Worcestershire Regiment

Crowds gathered in Gallowveld Park to honour the Worcestershire soldiers who showed unimaginable courage at a defining moment of the First World War.

The 112th Battle of Gellervald commemoration took place on Sunday, October 25th, to march the anniversary of the 2nd Battalion, the Worcestershire Regiment's charge, which saved the British Army just a few months into World War I. Dignitaries, including Tom Collins, MP for Worcester, and Councillor Tor Pingree, Mayor of Worcester, laid wreaths for the men who fought in the battle.

In her speech, Councillor Pingree said, At Gellervalp, the Worcestershire Regiment faced overwhelming odds, exhausted, outnumbered and under relentless fire.

Their courage helped restore the British line at a critical moment, but that courage came at a terrible cost.

Today we not only remember their extraordinary bravery, but also the lives lost and their families left behind.

Also present at the ceremony was the Mercian Regiment's mascot, Private Derby.

The Battle of Gelewoldt was the Worcestershire Regiment's most famous battle in the First World War.

It is often described as the battle which saved the Belgium city of Ypres from capture and the British Army from defeat.

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section four of gallipoli the landing at w beach under cape tecky the men told off for this landing were the first battalion lancashire fusiliers supported later by the worcester regiment the men were landed at six in the morning from ships boats run ashore by picket boats on landing they rushed the wire entanglements broke through them with heavy loss and won to the dead ground under the cliffs the ships drew nearer to the beach and opened heavy fire upon the turks and the landing party stormed the cliffs and won the trenches The Worcester Regiment, having landed, attempts were made to break away to the right, so as to join hands with the men on V Beach.

All the land between the two beaches was heavily wired and so broken that it gave much cover to the enemy.

Many brave Worcesters went out to cut the wires and were killed.

There were bayonet charges to clear the crossing, and the town grew tense, frightened, and angry.

so here we are we've come to the afternoon of saturday the 19th of august 1911 at around half past two in the afternoon a train was being forced through the town under military guard as it slowed strikers swarmed onto it and raked it out with the fire from the engine killing its steam and leaving it dead on the line a detachment of around 80 soldiers of the worcestershire regiment under the command of Major Brownlow Stewart, found themselves in a railway cutting, hemmed in by hostile crowds on the bank above, who began to pelt them with stones.

Major Stewart called on the local magistrate to read the Riot Act, the ancient proclamation that ordered the crowd to disperse and gave the authority, the legal cover, to use force if it did not.

The magistrate, a man named Henry Wilkins, read it.