Inside the church of a small Som village is a memorial to a British division that fought and suffered there in the opening phase of the Battle of the Somme.

What was this division? Who were the men who placed this memorial and what does it tell us about the experience of the Great War?

With the end of the special Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force episodes,

season 8 of the old front line is coming to an end.

But I wanted to put out a couple of bonus episodes until season 9 starts properly

in September. And these, and this one included, will be short episodes, focus on a particular

theme or subject, and in this one we're going to look at a divisional memorial on the Somme, the Somme battlefields.

But which one?

Tucked inside Freakor Church on the north wall of the church is a plaque to the 17th Northern Division,

commemorating their whole parts in the Great War and testifying to the losses that they had,

but in particular their sacrifice in capturing the village of Freakor and the surrounding ground

at the start of the Battle of the Somme. I've often said how there is a connection between

a good old Comrade Association after the war,

the publication of a divisional history, and a memorial placed on the battlefields.

And that certainly seems to be true here.

In the case of the 17th Northern Division, it's less clear how the Old Comrade Association worked,

but they had an excellent divisional history published in 1929, written by an author that I'm not familiar with,

called A. Hiliard Atteridge. And he used the surviving papers that he was given

access to by veterans who'd served in the division. He used the war diaries, which were then not

publicly available. And he produced a pretty good divisional history. Not every division

published their history. but this is certainly

one of the better ones with good narrative and some good maps. It doesn't have many

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