Jayne Kirkham

I want to talk about the Cornish men and women who were in the Somme and involved in the first world war. There were 6,300 deaths of people from Cornwall in world war one. Many of them signed up to the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. There were a number of battalions from Cornwall that fought in the Somme, and the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division fought in the latter stages of the war as well. There was an article in the Royal Cornwall Gazette on 26 October 1916, which was an account sent by someone from the front, who said that they were mocked by the Germans because they knew where they were from; the Germans asked them if they had any Cornish pasties. Even over there, the Cornish were known and recognised. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Amanda Hack) for talking about the tunnellers. They were coalminers where my hon. Friend is from, but those from Cornwall were tin miners. The Royal Engineer tunnelling companies worked in silence so that they were not heard; they could hear the Germans above them, apparently sometimes talking about how long it was since they had held their wives—they were that close. On the first day of the Somme, 19 charges were detonated under German frontlines, many of those tunnels having been built by the miners from my constituency and my hon. Friend’s. The saddest thing is that many of those who managed to survive the Somme and the first world war came back to Cornwall and carried on working in the mines, and only a year later, on 20 October 1919, five of them were killed in the Levant mining disaster, in which 31 people died when the mine collapsed. It is a terrible sadness. I know some of those stories because last week I saw the historians of Penair school, who have won the Western Front Association Malcolm Doolin local history prize for bringing the stories to life in a magical way. They used AI to make films about some of the people who fought in the Somme and the first world war—tunnellers from Cornwall—and said they had become very close to the men because many of them were only a year or two older than they are now. The way they brought them to life was magical. I am proud of the historians from Penair. They have been here for the past couple of days; they went to the ceremony at the Cenotaph yesterday and paraded there. I am contributing to this debate simply to remember the men of Cornwall who died in the Somme, of whom there were many, and to give our great thanks for all that they did and all that they gave.