Salisbury in 1906. A member of the 4th Grenadier Guards, he was killed at the Battle of the Somme in1916. One of his poems reads:

And here I am in Tidworth Camp
By night I freeze, by day I tramp,
We’re crowded in a jolly squash,
They never give us time to wash.
The boys are dressed ‘fore I’m awake
I need a dickens of a shake,
But I don’t mind the sweat and grind,
For England, England’s sake.

(Possibly these lines may reflect his experiences at a prewar Officers Training Corps camp at Tidworth.)

Moonraker

[TimCornish]

Hi Ashley

Only a short reply but will reply further in the morning - I will have a dig through my contact book for those who can help you in regards to the Somme and Wiltshire. Tim Brown is worth a call, I shall have to find others that I have come across, but they're in my contacts somewhere. Will fill you in tomorrow.

Tim

[Michelle Young]

Martin Brown is a member of this forum, he is based on Salisbury Plain as an archaeologist. Probably worth contacting him.

Michelle