Wellington Local History and Museum Society's most recent event hosted Darren Berry, from the award-winning West Country Tommies Re-enactors Group.

Darren gave a talk entitled “Names on the War Memorial – who were they and what did they do?” He provided an in-depth overview of the 1914-19 Great War as it was known because nobody expected a second such conflict. 

For the illustrated talk he wore the woollen khaki uniform of the Somerset Light Infantry (Prince Albert's) 7th Battalion, explaining that his group is twinned to the modern 7 RIFLES, the SLI being an antecedent of The Rifles, Wellington's Freedom regiment. 

The audience had the chance to handle and hold various items of kit worn by the soldiers of the period.  Notable was that two sterile wound dressings were stitched inside the uniform battle dress, while the puttee came into general service when Khaki (meaning Dust in Urdu) was adopted to replace scarlet uniforms from the 1890s.  This particular cloth item was produced in their thousands by Fox Brothers for the British Army during the war.

Living in the WW1 trench system that stretched from the Channel coast in Belgium to the Swiss border brought with it all the deprivations of war. 

Daily ration packs contained corned beef, tinned stew and fruit and dried biscuits, although the Army aimed to provide the British Tommy with 3,000 calories per day. 

Personal hygiene was particularly important and feet care came in for special attention: there were over 75,000 cases of trench foot at the front and 41 deaths from it. 

Feet were therefore regularly inspected and resulted in extra socks being issued and whale oil used to combat the condition.  Post from home was really important to help maintain regimental morale and 15,000 people alone were employed just to ensure family correspondence to and from the front line was regularly maintained.

Given the industrial scale of the Great War, nearly 90% of our lads who fought returned home at the war's end but a consequence of it was the issuing of the Death Penny to all who had suffered a bereavement and the village war memorial was born to remember the fallen. 

Darren noted that only 53 civic parishes in England and Wales don't have a memorial to the Great War, with Holywell Lake being one of just nine in Somerset.  Darren concluded with sobering facts and figures about the mass casualty numbers, saying that if lined up Britain's War Dead from the 51-month-long First World War would take over 24 hours to march past a reviewing stand.