Name in a tunnel— before soldier’s death on the Somme

From the Bolton Evening News, first published Tuesday 30th May 2006.

THE year is 1916 and behind the front lines of the Somme a young soldier sits in a cramped, dark tunnel waiting his turn to be called above ground to face almost certain death.

For Kearsley soldier 11789 Private Harold Mottershead, of the Lancashire Fusiliers' 2nd Salford Pals, time hung heavy. And as he waited, he carved his name and battalion details on the tunnel walls, to ease the agony and to show he was there.

Within hours, the young married man was dead killed in the first attack on Thiepval one of thousands of British troops lost on the nation's costliest day of a brutal war. His body was never found and he was listed missing in action.

Decades went by and poppies covered the French fields where so many died, and the graffiti in the tunnels from the long-dead hands of British and Canadian soldiers lay undisturbed.

The passages under the church in the village of Bouzincourt, originally created in the Middle Ages to allow local people to hide from invaders such as the Vikings, became dangerous and hard to reach.

But a village official found his way through them to photograph the graffiti as a record of the "war to end all wars".

And a former Bolton woman, who had married a Frenchman and made her life in the area, deciphered them.

Paula Kesteloot, formerly Flanagan, is an ex-Farnworth Grammar School and Bolton South Sixth Form College student who is now teaching languages in French primary and secondary schools.

She knows a great deal about the First World War and its local connections; she worked as a translator and text writer for the Somme trench museum and runs battlefield walks.

She lives in Albert, which was a British garrison town on the western front of the Somme battlegrounds, and was intrigued by the soldiers' wartime words, especially those of Pte Motterhead, who came from Kearsley where she grew up.

"All I know is that his wife at the time, Nancy Mottershead, became Nancy Street and her later address was 434 Manchester Road, Kearsley.

"It was very moving when I read the words the soldiers wrote then, and I just thought that the families and remaining relatives would like to know about how they spent their final hours before they died," Paula explained.

She also wants them to know that, in spite of the years and the distance, the soldiers are not forgotten in 2006. Young pupils in her primary school, Notre Dame, are each adopting one of the 20 soldiers identified from the tunnels as part of the 90th anniversary of the Somme battle on July 1.

They will write a poem for each soldier, and read them at ceremonies at the two cemeteries where the soldiers are buried or whose names are on the famous Thiepval Monument.

Then they will place their poem and a poppy for each soldier's name on the graves to show that, in the hearts of a new French generation, this corner of a French battlefield will be forever England.

l Paula Kesteloot wishes to thank Neil Drum for his book, God's Own, and the Lancashire Fusiliers Museum in Bury in her battlefield researches.

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