Amongst the trees of a pickety wood in the heart of the Somme, men from South Africa

fought the greatest battle in their country's history. This was Boadelville, Delville Wood,

Devil's Wood, South Africa's greatest place of sacrifice in the Great War.

Picture, if you will, a small village on the Somme in the summer of 1914.

It's south of the old Roman road that runs between the towns of Albaer and Bapom.

It sits itself at a crossroads,

which a future mayor decades later would refer to as the crossroads of Europe,

given how many visitors passed that way from so many different nations.

But then it was a sleepy backwater, a village dominated by farming.

When we look at the 1911 census, and these are now all available on the SOM archive site,

you can go on there and search for a particular village on the SOM and it will give you

the census at different dates

and you can see who lived in these villages what they did and importantly I think how many

lived in them they were quite small communities and this village was no different so where are we

this is the village of Longoval. And here, according to the 1911 census made in the

Department of the Somme, there were 363 people living in the village, from infants through to some

quite elderly retired farm workers.

Farming, agriculture was the main employer,

but on the road to the next village of Guimonts was a sugar factory

and quite a few people that lived in Longerval work there.

Sugar beet, as today, was a major crop in this area of the SOM and sugar factories existed in

almost every village in that area, every sizeable village to bring the sugar beet in to turn it into

...