“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.”
More than 4,500 men from Dorset never came back home to our county after WWI: more than 16,000 came home, but with life-changing injuries. From the Dorsetshire Regiment, 350 men died in one day during the Battle of the Somme. Private Harold Mead from the Dorsetshire Regiment was just 16 years old when he was killed in Belgium on 13th November 1914, having enlisted underage. Those men left the rural idyll of our county to be met with the horrors of trench warfare, the devastating effects of modern heavy artillery and the widespread use of chemical weapons. It is hard to comprehend what impact that must have had on them, both during and after the conflict. The toll placed on their families,
not knowing from day to day if their sons, fathers and husbands were still alive or not, must also have been unbearable.
In total, Dorset lost more than 5,000 men and many hundreds of civilians during the two great wars. The county experienced significant damage to the towns of Bournemouth, Poole, Weymouth and the Isle of Portland, which were heavily targeted in bombing raids by the Luftwaffe.
The men who left our county were, in the main, not experienced, trained soldiers: they were ordinary civilians, young men at the start of their lives, many still only teenagers. They left our county and country without hesitation, in the belief they were fighting for something larger than themselves – a nation, a home. The brutal contrast that these men would have experienced between our then-quiet rural county and the harrowing realities of modern war, particularly that of the Western Front during WWI, is all but impossible to imagine.
We must never forget what that generation gave, and I believe we have a deep obligation to continually question how we have honoured the sacrifice of so many.
Have we earned what they gave us? Have we preserved the country for which those men and women were prepared to give their lives?
Have we honoured the lives of young men like Private Harold Mead, by ensuring the country we pass to our children is better than the one we inherited?
Our forebearers quite literally gave their today for our tomorrow. We owe it to them to fix broken Britain and create a better country for future generations – as they did, with great consequence, for us.
To all those who have served our country, we owe you a debt that can never be repaid.
Thomas Gargrave
Reform UK Dorset
