Forbidden History - The Somme: The First 24 Hours

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

In this Remembrance Day episode, we join Sir Tony Robinson to uncover the first day of the Battle of the Somme, from the perspective of five men from the Sheffield ‘Pals’ Battalion. Known in history to be one of the largest and bloodiest battles of World War 1, we recount its first 24 hours by tracing the Pals’ real story, visiting key sites and the families of those affected. -- Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://surfshark.com/forbiddenhistory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or use code FORBIDDENHISTORY at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Go to ⁠nakedwines.co.uk/forbidden⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines for just £39.99, with delivery included. -- Cast List: Sir Tony Robinson: Author, Actor & Broadcaster  Helen Ullathorne: Archaeologist  Penny Meakin: Author, The Meakin Diaries  Paul Oldfield: Author & Battlefield Tour Guide  Nick Meakin: Grandson of Frank Meakin Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. We're an independent podcast and advertisements help keep us going. Ads are automatically placed and not specifically chosen or endorsed by us unless read by me the host. Thanks for supporting the show. On November 11th, across the United Kingdom, silence falls. Poppy's bloom on lapels, and people stop to remember the fallen, known as Remembrance Day. For Americans, it's a familiar ritual. We call it Veterans Day. But the origin of both lies in the same silence, the end of World War I,

and among the war's many tragedies, none looms larger than the Battle of the Somme. A clash that was meant to break the deadlock of trench warfare, and instead became one of the bloodiest days in British military history. Today on Forbidden History, we join actor and author Sir Tony Robinson and return to the fields of northern France

to uncover the stories of the men who marched into a storm of steel. World War I, the Battle of the Somme. It was one of the greatest offensives ever seen, and it would go on for months. The day it all began, July 1, 1916, is remembered now as the British Army's darkest day. hardly got beyond their own barbed wire. Loads of them are dead and injured.

It was absolutely crazy. People have always been fascinated by the story of this terrible battle, but first-hand accounts kept at the time are pretty scarce. So we have to piece together the story from the few bits of evidence we have. Now, thanks to a very unique personal record smuggled back from the front line,

we'll reveal the dramatic story of one battalion of one battalion in the words of private Frank Meekin. He could have got into trouble. Oh, huge trouble. These were hot staff. Frank and his comrades were part of a unique volunteer army, the pals, who left their homes and their loved ones behind to go and fight. With the testimony in Frank's diary and with the help of historians and experts,

we'll retrace their unique journey. The trenches were they trained. the trenches where they fought 100 years ago, as they faced the terrible first 24 hours on the psalm. By summer 1916, what would come to be called the Great War had been raging for almost two years. But on the western front, there was stalemate, with lines of trenches and barbed wire dividing Europe from north to south.

With the casualty figures rising, both sides were desperate to make a breakthrough. make a breakthrough. Time had come for the Allies to make the big push. And on the 1st of July 1916, in this very trench, hundreds of British soldiers went up this parapet and out into no man's land. The majority of them would become casualties in the first few yards. Overall, 19,000 British troops would be dead by sunset. The first day of the Battle of the Somme, had begun. Throughout that first horrendous day and during the weeks and months that

followed our secret diarist Frank Meekin served alongside hundreds of thousands of young men who joined up to fight for king and country. Can you imagine there would have been hundreds of guys in their uniform shuffling and pushing, trying to get in line and then slowly they began to move forward to their own barbed wire. And yet, what makes it even more remarkable is that Frank, like millions of others, had volunteered to go. Frank's road to the Somme began two years earlier, many miles away in the northern British city of Sheffield. In August 1914, Sheffield was a thriving place. Its famous steel industry booming as production stepped up for the war.

It was the armory of Britain. But the war effort needed more than weaponry. Lord Kitchener was building a new volunteer army. Two and a half million men, many from the same city, town, street, even workplace, signed up to fight. They became known as the Pals Battalions. At first, Sheffield didn't have its own Pals Battalion, and that caused quite a lot of fuss in the newspapers. Although in many ways it was understandable.

Sheffield had already contributed. had already contributed hundreds of young men to the old York and Lanks Regiments, and it needed to hold on to a lot of its skilled young men in order to keep working in the munitions and steel industry. But it was perceived that something had to be done, and a couple of guys in the Officer Training Corps came up with an idea to bring Sheffield's professional classes into the war. By this, they meant office workers, clerks and businessmen, as opposed to manual workers of which most other PALS units were comprised.

It was the Sheffield City Battalion, and Frank Meekin wanted to be part of it. On the afternoon of September 2nd, 1914, a large crowd gathered outside Sheffield Town Hall. They were there to watch hundreds of volunteers arrive and sign up. They came from all parts of Sheffield and beyond, all walks of life, all encouraged by the Duke of Norfolk himself. 1,500 forms had been printed especially, and in the Sheffield Council Chamber, Frank, along with a group of friends and colleagues, signed their names.

None of them knew what lay in store. But 100 years on, we do know in detail, thanks to Frank's diary, a diary that shouldn't have existed, because keeping one was forbidden for service men on active duty on the Western Front. 34-year-old Frank Meekin worked as an architect in the Sheffield Town Hall. All he and a bunch of his workmates had to do was walk up the stairs from their office to sign up. Sir Tony Robinson tells us more about Frank's fellow pals.

19-year-old Alpheus or Alf Casey had been studying for a physics and pure math degree and was a keen tennis player in Sheffield before he joined up. William Arthur's Collie was one of the oldest volunteers at 45. He'd had a successful career as a businessman. Now he was made a captain and given command of a company of soldiers. They all waited for their turn to sign up and receive the traditional bonus. You know the old saying, taking the king's shilling? Well, they still said that during the First World War,

although it wasn't actually a shilling that you got. It was significantly more, which worried at least one bloke who signed up here, His name was Reg Glenn and he worked for Sheffield Education Department and one day at work his friend came in and said, let's go and sign up right now. Reg was 21 years old and worked as a supply clerk. Like many others, he saw joining up as a chance for a bit of excitement. So they got their caps and they came down here, he signed on and he got, not a shilling, he got one and six.

And ever after he was really nervous that he'd been overpaid and that the army was would come and chase him for the extra sixpence. Like Frank and the rest of the first few hundred recruits, Reg Glenn was from Sheffield. But after three days, the catchment was broadened to include men from the surrounding areas. Like John William Streets, the eldest son from a Methodist family in Whitwell, Derbyshire.

He was self-educated, studying in his spare time while working down the pit to help support his family. Frank and the other volunteers barely had time to reflect before they were ordered to report for the battalion's first parade. On the 14th of September 1914, nearly 1,000 city battalion men made their way to Norfolk barracks in Sheffield, waiting to start the process of becoming soldiers. You can imagine what it would have been like. They would have known nothing.

They would have been edging around, milling about, laughing, cracking gags, being nervous, until eventually some old sweats who'd be done. been in the army before would start pulling them together into makeshift companies. But these were people who'd been at school together, been at work together, or in the same family. They didn't want just to be in the same companies. They wanted to be in the same platoons and the same sections, which is why the Battle of the Som had such a terrifying impact on society. Because all those guys who'd been together for so long were still together now when the fighting began and the slaughter started. The men of the Sheffield Battalion

The battalion couldn't have imagined the horrors they'd face on the first day on the Saan. That was still almost two years in the future. Now after enlisting came the bane of all new army recruits. Before they could hold a rifle or even wear a uniform, the new City Battalion had to learn to drill, and there was only one place nearby that was big enough for that. I used to come here to away matches when I was in my teens. Bramall Lane, the home of Sheffield United Football Club.

And when I knew this place, there was a cricket pavilion. And the local people loved it. They used to come here, sit in the stand, watch all the guys marching around, applauding. Well, at least they did for a bit, but after a while, everyone got really bored with that. And as you can imagine, the groundsman got pretty hacked off as well, seeing their lovely grass being ripped to shrew.

shreds and so the battalion had to find somewhere else to do their marching. The weeks of drills had made the men fitter, which came in handy as their new barracks weren't actually in Sheffield but up on the moors outside the city. On the day they were made to march there, it snowed. Red Myers camp was so new in fact that it wasn't actually finished. The men were put to work as soon as they arrived, building huts and laying gravel paths. And if that wasn't bad enough, there was also field training and route marches

in full equipment to be done. Helen Ullathon has been researching the area for 20 years. Given what was going to happen to them in the not too distant future, they really did need to be toughened up in weather like this, didn't they? They certainly did, and they certainly had a baptism by fire almost, by being up here, because it's very high up here, very exposed, there is no tree cover where they were training. We know from the accounts that it was very bad weather.

The huts and gravel paths built by the men are now long gone. In the early 1990s though, archaeologist Helen discovered other remains of this area's military past, which had lain forgotten for many decades. I was taking some students out from the University of Sheffield and we were doing landscape recording and we came across these features that nobody knew what they were until we started doing a bit more research and we discovered that these were actually rather rare First World War practice trenches. Amazingly, the trenches Helen found were actually dug by the city battalion men during the winter of 1914, 15. They were built to get them familiar with the kind

of positions they would find themselves in in action. It's thanks to the chef Field City Battalion, that some crucial historical detail exists, not only about the first 24 hours on the Psalm, but also about life at Redmire's beforehand. Much of what we know comes from the other men who kept diaries. One of these was written by a young private, Alf Casey. His diary came to light after a house clearance a few years ago. It gives an amazing insight into life for the recruits that winter. Monday the 4th of January, 1915. The rain it raineth every day.

Slush and sleet, rifles inspected, physical exercises in hut, one and a half mile run, drill with rifle in closed formation. Dinner rather poor for a surprise. 9 to 2.30 p.m. over Roper's Hill, ringing low, over moors, down to town, past Drill Hall to Norfolk Park,

back to Midland Station, back to Red Myers. After almost five, months of hard training, it was time for the battalion to leave Red Myers and Sheffield. For Frank Meekin, Alph Casey, Reg Glenn, William Folly, and Will Streets, the drilling and the exercises were over. It was time to go to war. This was the moment Frank Meekin started keeping his diary.

But his detailed account of events leading up to the psalm remained lost, unread by his family, they were discovered by Penny Meekin, who has been enthralled by Frank's story ever since. These are actually Frank's diaries. How did you get hold of them? They were in my husband's family for 80 years. Was he related to Frank? Frank was his grandfather. In four volumes, they're the most complete personal diaries that remain from the City Battalion.

How long did it take you to decipher the lot of them? About 20 years? No. No. On and off. Frank's diary is a raw and honest personal record of events as he saw them. However, his views sometimes conflict with the official story. They were not allowed to keep diaries during active service.

Now, Frank was quite a rebel. I can tell that from what he writes in the diaries. And I don't think it's any coincidence that he started these diaries. these diaries on the first day of active service. What sort of things do they say that make you think he was a rebel? Making comments about what's going on. You know, perhaps it shouldn't have happened like that. Oh, really?

So he could have got into trouble if this would be found. Oh, huge trouble. I mean, for keeping the diaries alone. I mean, yes, these were hot stuff. Frank certainly didn't hold back from describing the harsh realities. April the 26th, 1916. The idea of wasting valuable years of one's short life at this game and being treated like beasts

shows that we've truly sold our birthright. He had his own circle of friends, didn't he, in the trenches? He did. Most of them he worked with in the town hall in Sheffield before they signed up. And they all signed up together. They all signed up on the first day. Train together, forked together.

Being in his mid-30s, Frank got a lot of. along well with some of the older guys in the battalion who were officers and sergeants, including Will Folly and an experienced man named William Marsden who'd been made a company sergeant major. In early March 1916, they got wind that something was up. Friday, March the 3rd, 1916, there are strong rumors of moving at last. Finest rumor so far is that the battalion staffs have six days leave immediately after arrival in France. In April 1916, the Sheffield Battalion arrived on the Somme. Thousands of British and Commonwealth troops were being massed along the Somme front, ready for the big push.

The idea was for more than 20 Pals battalions, thousands of men, to attack the German lines and break through to the open country beyond. Everyone knew it was coming, even the Germans. The Sheffields formed part of the 94th Brigade in the New York. brigade in the new and entirely northern 31st division. Appropriately enough, they were deployed to the northernmost part of the whole front, the extreme left of the British attack. They and the other battalions of the 94th came to know this area of the trenches all too well.

Throughout May and June, 1916, the men served several tours of the front lines here. It was their introduction to trench life. Do we know much about what his life was like when they first arrived at the trenches? They arrive at the trenches and I think it's a bit of a rude awakening. And the conditions in the trenches are appalling, absolutely appalling. He writes of being covered in lice. He talks of rats running over them. He talks of not having a shower or a bath for weeks.

Like all soldiers, food was a constant obsession. But Frank had more reason for this than most. The whole set of diaries, every day he starts with what he had for breakfast, what he had for dinner, what he had for tea. Because he had diabetes, he had to eat little and often. Breakfast, bacon, dinner, hot meat and raisin duck fully beef, dates, a few, and no jam or butter. The conditions are dreadful, but Frank's the most important thing to fry. important thing to Frank food. Will he get his food on time? And you think that

rather than it just he liked food or being greedy that was about managing an illness? That was managing the illness. As well as the conditions, the food and an illness Frank and the others had something else to deal with now. The Germans sniped them, raided them and shelled them. And the layout of the trenches they were in didn't help. This was the lad's first experience of the brutality of war and a really hard lesson in trench warfare. These trenches had been dug by the Germans

who'd then retreated and had been taken over by the Brits. Now, that meant that their entrances were facing towards the Germans, whereas if they'd originally been dug by the Brits, everything would have been the other way round and the entrances would have been covered by the rest of the British-Lerals. line. So the guys here are incredibly vulnerable. Not only that, but the Germans know the whole geography of the trenches because they dug them. On June 17, Frank Meekin's friend, Sergeant

Marsden, was caught in a sudden German barrage. So on this particular day in the run-up to the battle, Sergeant Marsden and a bunch of other guys are in a dugout. They've been shot up during the course of the day. They're waiting for first aid and even if you're evacuation and they think they're perfectly safe. When wham, a mine and verafer goes straight in through the entranceway, the rest of the guys get out, Sergeant Marsden doesn't. That was a very, very difficult day. Frank was guarding his post and there was terrible bombardment.

And so many people were killed, including a lot of his pals. And I think that's when the realisation really set in that this really was horrible. Suddenly it was all very different from their days at Redmire's. This was war. Frank and his pals just had to push on. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the Sheffield Battalion's mission was to attack a stronghold near a village called Ser. If you blinked, you'd missed this place. It's just a few houses and farm buildings scattered along the main road. But in 1916, this was strategically incredibly important.

It was a virtual fortress. It was ringed by four concentric circles of trenches. And even though virtually every house was smashed to bits, every one of them was a strong point or a command post or a dugout. Before the attack, the plan was for the British artillery, British artillery to fire a week-long barrage. More than a million shells aimed at destroying the German barbed-wire defenses. For days, the men listened to the incessant fire of their own guns, while the rain hammered down, turning the trenches into swamps. On the 30th of June, they began moving

into attack positions in the frontline trenches. Zero hour was 0.730 the following morning, 1st of July 1916 the first 24 hours of the battle of the psalm are about to begin we'll be right back after the break sir tony robinson is meeting paul oldfield a retired army officer who has extensively researched the history of the sheffield battalion on the psalm where would they have come from well they started off the night before the attack about five or six miles back They'd had billets in a wood, started moving forward early evening about 7.30. But later on they had a final halt for some tea and rum and take some rations. At that point then they had to go into the trenches.

So the last two miles of this journey were in communication trenches. What must it have been light for them moving around that night? It was dark, they had to keep quiet. There was no light showing. There was lots of flashes of shells going over the top of them. Very atmospheric, very tense. And of course the bus. the bottom of the trenches were thick in mud. How many guys do you reckon would have been here? Well, in this brigade area, probably about 4,000 guys,

all trying to get to their positions at the same time. All on the timetable, of course, so it was well worked out. But despite that, the ground conditions were such that most of them were two or three hours late actually getting into position. From Redmire's where the men first set foot in a trench, to France, where many of them would leave trenches for the last time, They were now almost in position. Paul and Tony now discussed the search for the actual place

where the city battalion went over the top in the first moments of the psalm. This is called the Sheffield Memorial Park, but were the Sheffields actually here on the first day of the Saan? No, they weren't. They may have been here during an earlier tour in the trenches, but this area was occupied by another battalion. There were four copses here in 1916,

and over the years they've all joined up into one. So who was here? Oh, the Akrigen Pals were here. The famous Akrington Pals. Absolutely. 11th East Lancashire. Yeah. So to find out where the Sheffields are, we're going to have to get through this barbed wire and head off in that direction.

I'm afraid so. John Copps is littered with the remains of trenches and other features. It's always been under tree cover and so has never been plowed or built over. The undulations and bumps are all that's left of what would have been a complicated trench system. And the Sheffield men had to find their way around. it in the pitch dark. This area was never properly cleared after the war. It's no more dangerous than any other front line land on the Somme battlefields, but it's on private land, and we were granted special access to explore here. Among and beneath the trenches, there would have been lots of dugouts

and shelters like the one Sergeant Marsden was trapped in. It's all lasting evidence of the City Battalion's experiences here on the Somme. Exhausted from the long night, the guys waited ready for the off. Tony and Paul are at the edge of the overgrown wood where they can just about make out the Sheffield's actual front line trench. So where we are now in this depression is exactly the front line where the city battalion would have been on that night. Exactly. I mean even after a century it's still pretty apparent almost still about a meter deep. Very well preserved apart from all this vegetation of course and it would have been from here that

they would have gone over the top they'd have fixed their burn it's 720 in the morning they would have gone over and set themselves up on their start line ready for the attack to start at 7.30 Frank Meekin Alf Casey Regg Glenn, Will Folly and Will's streets were all ready to go. Five men about to go into battle how many would return. Tony tells us more. The city battalion boys are ordered to get on their ladders, get up onto the parapets. The idea was that when the off was given 10 minutes later, they'd already be up here and could go straightforward without worrying about getting their webbing tangled on their ladders or whatever.

The first wave was made up of A and C companies. B&D were time to leave minutes later, a couple of hundred yards or so behind. The order is given that they should all. all lie down. They lied there doing nothing for around about eight minutes. And the Germans are firing small arms, burst from their machine guns, heavy artillery. It was horrible. So even when they've hardly got beyond their own barbed wire, loads of them are dead and injured. It was absolutely crazy. For eight whole minutes, they had to lie there under fire. Then at last, they were

ordered to stand up and move forward. This isn't flat ground, it's a slope, it's a hill. And the German front line was just on the lit. So if you got a rifle and you were firing towards the city battalion, you wouldn't have had to be the greatest marksman in the world to hit someone. Well, not only that, but remember, this is the far northern end of the line.

So the German flank is here. And they've got machine guns. They're firing into the city battalion. If you miss the first guy, you're likely to hit the person behind them or the person in front of them. So as you can imagine, all the guys are veering off in this direction to avoid this murderous fire. All they could do was hope the artillery had done its job to open the way forward. The German wire, it hadn't been cut, even though there'd been massive bombardment. It hadn't harmed the wire at all.

The German wire was thicker than the British wire. So imagine what a state they would have been in now. They've got all this machine gun fire coming at them from over here. They've got these small arms being fired at them from over here. They can't move any further this way. They're not even allowed to go back towards their own line. How would you have felt in that kind of situation? The first day on the Battle of the Somme was just minutes old.

And already the Sheffield's attack on Sear had broken down. It was chaos. What happened next? No one really knows. It all gets very hazy. This is partly because battalion headquarters over in John Copps was getting so little information, but also because most of the people who were on this field died on this field. So we have to piece together the story from the few bits of evidence we have. Of the characters who took part in the Battle of the Somme,

all but one left that front line trench on the 1st of July 1916. The exception was Reg Glenn. As one of the last remaining signallers, he was too important to risk. He spent the first part of the battle in the headquarters dugout. He'd wanted to join the action with his comrades. 47-year-old Captain William Folly had led his men since Redmire's. Someone asked him the correct time in the last few minutes before zero. Alph Casey's later diaries were lost, or he simply never had been.

wrote anymore on active service. Whatever the truth, he went over the top and was killed. He was never found. Few men survived the opening minutes unscathed, and certainly no one from headquarters was there to describe events for the War Diary. So then, we owe a great deal to the battalion's other diarists. The 35-year-old architect survived,

and not only that, but he also made it further than almost anyone else. It was Frank Meekin who asked Folly the time, maybe to try and distract him for a few moments. Frank Meekin said that on the long trudge up to the German line, he could see his mates on either side of him covered in blood, but it never occurred to him for one moment that he would die. He just wanted to get on with the job.

When the barrage lifted, the first wave went forward. I closed up and joined them. I stumbled several times in hour barbed wire. and cursed freely, but probably he stumbles saved my life time at the time. Eventually, he gets to the German line, can't get through, but then about 40 yards away, he can see an area where half of the wire had been blown away, but only half of it. So there was enough there for him to get snug in and be firing towards the Germans

who he could just see through the rest of the wire. The Germans were right on top of the paraphras, the wire. They even brought up a machine gun there to face us. We made good rifle practice for a time, accounting for several of them until they took more careful cover. Frank and the others kept up this close range fight until they couldn't hold on any longer. The other guys are saying, let's get out of here, let's go back to our line. He's saying, no, no, that would be crazy. We've got to wait until it's dark. Some of them decide to go back. Some of them are hit. Others of them come back and take cover by the barbed wire again until eventually Frank thinks it's safe enough to go back.

He goes back across no man's land and he hops from one crater holes to the next, sprinting, ducking down, sprinting, ducking down, zigzagging this way and that until finally, just before he gets back to his own line. The whole area is thick with bodies, thick with injured. He helps patch some of them up, drags a few back into the trench. He gets into the trench himself, and that's the end of his first day. For miles along the British lines, it was the same story. A few breakthroughs in these first hours, but mostly the attack stalled with terrible casualties. The fighting went on for hours.

There was a little lull at one time when the Germans allowed the British to clear their dead and injured away. But then the British started shelling the Germans. The Germans retaliated, and the whole thing kicked off again, till eventually virtually the whole brigade had been wiped out and their bodies lay where they fell for months until finally they were buried in one of the little cemeteries dotted around the battlefield. The Sheffield's objective at the village of Sear

remained held by the Germans until they withdrew the following year. Frank and his pals never reached the village. But in 1923, the residents donated ground for a memorial to the men who died. Private Alf Casey, Captain William Folly, and others are commemorated on the memorial to the missing at Tipval. Reg. Glenn saw out the war. Over the years, he was a regular face at reunions until the final one in 1976. He was the last survivor of the original Redmire's men when he died in 19, 1994, 101 years old. Later on, this first day of the Somme,

Sergeant Will Streets had led his men from the front. He was on his way back into the British line. Sergeant Streets was wounded and made his way back to the comparative safety of his trench, but before he got there, he was told that some particular guy was injured and needed help. Sergeant Streets turned around, and went back to assist him and was never seen again.

John William Streets is believed to be buried near John Copse, where he died. A book of his poetry was published posthumously in 1919. Frank Meekin, too, survived the rest of the war and returned home to his wife, Dahl, in Sheffield. Their grandson, Nick Deakin, is Penny's husband. Nick, what happened to your granddad after the war? He returned to Sheffield, to live in Sheffield, resumed his career at the town hall. God, that must have been hard for him, mustn't it?

I can't imagine. To enlist with all of your pals to go off and fight and then come back and do the same job that you had before. With so many of them gone. Absolutely. And now he would have probably about half a dozen great-grandchildren as well. So were it not for his sons, not for his stumbles and the bullets missing him.

None of us would be here, of course. When the death count was finally confirmed, the true scale of what had happened over the first 24 hours on the psalm hit home. 19,000 were killed, most of them probably in the first few hours. The Sheffield City Battalion alone suffered 248 officers and men killed and 415 missing, wounded, or who subsequently,

died of wounds, all as a result of the attack on the 1st of July. The Germans, up against all the battalions of the British 31st Division, lost just 365, killed, wounded, and missing. All the city battalion men who were killed in the first 24 hours are still there on the Somme. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow. for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below,

and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out where did everyone go, Histories of the Abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places. Available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.