
| Remembering
the Bradford Pals |
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| The
last visit to the Somme by the Bradford Pals Comradeship Association
in 1974. |
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In
the middle of World War 1, on July 1st 1916, 2000 young men from
Bradford left their trenches in Northern France to advance across
no man's land. It was the first hour of the first day of the Battle
of the Somme.
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POPPIES
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Scarlet
poppies grow naturally in conditions of disturbed earth.
The significance of the poppy as a lasting memorial symbol
to the fallen was realised by the Canadian surgeon John McCrae
in his poem In Flanders Fields.
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In
1974 a Âé¶¹Éç North crew accompanied some of the surviving Bradford
Pals on what was to be their last trip back to the Somme.
A Bradford
Pal remembers casualties at the Somme and being wounded himself:
We were supposed to go over at ten-past-eight.
We were the third wave, the second battalion Pals. The Leeds
Pals and the first Bradford Pals went over at ten-minutes-to-eight.
It was a massacre, they were just wiped out. No chance at all.
It was pure massacre and anybody who says it wasn't is just
telling a pack of lies. At 8 o'clock the whole brigade, the
whole lot, were wiped out in half-an-hour. By the afternoon
there were 63,000 casualties that day, and it all took place
in the first hour, just like that. I got wounded at about 10
o'clock and they told me to get out because I was only a walking
case. I did walk out. I bl**dy would have run out, and make
no mistake about that, I got out as quick as I could. We'd got
a one-eyed officer. He'd lost an eye at Ypres. He was going
in the wrong direction. I told him, 'You're going in the wrong
direction,' so he said, 'All right, if you think I am going
in the wrong direction, find some senior officers. Well, I was
searching on my belly and my knees and crawling, and eventually
found just one. I was taken him back the best way I could. He
got wounded. I was attending to him, patching his wound up in
the back, and I got wounded. Just like someone put a stick right
across my back. Ten o'clock as far as I was concerned, the battle
of the Somme was over.

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