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The ubiquity of the Somme in the title of many guides is
significant for, years on from 1984, it continued to exert its hold on
at least popular historiography. Curiously, the focus of the ‘angry
young men’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s such as Leon Wolff
and Alan Clark was on Passchendaele and 1915 respectively 3 , the
seeming obsession with the Somme being a product of the 1970s.
Certainly, much of the output based on oral testimony in the 1970s
and 1980s rarely looked beyond 1 July 1916 and that has continued
the pattern, with the burgeoning number of illustrated accounts of
the Pals battalions of Kitchener’s New Armies. Equally, there is now
British Battalions on the Somme, detailing the location and
movements of all 616 British battalions passing through the
Department of the Somme between 1 July and 18 November 1916 4 .
This is not to deny that such a compilation provides a useful
research tool and the same could be said to some extent of the
series of histories of individual Pals battalions, which began with a
study of the Barnsley Pals in 1986 and has since not only expanded
to cover the entire 3l st Division but also spawned similar
publications 5 . In fact, some of the accounts of battalions, divisions
or individual combat actions produced by nonprofessional historians
have been extremely commendable, including studies of the l6 th ,
36 th and 5l st Divisions and of the action at High Wood. Equally
impressive is one of the relatively few non-professional studies not
concerned with the Somme, a volume on the battle of Arras 6 .
The high tide of oral history with respect to the Great War has
now passed, not least because of the dwindling number of veterans
although Lynn Macdonald still works in the genre. However, the
most interesting use of oral testimony has been by historians of the
Dominion forces such as Maurice Shadbolt in New Zealand and the
Australian-born but British-based Alistair Thomson, who
controversially exposed the „hidden texts“ in such evidence in 1995.
The kind of general surveys of the personal experience of the
ordinary soldier common in the 1970s has also largely disappeared,
although Peter Liddle continues to make productive use of his
archive at Leeds 7 .
Whatever the obsession with the Somme, the continued
popularity of the Great War amongst the reading public is to be
welcomed and, in 1984, few would have predicted the spectacular
Lifts, Norwich, 1987; Anne Powell, A Deep Cry, Aberporth, 1993. See also M. and M. Middlebrook,
The Somme Battlefields, London, 1991.
3 Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields, London, 1959; Alan Clark, The Donkeys, London, 1961.
4 Ray Westlake, British Battalions on the Somme, dans «Barnsley Chronicle», 1994.
5 J. Cooksey, Pals Barnsley, dans «Barnsley Chronicle», 1986.
6 Philip Orr, The Road to the Somme, Belfast, 1987; Terry Denman, Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers,
Dublin, 1992; Terry Norman, The Hell They Called High Wood, London, 1984; G. Y. Cheyne, The
Last Great Battle of the Somme: Beaumont Hamel, 1916, Edinburgh, 1988; J. Nicholls, Cheerful
Sacrifice, London, 1990.
7 Peter Liddle, The Soldier’s War, 1914-18, London, 1988; Idem, The 1916 Battle of the Somme: A
Reappraisal, London, 1992
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