Dressed in First World War uniform, they appeared out of the blue to hand out simple cards to passers by – with each card carrying the name of a soldier who died on July 1, 1916. It lasted until November 18, 1916 and left more than a million soldiers injured or dead.
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The Lost Gardens hosted a short ceremony on West Lawn at 11am on Friday, July 1, marking the first day of the battle and including a two-minute silence and a poetry reading from The Royal British Legion’s free Somme toolkit.
The work, entitled “1.7.16”, has been commissioned by the local Hamilton Flute Band and will be performed by the band during a remembrance service in St Columb’s Cathedral.
The stone, quarried in Jersey, will be taken to the village of Guillemont in France on Sunday, to mark the site where men from the Jersey Contingent fought and died in the Battle of the Somme. We are looking at them, and what life was like beforehand.
“It is to make people actually think about the people who died, the casualties and the people who survived and came home – a lot of them with quite horrific injuries, whether physical or mental”.
“Amazingly there are 103 pupils in year seven, exactly the same as the number of men killed”, said Janine Murray, the school’s head of art. “The timing couldn’t have been better because year seven have been learning about the Battle of the Somme”.
Exhibitions have gone on display at 21 libraries around the county, including Droitwich, Warndon and Malvern.
“As a city with a long and proud military history Plymouth has always been painfully aware of the great sacrifices made by our armed forces in defending our freedoms and, in terms of sheer scale of sacrifice, few battles compare with the Somme”.
Simon Sharkey, associate director of the National Theatre of Scotland, said: “To have been involved in what is an unprecedented UK-wide participatory arts project has been a truly fantastic learning opportunity for these young Scottish men”. It was one of the bloodiest days in history.
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“We honour the men who served from across Britain and Ireland, the Commonwealth and from France”.
