Hell's Foundations: A Social History of the Town of Bury in the Aftermath of the Gallipoli C... Book

"The most haunting agony remains Gallipoli. No other battle or campaign fought between 1914 and 1918 has ever been remembered quite so tenaciously as the ill-fated Allied expedition to the Dardanelles." And perhaps nowhere in Britain so tenaciously, continues Geoffrey Moorhouse, as in the small Lancashire mill town of Bury. With a population at the time of only 50,000, Bury was home base to the Lancashire Fusiliers, and though they were but one of eighty-four British regiments serving at Gallipoli, they suffered grievous losses--nearly 2,000 officers and men fell in the nine-month assault. In this original and haunting book, Geoffrey Moorhouse examines the effect Gallipoli has had for three quarters of a century on this Lancashire town. Using a wide range of sources--newspapers of the day, regimental archives, parish records, Imperial War Museum documents, Public Record Office papers, as well as the private papers and diaries of locals (both civilian and military), and interviews with the remaining survivors and their families--he reconstructs a social history of the town in light of the military disasters that befell it. Here is the town on the eve of war and the town cheering its men as they marched off to war. And here is the town as the news of the catastrophe gradually filtered back from the front. Here is Bury in conflict, struggling with its fierce patriotism and the demoralization Gallipoli brought, trying to reconcile romantic ideals with grim reality as the war dragged on for three more years and the death total neared 14,000. And here is the aftermath of the war, the broken families and broken men, in a country that wanted to forget the war and get on with life. Finally, here is the town today, having reached beyond grief, celebrating every Gallipoli Sunday in a salute that has metamorphosed from disaster to legend. This is social history at its best, a close-focus view of the way ordinary people coped with extraordinary events. Filled with tales of