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28 October 2014
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Remembering the Bradford Pals
The last visit to the Somme by the Bradford Pals Comradeship Association in 1974.

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

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 BBC 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:


start quotes

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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