Uncovering the secrets of Sheffield's students of the Somme

More than a century ago, a group of Yorkshire students were the driving force in forming a battalion of ‘professional men’ to volunteer to fight in the First World War. Now their successors at the same university are uncovering the secrets of how the Sheffield Pals spent months training for their ill-fated mission to the Somme – only to be slaughtered in their hundreds in minutes.

Archaeologists from the University of Sheffield have been conducting a week of fieldwork at a First World War training camp at Redmires – an area in the Peak District that was used to train volunteers who had enlisted in the Sheffield City Battalion.

Helen Ullathorne, from the University’s Department of Lifelong Learning, who initiated the study, says the site of the training camp was discovered accidentally as students doing land surveys came across what turned out to be practice trenches.

“We first came up here in 1999. We were trying to find a landscape we could use to investigate how to do certain types of land survey. We did a bit of background research but didn’t know what was here really.

“Only after we had started recording some of the features, we realised we had something rather extraordinary.

“Students did an amazing amount of research to find out what those features represented. We learnt they were practice trenches for the First World War.

“As far as I understand it, the knowledge of where they had trained was lost. It was students from the University of Sheffield who helped form that Pals battalion and it was students who found where they trained all those years later. It is lovely and circular.

“Over the years we have learnt it wasn’t just a First World War site, it was also used in the Second World War by the Home Guard, so Dad’s Army was up here as well.”

The battalion, which became known as the Sheffield Pals was formed in September 1914 after a group of students approached Herbert Fisher, the vice-chancellor of Sheffield University about the idea of raising a unit.

Those who ended up enlisting were engineers, businessmen, stockbrokers, teachers, journalists and clerks. More than 1,000 men signed up, training initially began at Bramall Lane, the home of Sheffield United. But after complaints about damage to the pitch from the military exercises, they were instead sent out to the Redmires camp on the outskirts of the city in the Peak District.

Ullathorne says there were good reasons that the battalion had fewer working-class members than many other similar ‘Pals’ units in other parts of the country.

“With Pals battalions, you tend to think of them as working class lads all from the same street. But the Sheffield City Battalion was slightly different in the way it was formed. They promoted themselves to professional men and were clerks, teachers and university students.

"Some of them were from working-class backgrounds but in Sheffield you had the steel industry and miners which were reserved occupations. They were workers who were very much needed at home for the war effort – that is why the take-up of the Sheffield Pals is different.”

After identifying the practice trenches, documents, newspaper reports and diaries from the time were all examined which proved the battalion had trained at Redmires. One student volunteer for the Pals, Alphaeus Abbot Casey, wrote of how the battalion trained at the site until May 1915 before being sent on to Cannock Chase.

They eventually left the UK in December 2015, initially to head to Egypt where the battalion was assigned to protect the Suez Canal from a potential attack by the Turkish army. But when that did not materialise, they were reassigned to France to the planned summer offensive of the Somme.

On July 1, 1916, the battalion was given the task of the capturing the village of Serre as part of the Somme offensive.

But as the battalion advanced on German lines, the men walked into a hail of bullets and shellfire, while long stretches of the barbed wire that it had been planned would be cut through remained undamaged, leaving the soldiers trapped in No Man’s Land and firing vainly at the German trenches.

As one survivor, John Harris, later wrote “Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying. That was our history.” By July 3, when the remnants of the battalion were taken out of the line, 513 officers and men had been killed, wounded or gone missing.

Surveying the Redmires site where the men who died had trained so hard the year before they died at the Somme, Ullathorne says the training camp shows it wasn’t a lack of preparation that was fatal for the battalion but instead the ill-planned offensive.

“When you come up here and see the training, they must have worked hard and diaries talk of intensive training. I don’t think it was a lack of training, it was walking into industrial warfare.”

The study by Sheffield archaeologists has already led Historic England to designate the site as a Scheduled Ancient Monument – a place of national historic importance. Many such camps sprung up all over Britain at the start of the First World War, but few are now so well preserved as Redmires.

In addition to fighting skills, drill and general fitness, the men learned how to construct different types of trench systems, some stretching for hundreds of metres. These earthworks survive as slight humps and bumps visible to the naked eye, and the university has been carefully mapping them all.

Not all are easy to interpret and more sophisticated techniques have therefore been used, including drones and geophysical survey.

Ullathorne says technological advances in mapping equipment mean it is possible for new information to be uncovered, even after almost 20 years of visits to the site. She says the week of fieldwork also allows people with an interest in archaeology to get a taste of the subject while exploring a fascinating part of Sheffield’s landscape. The archaeology tutor says investigating and mapping the military landscape at Redmire has been one of the most poignant pieces of research she has ever conducted in the course of her career.

“It has been an amazing experience for me, a lot of people have visited the site. I have been honoured to take people around the site. We had one guy who took out a photograph of his grandfather, who was part of the Sheffield Pals.

“There is a real connection with the not-too-distant past and the experiences of grandparents and maybe great-grandparents now. People are able to come to a place where they can walk in the footsteps of people who went through trauma by serving their country in the First World War.”

Fieldwork 'brings sacrifice to life'

Mature students who have taken part in this year’s fieldwork at the site say it has been a fascinating and moving experience.

Archaeology student John Welsh, 31, says examining the site brings home the reality of the sacrifice made by the men. He was among around 20 students who have volunteered at the site over the course of a week.

“The history becomes a bit more real out here. Those men were here for six months for many of them to die in just 10 minutes. It is just so sad, they were just kids – some were basically half my age.”

For more information about the history of the Sheffield Pals, who were formally known as the 12th Battalion Yorks and Lancaster Regiment, visit www.pals.org.uk/sheffield.