Meet the Men Who Dig WW1 TRENCHES in Fields | BARMY

this time on barmy i get a tour of a trench and this particular dagger is leaking like a sieve so it will be very very unpopular lovely cup of tea that's not bad is it really enjoying that and a much needed history lesson my name is joe cowan and i'm on a mission to meet the military obsessives who take things to the next level [Music] hmm [Music] this week on barmy i'm meeting respected historian and military advisor to films such as warhorse andy robertshaw [Music] andy good afternoon i'm very well joe nice to meet you nice to meet you yeah good well welcome to a lovely day in glorious elon yeah we've got schools of rain we've got mud it's uh i suppose you could say it was sort of what you might expect from the great war well let's see it okay let's go for a wander okay i'd been invited to spend some time with andy it's a world war one trench he uses for reenactments school tours and even as a film set so what we're looking at here is you've got the german front line trench the british trenches beyond it were built first and they're much much deeper the german system is relatively shallow then it now shows up on google earth yeah i i spotted it on google earth yeah i did my research yeah yeah absolutely oh wow so how often do you come up here at least once a month if not more um you know it's quite frequent okay what you've got here is a piece of german trench front line german style barbed wire we've normally had a mortar in there and a machine gun where the barbed wire now is but we'll go for a walk around the trench is so accurate that it often plays host to tv crews andy told me there was a nepalese crew here today making a film all about the first ever gurkha to be awarded the victoria cross hey that's amazing so what you like creators there's craters they're all being dug with jcb's to be perfectly honest barbed wire would these signposts have been here back in the day yes they would because you need to know i mean this one is hawthorne trench therefore you give the grid reference you know this is an out route that's an in-road because if you've got casualties you clearly don't want to be going down with a stretcher and meeting people coming up with supplies we've then got the engineers store and we can actually get in on the far side i don't like people going down the ladders because they're a bit dodgy as you can imagine when we go in if you keep your hands up your pockets that way if you fall over you break the fall with it with your hands not your i mean clearly the fires are hot and barbed wire is sharp there we are that's it and don't ever try and jump over a trench just take you steady there's no problem and all the problems we're going to have of getting around in here is the ones they would have had this is why we've put trench boards down yeah which today we call duck boards they were called trench balls at the time it's how long did it take to build it the the actual system had probably been dug out in no more than two days the riveting took a long time um probably i would say with people all working a month of work for about five people for five people yeah but remember if we were here with a platoon of 28 men or perhaps 40 men we could do all of this in a weekend you know it's a different world i was keen to find out more about andy and his connection to this part of history but it was clear that andy was just here to talk about history so there was nothing else to do but sit back and enjoy the ride small arms ammunition in here periscope so you can see out without getting shot pilk street is a a trench on the sum that that we know well in 1918 you wouldn't know that in 1939 it would start over again but it gives you some ideas about where infantryman might take some shelter out of the worst of the rain and there is no christmas truce for the french or the belgians by 1916 our men are being told this is not the war this is the phase of the war it will change there's a story about one servant filling a primus stove with petrol rather than paraffin or the dugout burnt for five days and trench warfare becomes more elaborate of course as people get used to it because nobody planned for long periods of static warfare so what we're going to do is go through here then into a small dugout [Music] slippery in here and very very dark oh yeah okay so you know you would be basically four officers in here yeah because at any time two of them are on duty so you've got two guys sleeping everybody else up there probably have a signal in here as well so you've got to really get on with who you're sharing with then yeah yeah it's cool it's called hot bedding the beds never gets cold but the key point then is that what matters is just surviving staying alive the routine here is that you work at night that's when you dig your trenches that's when you repair build your dugouts all down the dark and then daytime largely your daily tasks cleaning repairing food and then you sleep in the afternoon which all being well other than today is is the the warmest and driest time of the day yeah just thinking about not only this getting built under combat conditions but maintaining it can come constantly having to make repairs and it's constantly requiring supplies coming forward and people doing more and more work you know the one good thing about trench systems you don't have bored soldiers yeah absolutely well she'll give a bit of a walk through let's do it let's see what we can come up with what's the chances of a world war one style brew very good very good i've got everything ready yeah that's going now the soldiers would never call it tea it was always char because so many soldiers are served in india put that on there and stop stuff falling into it we then drop that on top when it's good and hot we've got sugar and tea okay condensed milk we're away oh you're right yeah yeah yeah that's hot okay here we go right spoon tea and it goes the way you open the tin of condensed milk first world war styling like that and then what we'll do is we'll split on there like that fine cup of tea cheers cheers you're very good health you know what it's hot can you just feel like how much that would uh what that would do for morale yeah that's spot on that's not bad is it i'm really enjoying that yeah [Music] i think we're going to be just enough time to get you into kit before it's too dark so let's do it quickly as we can it had been fascinating to get a glimpse of what day-to-day life was like in the trenches so when andy offered me the opportunity to try on the exact uniform the soldiers would have been wearing i couldn't resist can you get some braces on those trousers get that shirt on party's urdu word that means bandages stops mud and dirt getting into your boots let's make you look smarter what we now need is to give you a rifle pickaxe goes down the back of your pack you are now a soldier of the first battalion lancashire fusiliers i've always been the kind of guy to try a few sprints out when trying on new shoes and today was no different ah the fallen of the somme where we are right now is virtually in no man's land the front line is behind us and where you are now is at the entrance to a tunnel called a russian sap that leads out to a crater that probably wouldn't be occupied during daylight but it would be at night so it could be that tonight as part of your one hour on guard duty one hour resting one hour actually working you're going to be sent out no working view tonight you're going to have three hours out there with a mate and your job is to alert anybody behind you if the enemies start moving or doing anything and the point then is if that happens you shoot you do not challenge them you simply open fire and what you don't ever do is run back because if you run back through here they're gonna think you're an enemy well i think i'm gonna go over the top uh keep your head down and oh by the way see you on the other side you will we will okay all right andy thank you very much i'm off good luck you're gonna need it [Music] i'd really enjoyed my day in the trenches and gained a greater appreciation for what those young men went through and speaking of young men just before i left i met the owner of the land he told me his son toby had started the trench when he was just 16 years old i had to meet this guy so here we are we are back in ellum and this time we're here to see a young man called toby who we discovered is the guy who started this trench when he was 16 years old um and just can somehow convince his parents that they should let him build a trench in there in their land out the back so we're gonna have a chat with him and find out what his crack is basically why would you build a trench in your back garden hello how are you nice to see you again this must be toby um do you want to head straight up or should we get a cup of tea or um yeah yeah cool it's so crazy such a crazy thing it was 16 right when you built the trenches uh 16 with the idea then 17 by the time we got okay got you were you interested in trenches before that um yeah i love it i've always loved military history yeah um especially world war one yeah because just coming from a farming background like farming families were always quite big yeah and so like when the war came about a lot i've got quite a lot of sort of family members that went over oh really in both conflicts so that's sort of what's given you the like the initial interest in world world war one i guess yeah i like world war one there's so much from the off it was clear how much respect toby had for world war one soldiers i wanted to find out more about how he was using his passion to bring history back to life so the most common is the school trips and that's mostly year five and six kids okay and then we have our public open days where anyone can come along yeah nice so for you stood here now think like this is your creation you made this how does it feel when you stand up here and kind of take it all in um difficult right really yeah i didn't think it would take off like the way it does it was more thing um for me and dad to do really and mum to get involved as well and so it's like a family thing yeah nice brought you guys together yeah yeah we have quite good days up here let's have a little wander around so you said like your dad was kind of like a big was it was he an influence you think or did you guys decide to start it together or like uh well mum and dad have always been a big influence on my interest in history yeah because of their families um and then i basically came home one day and said can i build one and so they said yes so how did you how did you convince your parents it just happened that the next door neighbor had um i think it was about a 12-ton digger yeah so we went and grabbed them like right just drive it straight up the hill start digging we came out and they were like yeah sure yeah and it wasn't supposed to be this big um originally it was only supposed to go up to about that big tree when the digger man came he was like yeah i've got a bit carried away digging this and it ended up being about twice as big so really right okay so it's like it's an actual accident that it is as big as it is so when you started it were you thinking business at the no no so you just wanted somewhere that you could come and hang out and play soldiers basically yeah it was just sort of um one nice give you something to talk to talk about when you go down for a point it's a conversation starter yeah yeah so if we head up this way yeah sure so we've got the cook house [Music] i was really enjoying my time with toby andy had given me a much needed history lesson but through toby i was finding out about all the benefits the trench had for people around today no way we had one school here that for the majority of the kids it was the first time that they've actually been in the field let alone because it was real city kids yeah in city school yeah um and so like you come here and you come in nice weather you come around the trench do two and a half hours in the trench then we've got like the sheep lambing sometimes so if you've got school that's here when they're lambing they can have a look at that as well so you built the trench because the trench helps you develop as a person oh yeah definitely you'd say so i've always sort of like talking but i think now i'm you've got some fairly okay public speaking which you probably wouldn't be able to do without this you meet so many nice people as well really yeah and i love talking to old soldiers um either from there's not so many any more sadly from um world war ii yeah but you meet soldiers from like the korean war which you never really hear about yeah yeah you talk to them and the stories are telling you it's just mind-blowing yeah i was talking to one of the representatives from british legion yeah and one conversation led to another a lot of veterans that come back that have been injured that don't have anywhere to go straight away yeah they have a british legion village yeah i think it's in lenin yeah yeah um and a lot of them want to go out and see places like museums and things but just to get out with the fighting aspect some of them don't like it so you take kind of like the combat yeah you don't have to talk about the conflicts okay you talk about what it was like to live in a hull for four years and is that something that you've done um so that's something that we're planning on trying to start up it could be something really sort of helpful and beneficial here so toby had built a trench set it up as an education center and passed on his love of history to hundreds of people all before he could even buy a beer that's my kind of guy andy had made me think about the forgotten people that were lucky enough to make it home and toby is making efforts to give today's veterans a safe space to come and learn about history so with all this going on would you would you say that you're a little bit barmy do you reckon yeah but in a good way good barmy yeah good me everyone's a bit bombing [Laughter] i think i've used my barmy in a good way from the outside a lot of people think oh it's a bit strange but it's so like i'm trying to get and everything that's coming out of it i'm trying to have like a good outcome from it yeah so it might be a bit strange but it's a good strange before i got here i thought this this is weird it's just such a bizarre concept and everything but like to come and kind of like hear your perspective it's been really good and it's been nice to hear about all like the good that's come from it everyone should have the chance to come and have a look at history and nice one how long may it continue yeah hopefully toby i think we'll call it a day there but thank you so much for uh for having us along man thank you great great thank you has been quality for just a small patch of land in the kent countryside there were some great things coming out of the hawthorne trench and it was all down to the passionate people who saw this as more than just a hole in the ground [Music]

Channel: BFBS Creative

Views: 133,523

Rating: 4.9339261 out of 5

Keywords: trench, ww1, world war 1, first world war, trench in garden, backyard trench, trench builders, build, trench in field, toby dingle, andy robertshaw, joe cowen, andy robertshaw trench, ww1 history, the great war, ww1 reenactment, Meet the Men Who Dig TRENCHES For Fun, bfbs, barmy, bfbs creative, trench warfare, trenches, trench defense

Id: tJwcWy-Uebc

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020