A history of four battalions of the Durham Light Infantry raised in the Country during the First World War. The 18th (Pals) were the first troops of Kitcheners new army to come under fire, when the Germans bombarded Hartlepool in December 1914. The 19th were raised as Bantams and the 20th (Wearside) were raised by the Sunderland Recruiting Committee. The 22nd, the last raised became a pioneer Battalion but fought as infantry through much of 1918. The book covers raising, training and activ...

In answer to Lord Kitchener's appeal, in late August and September 1914 many men joined Alexandra's Princess of Wales's Own Yorkshire Regiment, better known as The Green Howards. Recruits came from around the Middlesbrough area and the ironstone mines on the North Yorkshire moors, while others came from the East Durham coalfield and the Durham City area. The 8th and 9th Battalions left the Regimental Depot in Richmond in late September and moved to Frensham on the Hampshire/Surrey border, ...

The Pals battalions were a phenomenon of the Great War, never repeated since. Under Lord Derbys scheme, and in response to Kitcheners famous call for a million volunteers, local communities raised (and initially often paid for) entire battalions for service on the Western Front. Their experience was all too frequently tragic, as men who had known each other all their lives, had worked, volunteered, and trained together, and had shipped to France together, encountered the first full fury of...

"Serves to illustrate the carnage of battle throughout the three critical months of 1918: March, April and May . . . An amazing archive."— The Great War MagazineIn March 1918 the German Army launched a series of offensives that brought them very close to winning the war. Military photographers followed their advance and took many photographs of the operations as they progressed. This is the war seen from the German perspective, British and French s...

This is the story of the 20th (Service) Battalion, from Wensleydale and Barnard Castle to the overseas service in Somme, Ypres Messines and more.

The exploits of the twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third (Service) Battalions of the Northumberland Fusiliers during the Great War—"Harder Than Hammers."Although called the Tyneside Scottish, very few of the men who made up this Brigade were of Scottish descent. Many came from local villages or were from the Northumberland pits. They saw action at the Battle of the Somme and after it were allowed to put tartan behind their cap badges because of ...

The victorious achievements—and tragic losses—of two of Great Britain's most heroic battalions in World War I, featuring the soldiers' personal accounts.In August and September 1914, the Regimental Depot of the Durham Light Infantry at Fenham Barracks in Newcastle was overwhelmed by the number of men enlisting. Accommodation was tight so the men were formed into batches and sent off to training grounds in the south of England. Over two,zero men were sent to Bulllsw...

The 2nd Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry was one of only two battalions of the regiment that did not have its history published in some form after the Great War, the other was the 1/7th (Territorial) Battalion. As the regular Home Service battalion of the regiment it was brought up to strength with Regular Reservists and men from the Special Reserve and went out to France in September 1914, where it fought at the Battle of the Aisne, before moving north to Flanders. The battalion was...

John Sheen, the author of this book, was told, aged nine, that his parents were dead. It was then, having found them alive and well, that he was told that he had been adopted. This is his story, and how he came to find his birth family after sixty four years. It gives an insight of the adoption process in the 1940s through the documents and letters discovered. Highly emotional at times, but laced with humour, this story will be of interest to both adopted and adopters. Having spent his wor...

All of us say we want peace, but only a few are willing to prove it.John Dear, SJ, has been arrested more than seventy-five times. He has spent more than a year of his life in jail. He has been mocked by an armed and angry U.S. National Guard battalion standing outside the doors to his New Mexico parish. All this because he so fervently believes in peace.A Persistent Peace, John Dear's autobiography, invites readers to follow the decades-long journey and spiritual growth of this nationally kn...

Naxos AudioBooks continues its new series of Great Poets represented by a collection of their most popular poems on one CD with John Keats. Although this man had a short life, he produced a series of outstanding poems many of which appeared first in letters to his sister. He was largely unappreciated during his lifetime, and died in Rome at the age of 26. Most of his 150 poems were written in just nine extraordinary months in 1819. This selection contains some of his finest works, the prin...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in collaboration with his friend William Wordsworth, revolutionised English poetry; in 1798 they produced their Lyrical Ballads, poems of imagination and reflection using ‘the language of men’. They pointed the way forward for a generation of Romantic poets. Coleridge’s addiction to opium affected his poetic output, and yet the handful of poems he did produce were innovative. These ranged from the quietly conversational to the wildly imagined, and include two of th...