Battle of the Somme: Centenary

Lord Black of Brentwood Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating my noble friend on so powerfully introducing this important debate, in which I declare an interest as a trustee of the Imperial War Museum Foundation. Between them, the Imperial War Museum, 14-18 NOW and the wider First World War Centenary Partnership have formidable plans to commemorate the centenary, perhaps most strikingly through the restoration of the UNESCO-listed film, “The Battle of the Somme”. And through the ambitious Lives of the First World War project, these organisations will build a permanent digital memorial to those who died at the Somme, bringing new meaning to our exhortation that, “We will remember them”.

In his extraordinary account of Europe from 1914 to 1949, Ian Kershaw said of the two great battles that dominated the middle years of the war that while for the French Verdun came to symbolise the saving of their country, for the British the Somme symbolised,

“the pointlessness of such immense loss of life”.

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of the Somme, the most pointless of all, was the way in which it robbed us of so much bright young creative talent that was mown down in the flower of youth.

In his director’s address shortly after the outbreak of war to students at the Royal College of Music, on whose council I sit, Sir Hubert Parry had this to say:

“One thing which concerns us deeply is that quite a lot of our happy family … have been honourably inspired to go and chance the risks of a military life; and among them are some very distinguished young musicians. We feel a thrill of regard for them ... But then we must also face the facts with open minds. Our pupils ... are gifted and rare in a special way. Some of them are so gifted that their loss could hardly be made good”.

Among the young musicians who died during the war were Ernest Farrar, Willie Manson, Cecil Coles and, at the Somme itself, perhaps the most talented of them all, George Butterworth, whose early works such as “A Shropshire Lad” and “The Banks of Green Willow” foretold a life of great musical genius that was not to be.

At the outbreak of war, Butterworth joined the British Army and accepted a commission in the 13th battalion Durham Light Infantry. Soon after the start of the Somme, he and his men were sent in to capture a series of trenches near Pozières on 16 July. For his role in doing so, Butterworth was awarded the Military Cross. He did not live to receive it as he was shot through the head by a sniper during the desperate battle to hold Munster Alley on 5 August. Hastily buried that day, his body was one of the hundreds of thousands never recovered. His remains lie there still today, perhaps the most obvious case of “what if?” that is left to us in the earth of the battlefields of northern France. He joins the Frenchman Albéric Magnard, the Spaniard Enrique Granados and the German Rudi Stephan as losses from the First World War to the world of music who, as Parry said, can, “hardly be made good”. As we commemorate the battle this year, I hope we will find time to think of the “what if?” generation of composers, poets, authors and artists whose talents would have so enriched our lives had they not had to make the ultimate sacrifice.