Current Information:

Age-26

70, Northwold Road, Upper Clapton

Sucrerie Military Cemetery, Colincamps, France

The opening day of the Battle of the Somme 1st July 1916

This was a disastrous day for the British Army in France. Eleven divisions of Fourth Army attacked along a 15 mile front from Maricourt to Serre. Two further divisions of Third Army launched a diversionary attack just to the north of Serre at Gommecourt. For a week beforehand the British artillery pounded the German trenches but the Germans had been there for a long time and they had constructed deep, concrete reinforced shelters beneath their trenches and many survived the bombardment. The troops went over the top at 7.30 am but even before they had left their overcrowded trenches, many had been killed or maimed by German artillery. The Germans knew that they were coming. Once in No-Man’s-Land the artillery continued to take its toll and then the machine guns opened up on the advancing British infantry. They fell in their thousands and the attack came to a standstill almost everywhere. Survivors sought cover wherever they could find it and at night they crawled back to their own lines, often dragging a wounded soldier with them. Only in the south were any advances made with the attack on Fricourt and Mametz. Over 19,000 British soldiers were killed on this day, including 2,500 from London.

4th Division attacked as part of VIII Corps against the fortress villages of Serre and Beaumont Hamel. The German positions here were a kind of amphitheatre with the British confronted by tiers of fire. Their defences also included two strong redoubts, Ridge Redoubt and the Quadrilateral. Their objective was to breach Munich trench, 100 yards behind the front line and then the supporting 10th and 12th Brigades would go through. However, no-man’s- land was bare of cover with well sited German defences which the bombardment had not destroyed.

At 7.20 a.m. Hawthorne Ridge mine was blown and the artillery lifted off the German line giving them lots of warning of the impending attack. Even before this attack began at 7.30 am, 'shorts' , fired from British guns had buried a section of one platoon of the 1st Hampshire battalion and it took an hour to dig them out. 1st Rifle Brigade and 1st East Lancashire led 11 Brigade’s attack at 7.30 am and both suffered terribly. Ten minutes later 1st Hampshire followed in the wake of 1st East Lancashire and met the same fate.  No-man’s land was littered with the dead and wounded. When it got dark the stretcher bearers went to work and luckily the Germans allowed them to recover the wounded without firing on them. The meagre gains made by 11 Brigade that day were all back in German hands by the next and the price paid by 1st Hampshire was over three hundred killed and another two hundred and fifty wounded. Alfred Brooker was one of those killed in action on this day.