It is estimated that around 50,000 Brigade Lads served in the First World War, during which many honours and distinctions were awarded. The Brigade contributed two Service Battalions of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps whose members were comprised entirely of past and present members of the Church Lads’ Brigade. These were known as ‘Pals’ Battalions. The story of the battalion centres around the experiences of eight men who served and some who died in the Battles of The Somme, Arras and The Lys.

Pennant, Journal of the Forces Pension Society

The premise for this particular book is an interesting one; rather than a straightforward battalion history, the book is based on a page from ‘The Brigade’, the magazine of the Church Lads’ Brigade battalion, dated August 1917. This page shows pictures of eight men from the battalion who had been wounded, including the author’s uncle. The book is based around her journey to find out more about these men.

Argunners Magazine

When I agreed to write a review of Jean Morris’s book I did not realise what a serious piece of history it was. It is not academic, in the sense of challenging history, rather it is a straightforward and carefully researched history and one that is both fascinating and readable.

That said I still felt it was a little outside my area of expertise to comment on; my son in law, however, is a professor of modern history (and himself an author of academic books). So let me paraphrase his comments:

The book provides a detailed insight into a distinctive Pals battalion. The author pulls off the tricky task of balancing a tightly-focused study with the wider context explaining succinctly and effectively the experience of the battalion in each phase of the war on the Western Front. Of particular interest is the background details of the men who volunteered in the autumn of 1914. The pen-portraits of some of these early volunteers reveals much about the type of person of which the Church Lads’ Brigade appealed as a social, cultural and religious badge of identity. Of course, the heavy casualties these “Kitchener’s Army” units sustained, particularly on the Somme in 1916, meant that their original demographic roots were soon severely disrupted as fresh drafts from a variety of backgrounds were absorbed into the battalion in order to bring it up to strength. However, as the author shows, its original identity was never entirely eradicated and it maintained its distinctive ethos throughout the conflict. At the same time, she shows that these men went from being inexperienced, patchily-trained men into highly effective soldiers who, in the so called 100 days of 1918, were at the cutting edge of a series of victories unprecedented in the annals of the British Army.

Overall, I think this means a thumbs-up from both of us for an interesting, well-researched and presented piece of writing. A significant achievement.

Patrick Forsyth