When the World's Armies Came to Salisbury Plain

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2021

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

During World War One, Britain and its empire mobilised soldiers on a hitherto unprecedented scale. That required a huge logistical effort to feed, equip, house and train them. No place reflects these efforts better than Salisbury Plains. Now mainly sleepy villages and farmland, these plains were once home to tens of thousands of men and women who descended on the camps to prepare for war. In this episode historian Margaret McKenzie, who spent the last 30 years studying the camps, takes Dan on a tour of the site helping understand the scale of what once stood there. Margaret sadly passed away a few weeks ago, so this episode is dedicated to her and all those who served at the camps with which she became so familiar through her research.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi everyone, welcome to Dance Know's History. During the first while, Britain and its empire
0:03.9	mobilised men on a hill to unprecedented scale. Millions of men were sent round the globe
0:08.6	fighting on battlefields, for example, in the Middle East, in Africa and particularly, of course,
0:13.2	in Europe, in Sloanica or, of course, on the Western Front. That number of men required a huge
0:21.8	logistical effort, feeding them, equipping them, closing them and training them, and souls
0:26.2	be playing in Wiltshire became a massive armed camp. It's still used by the armed forces today,
0:31.6	but it's predominantly an area of farming and rural settlement. Pretty villages dotted around
0:37.0	amidst beautiful landscape. That would be a very different scene in the First World War.
0:41.2	Tens of thousands of men in pre-Fab wooden huts, corrugated iron clad, roofs, wood stoves in the
0:47.3	middle, packed in around newly laid down railway tracks. A gigantic effort to prepare men for the
0:54.9	theory of the battlefield. I've known about some of these camps for a while, but I got a very
0:59.0	special invitation a few months ago. That was from a woman called Margaret McKenzie. She'd
1:04.5	actually born in New Zealand, but she moved to this area of Salisbury Plain. She moved to UK
1:09.1	in 1991. She spent the last 30 years researching first the Anzac soldiers, because obviously she was
1:15.7	from New Zealand initially, so the Australian New Zealand soldiers, but also extending it out to study
1:20.7	the camps and the other soldiers that found themselves on Salisbury Plain during the First World War.
1:26.4	She became the world's leading expert, as she also won the gratitude of many for tending the graves
1:31.5	of those who died in training accents or of illness in places like Fauvent, Bava Stock, Bedford
1:37.2	St Martin on Salisbury Plain. She'd been there for 30 years, but her name was grown in touch recently
1:42.0	because she'd been diagnosed with a terminal illness and it was a chance to meet her up there and
1:46.0	learn about the area from the person that knew most about it. What you're about to hear is
1:51.5	recording of my trip with Margaret around the area, around Fauvent up onto the downs,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of History Hit and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.