In June 1931, 236 people from three Rossendale Boroughs embarked on a journey of over 900 miles to the Somme battlefields of World War I. This second annual pilgrimage was organized by the Rossendale Liberal Association. The train, which left Bacup at 2:25 PM on Friday, May 29th, carried 32 passengers from Bacup. It picked up an additional 86 passengers in Waterfoot, 55 in Rawtenstall, and 64 in Haslingden.
The furthest point of their journey was Albert. Among the pilgrims was a 70-year-old widow who had lost her son in the war, along with many younger men and women who had lost husbands, sons, and brothers in what was known as the Great War. The group also included men who had fought and returned, carrying with them bitter memories of the relentless barrage and endless seas of mud. They remembered days when they merely existed, surrounded by the very earth that now served as the eternal resting place for many of their comrades.
The first cemetery they visited was the British Cemetery at Bucquoy Road, where 1,857 graves of known and unknown soldiers lay. As they passed through the villages of Boiry, Ayette, and Bucquoy en route to Queens Cemetery, which contained 731 graves, they traversed land once occupied by the 16th Lancashire Fusiliers and 8th King’s Own Rifles. At that time, the cemeteries were maintained by the Imperial War Graves Commission, now known as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
In Serre, they saw a resplendent memorial to the 12th Yorks and Lancs Regiments, including the 1st and 11th East Lancashire who served in the area. At the Newfoundland Memorial Park, the pilgrims viewed a model of a caribou elevated on a pile of rocks. As they walked up the shingle path to the memorial, they were confronted with reminders of the conflicts between German and British forces for the possession of Beaumont Hamel.
In an area of 300 square yards, scenes of the greatest inhumanity had been left untouched as a reminder to visitors. The frontline trenches of British and German forces lay like sickly yellow snakes, separated by just a few yards. The land known as “No Man’s Land” was littered with shrapnel-shattered helmets, bullet-penetrated water bottles, corroding rifles, dud shells, sinister trench mortars, and mazes of barbed wire.
A crashed aeroplane lay near the German lines, its fuselage awry and its engine half-embedded in the clay, with a bullet-holed fuel tank indicating its fate. In stark contrast, this scene was accentuated by a frieze of sweet-smelling flowers and healthy-looking shrubs. Birds chirped and frogs hopped harmlessly around the edges of stagnant pools at the bottom of deep craters, adding to the scene.
In the midst of it all, the Rossendalians paid silent homage to their countrymen and likely townsmen who had made the ground sacred with their own life’s blood. A huge wreath composed of Flanders poppies and five lilies representing the five Lancashire Battalions who were engaged in that section was laid at the foot of the memorial by Captain W Furness Dean. The inscription on the wreath read: From the Rossendale Liberal Council, Lancashire, England. To the memory of the men of the five Lancashire Battalions who fell in this section on July 1st 1916, namely 1st East Lancashire’s, 4th Division; 11th East Lancashire’s ( Accrington Pals) 31st Division; 2nd Kings Own, 4th Division ; 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers; 4th Division; 1st Lancashire Fusiliers, 29th Division. Laid By Captain W Furness Dean Rossendale Prospective Liberal candidate for Rossendale, May 30th 1931.