Cheshire Regiment

He's from where we live.

And he joined the Cheshire Regiment.

Those geographic links will be broken.

And I'll have to write a completely different personnel section in that second part or in that later war Brengan book, because you say it's a it's a volunteer or territorial army at this point of the war.

To help our understanding of these three cemeteries that we're going to see I ran the AI tool that I've developed which helps me analyze the Commonwealth War Graves Commission data and used it for this and the other cemeteries that we'll visit in this walk and I'll put the analysed data which I've turned into charts onto the podcast website for you to view it and have a look at that and there'll be a link to that obviously in the show notes.

What this kind of research tells us is that the highest number of burials in this cemetery, Stump Road, are from the 7th Battalion, the Queen's Regiment, the Royal West Surreys, who took part in the fighting in this area in November 1916 as well as well as the 7th Buffs who started the cemetery and have 57 burials in this burial ground and in addition there's also representation from the Cheshire Regiment the 7th Buffs who we mentioned before and the Royal West Kents they also dominate this cemetery as you walk down the narrow rows of graves which are very close together with the headstones almost touching each other you can see the dominant cap badges as you walk through this cemetery.

The youngest soldier at Stump Road is 18 years old, so not a teenage Tommy as such, he's a legitimate soldier who was joined up possibly when he was 17 to be buried here on the Somme, but he's an interesting one, he's not a British soldier, he's a Canadian.

Private Reginald Doman of the 2nd Battalion Canadian Mounted Rifles, who was killed on the 30th of September 1916.

Now, even when a viable hand grenade in the form of the ubiquitous Mills bomb arrived at the front in 1915, there were still dangers to employing them in the close confines of a trench.

And this is what 2nd Lieutenant Adrian Hodgkin of the 1st 5th Cheshire Regiment says.

A hand grenade is great fun.

The pictures of it in the official books explain it sufficiently.