Adam Thompson

On the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, 19,240 British men lost their lives. It was the single bloodiest day in the history of the British Army. The Sherwood Foresters, some 2,000 men from across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, started the battle with an assault on Gommecourt. I have been able to identify at least 12 names of young men from across Ilkeston, Long Eaton and Sandiacre, who were killed on that first day alone. The eldest, James Mann, was 41. He worked in the lace industry and left behind his wife Flora and their five children. The youngest man who was killed, Arthur Robinson, had only just turned 20. He lived with his sister and her family at 105 Bennett Street in Long Eaton. Looking over these lists, it was seeing exactly where they lived that struck me the most. The first world war was so long ago now, it is almost a different world. The numbers of dead and wounded at the Somme alone are so large as to be incomprehensible, squeezing from view the individual, human stories that were lived by each and every one of the people who were there, but the thing about knowing which house Arthur lived in is that that house is still there. I have knocked on that door. I have delivered leaflets through it. Twenty-year-old Arthur Robinson knew the streets that I know. He lived across the road from my mates Howard and Margaret. Long Eaton has changed a lot, certainly, in the more than a century that has gone by since he gave his life, but it is still the same place. I get similar feelings when I look at the list of young men killed from Ilkeston. I see Naylors and Beardsleys and Mees, local surnames that I still see regularly everywhere, from my Facebook comments to our council ballot papers. It should not be a surprise that this information exists and is there to be found. Despite the first world war having ended so long ago, we make a vow every November that we will remember them and we hold true to that vow. The two world wars draw further into history all the time, but I think our remembrance events in Ilkeston, Long Eaton and the surrounding villages are better attended every year. In Draycott, the homes of soldiers who died in the first world war are marked with their own small, individual memorials on each doorstep, reminding us of the time that our world was their world. They were sent off from terraced streets in Derbyshire to the fields of France and Belgium, where they endured the most unbelievable hardships; suffering so great that the very least we can do now is remember them. There is plenty of history written about grand acts of strategic brilliance or incompetence, depending on one’s opinion—about noble generals and the aristocrats and industrialists who dominated this place at that time, and the balance of power between the great empires fighting over who got to have the biggest navy or which African colony they got to control—but that is not why people piled into Ilkeston and Long Eaton town centres on Sunday. What we pledge to remember are the hundreds of thousands of working-class men, so many of them so young, who were sent abroad to fight in those great wars. We should remember who they were: their names, what families they came from, where they lived and where they worked. We should remember them not just for dying but for living—for being the people that they were. We should remember that for as long as we can, no matter how long ago it was. If we remember them like that, then the history stops being faraway and abstract; it stays real in our hearts and minds and helps us prevent such tragedies from ever occurring again.