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The development of Burrs Country Park could not have been progressed without rebuilding the old Burrs Bridge. Until about 1880, the only way to cross the river here was by the ford, or for pedestrians, over the feeder canal aquaduct. During floods, the only alternative for horse and cart, shifting raw cotton, finished yarn, and coal, was a long and awkward route via the Plumpton Brook and Walmersley Road, to the canal terminal at Bury Bridge.

By 1987, the old bridge, with two brick and stone piers, and carried upon wrought-iron beams, was in a poor state, with a 2 tonne weight limit. Bury MBC committed to a £240,000 rebuild, by Harbour & General Works Ltd (now VolkerStevin of Preston), which started in September of that year. The first task was a site investigation, to determine the foundation design. A drilling rig erected by the old bridge almost came to grief when flood waters forced it away from its anchors.

Meanwhile, before the old bridge was demolished, an alternative access across the river had to be provided. At this point, and at practically no cost to Bury MBC, the Territorial Army’s 127 Field Company (REME), based at Clifton, in Salford, stepped forward. Astonishingly, over a single weekend, these dedicated and highly capable men constructed a military ‘Bailey Bridge’ across the Irwell, just to the east of the existing bridge.

On Simons Field, to the south of the river, they assembled a long steel deck and high parapets, of which the ‘leading edge’ comprised lightweight elements which curved upwards at the river end. The whole structure was carried upon rollers, and was simply pushed forward across the river by a large bulldozer, being dependent upon the cantilever effect to ensure that the whole structure didn’t tilt into the river.

Once the lightweight north end had ‘landed’ on the north bank, this part was progressively dismantled, to be replaced by the ‘full spec’ bridge structure as the bulldozer pushed it forward in incremental sections. There was nothing flimsy about this temporary bridge – it was designed to take 38 tonne vehicles, and was only dismantled, by a reverse procedure, once the new bridge was completed.

Demolition of the old bridge was then fairly straightforward. A large excavator sat upon the masonry of the old ford, and simply pushed up and displaced the old iron beams, then used a hydraulic breaker to reduce to riverbed level the two masonry piers and the end abutments.

What then followed was the digging of a pair of huge holes down to bedrock on the north and south riverbanks, followed by concrete being poured within timber formworks to create the new bridge abutments. A massive crane was then brought in, and in the words of the site engineer, this lifted and located the four 30 metre steel beams ‘as if they were just pencils’.

And the concrete deck and parapets were then added, and then in September 1988, a small group gathered to witness a ribbon being cut by the retiring Chief Executive, Jim McDonald, and the bridge being officially opened to road traffic. This was to represent the fifth bridge crossing the river at Burrs, and a sixth was to follow when the new ‘pipe bridge’ was erected just downstream, several years later.

“Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?”
Words attributed to Sir Launcelot Kiggell, Chief of Staff to Sir Douglas Haig, when he broke down in tears after first seeing the morass across which the Battle of Third Ypres had been fought.

 

207 Machine Gun Company

In the aftermath of the Battle of Third Ypres, the exhausted commanding officer of 207 Machine Gun Company sat down amid mud, shell craters, and corpses, and penned a short letter on gridded paper, used normally for artillery projection. He wrote to a Lancashire housewife, asking after the health of her husband, Lance Corporal Richard Fletcher, who, until very recently, had been serving within his unit. This man had been wounded during a ferocious artillery bombardment, and had been evacuated from the battlefield.

Richard was born in Bury in 1886, but was raised in the Salford industrial slums immortalised in the Robert Roberts classic autobiography A Ragged Schooling. As a young man, he had travelled to the USA to find employment working in Buffalo, New York state, on railway steam locomotives.
In 1908, he had married Lucy Warburton, who had been orphaned as a child when her parents, both travelling actors, died in County Durham of a ‘plague’. She had been taken in by a quarry manager living in Turton, Lancashire, and was raised as a member of his family.

By 1914, Richard and Lucy were living and working in the Lancashire cotton mill town of Darwen. In 1915, Richard volunteered to join the 1st (Regular) Battalion of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, and was allocated to the Machine Gun section. He then took part in the Battle of Loos, and in the disastrous attack against the Hohenzollern Redoubt, which claimed 3,643 British casualties in the first few minutes.

During the winter of 1915-16, the Machine Gun Corps (MGC) came into being. At Brigade level, all of the trained gunners and machine guns were brought together, to form a single MG Company, equipped with sixteen Vickers Mk.1 guns. Each gun required a team of six men. The team leader was normally a Lance Corporal, who fired the gun, assisted by the No.2, who fed the canvas ammunition belts. No.3 acted as range taker, using a complex optical device. No.4 was the signaller, maintaining contact with Brigade HQ. Nos. 5 and 6 acted as ammunition carriers. The 16 guns thus required 96 men, whilst an additional 24 men formed a transport section, using horse-drawn limbers to carry the guns, spare parts and ammunition when the Company moved up to the line and back.

The primary function of an MGC Company was to provide a short-range artillery battery, which would operate from behind the lines, and would bring down a hail of bullet rounds upon designated targets, using the water-cooled Vickers machine gun, which operated at 450 rounds per minute, using indirect plunging fire at targets up to 4,500 yards (4.1km) away. These batteries were used against road junctions, trench systems, and troop forming-up points, with devastating effect.

Richard was initially attached to No.2 MGC, but following a wound, he was then transferred to 207 MGC. From the start, 207 MGC was commanded by Captain Morris Gelsthorpe, a graduate of Durham University, whose older brother Bernard was reported as missing in action in September 1916, and never came home.

The killing fields of Third Ypres

The Battle of Third Ypres comprised ten separate engagements between July 31 and November 10, 1917, all of which were intended to expand the Salient to encompass the high ground east of Ypres, from which German observation enabled devastating shellfire to make the Salient so dangerous to Allied forces. By the signing of the Armistice, it is believed that at least 200,000 men of the Commonwealth forces had died here.

From the Menin Gate, the Menin Road runs straight and level across the Salient, before visibly rising at Hooge. Between this point and the village of Gheluvelt, the corridor of the Menin Road must contend as one of the most fought-over plots in the history of warfare. It was here, in 1918, near the sinister German strongpoint known as ‘Tower Hamlets’, that war artist Paul Nash painted his iconic battlefield image The Menin Road, which now hangs in the Imperial War Museum. It was across this corridor that the Battle of Polygon Wood was fought, as the fifth engagement of Third Ypres, and it was in this vicinity that the men of 207 MGC briefly held the line against a massed German infantry and artillery assault.

General Plumer’s Second Army were to follow the Battle of Menin Road with an advance to take Polygon Wood, scheduled for 26 September 1917. The 1st Anzac Corps were to advance through the Wood, supported on the right by the 33rd Division, which was to take the valley of the Reutelbeek stream, and Polderhoek Chateau. To the south of the Menin Road, the 39th Division were to move against the ‘Tower Hamlets’ defensive bastion. Three Machine Gun Companies were to supply a barrage capacity from behind the front line, these were 207 MGC, 248 MGC, and 19 MGC.

By 1am on the morning of 25th September, Captain Gelsthorpe had stationed 207 MGC about 150 yards behind the front lines of the 33rd Division, the machine guns being spaced 30 yards apart. But at 3.30am, the German artillery commenced a ferocious bombardment on the 33rd Divisional front, and SOS flares appeared along the line, requesting artillery support. 207 and 19 MGCs responded immediately with a barrage on a trajectory against the enemy front line.

At dawn, the German barrage ceased, and a massed infantry attack of no less than five divisions commenced upon the 33rd Divisional front, which was badly mauled and pushed back, suffering thousands of casualties, many being burnt by Flammenwerfer. As the German infantry cut through the British front lines and advanced towards them, Gelsthorpe’s men levelled their machine guns and took aim over open sights.

The records of the MGC during Third Ypres recount what happened next:
“The 207th Company…opened fire with sixteen guns at almost point-blank range into the massed hordes of the enemy. The enemy was concentrated behind Polderhoek Chateau Ridge, and as soon as their bodies were seen down to the knee topping the lines, Captain Gelsthorpe’s batteries opened a murderous fire into their ranks. Low flying enemy aeroplanes soon, however, detected him and both by machine gunning and directing artillery upon the 207th MGC, the enemy inflicted very severe casualties amongst the gunners”.

L/Cpl Richard Fletcher’s own testimony of his last hours on the Western Front relates the fate of the brave men of 207 MGC. A shell or mortar round landed in his own gun position, killing his entire team and destroying the gun, but miraculously leaving him with only an arm wound. As the ground heaved from the constant impact of artillery shells he ran, stopping only to help a fellow gunner with a leg wound. More than half of 207 MGC were now dead or wounded, and the latter, if they were able to, made their way to the nearest dressing station, probably at Clapham Junction on the Menin Road.

The MGC records continue:
“Captain Gelsthorpe realized that his position was untenable and withdrew his guns, excepting four which had been totally destroyed, in perfect order to a new position east of Stirling Castle, dug in, re-laid his lines and personally reported what he had done. During the whole period Captain Gelsthorpe and his two remaining officers, one of whom was wounded, and his whole Company, such as were left of them, displayed the most conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty and inflicted enormous losses on the enemy…”

Despite all of this, by 27 September, the Germans had been thrown back, and Captain Gelsthorpe returned to bury the dead of 207 MGC. They were probably given shallow graves with wooden crosses; but it is likely that this burial place was churned over by artillery in subsequent actions, as well as being reoccupied by the German advance in 1918.

The survivors of 207 MGC, now somewhat less than 50 in number, fought on in the remaining engagements of Third Ypres, but before Polygon Wood was taken, L/Cpl Richard Fletcher would have joined the thousands of wounded taking the Menin Road through the Salient, to pass through the shattered ghost town of Ypres, to gain safety.

By train, he was then taken to No.18 General Hospital at Le Treport, on the French coast near Dieppe. He was admitted with a gun-shot wound to his left hand with fracture of the 3rd metacarpal. He was operated on, and a piece of shrapnel removed, before he was invalided to the UK on 4 October 1917. He returned to civilian life; but was not formally discharged from the ranks of 207 MGC until 27 March 1919.

Wounds seen and unseen

Very few serving men on the Western Front could have avoided being hit by bursts of red hot shrapnel, whether by artillery barrage, or by trench mortar. Ernst Junger, in his powerful memoir Storm of Steel, relates how he was wounded no less than twenty times during his service in the German infantry.

Whatever his physical condition upon his discharge, L/Cpl Richard Fletcher probably came to consider himself a lucky man, especially when he was later made aware that from the First Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers, a total of 1,800 Bury men had fallen to Turkish guns in the Dardanelles.

But the psychological effects of trench warfare may have been much more serious. Richard Fletcher was haunted for the remainder of his days by what he had seen and done in the Ypres Salient. It is one thing to fire on a barrage trajectory towards a pre-registered co-ordinate which is out of sight; it is quite something else to discharge a Vickers machine gun, at ten rounds per second, into the flesh of living men whose faces you can see, as he had done during the Battle of Polygon Wood.

Only the well-heeled could afford the new ‘talking therapies’ offered at Craiglockhart or Seale Hayne; and only the well-connected could indulge themselves by casting their medals into the Mersey in protest against the Establishment. But for the average ‘Tommy’ it was just a case of stoical silence, survival, and keeping one step away from the ‘means test’ and destitution. In the decades which followed 1918, any dysfunctional behaviour by Western Front veterans was addressed by their neighbours with the simple exculpatory phrase: ‘Oh – he was in the Great War’.

Aftermath and Remembrance

In 1921, with three young children to provide for, Richard Fletcher took his bicycle across the West Pennine Moors from Darwen to Bury, having been made aware of a possible job as a ‘firebeater’ at the Star Bleach Mill, at Burrs, near Bury. Despite his disability, he managed to get the job, and he then brought his young family by horse and cart, to a rented house at Calrows village.

In part the work was dirty and dangerous, especially for a man working alone with only one good hand. One of his duties was to climb through a manhole into the cast-iron economiser chamber, to remove accumulated soot when the boilers had cooled at weekend. This required swathing oneself in fireproof grey bandages, mummy-like, to avoid burns. It was normally a job undertaken by two men, as the risk of being overwhelmed by pockets of lethal carbon monoxide was ever present. But the men who had witnessed the barbaric horrors of the Western Front were not likely to complain about harsh working conditions; they were just grateful to have found their way home again.

In 1953, Captain Morris Gelsthorpe returned from his chosen work as a missionary in the Sudan, and was appointed as Assistant Bishop to Nottingham and Southwell. Every year from then onwards, he hosted a reunion of the surviving men of 207 MGC. But L/Cpl Richard Fletcher was not among them. For in 1947 he had died of a stroke in the deserted bleachworks of Rothwell’s Croft, at Lower Woodhill, Bury, where he had worked as caretaker after leaving Burrs Mill in 1940.

On Remembrance Day, 11 November 2017, exactly 100 years to the day after Captain Gelsthorpe had written his letter to Lucy Fletcher, with countless others we stood beneath the Euville stone vault of the Menin Gate, to witness the haunting strains of the ‘Last Post’, followed by a lone piper playing the ‘Lament to the Fallen’.

 

Appendix
207 Machine Gun Company
B.E.F. 11-11-17

Dear Mrs Fletcher,
I am rather anxious to know how your husband Cpl Fletcher R who was in this company is progressing. The last we knew of him was that he was wounded, not severely, but after passing through the Dressing Station further information with regard to his progress is never sent to us but to you, his next of kin. When you next write to him please let him know how grateful I am for all his good work in this company. I am very sorry indeed to be losing him as he set such an excellent example to everyone of bravery and courage under shell-fire. At the same time I am very glad for your sake that the wound was not worse and that you still have such an excellent husband. The men of his section miss him very much especially as his section officer was killed of wounds. They were all the very best of men whom no-one can replace.
Wishing you and your husband the very best of luck and hoping soon to hear news of him.
I am
Yours sincerely
A. M. Gelsthorpe Capt.
O.C. 207 Machine Gun Company

In the field

Acknowledgements
Mr Graham Sacker, Historical Research, MGC Database, for his kind research on Richard Fletcher’s army service in WW1.

Bibliography
Cave N 2015 Battleground Europe: Polygon Wood, Pen & Sword Books
Dendooven D 2001 Ypres as Holy Ground: Menin Gate & Last Post, de Klaproos
Gelsthorpe E 1973 A Corn of Wheat
Holt T & Holt V 2003 Battlefield Guide: Ypres Salient, Pen & Sword Books
Junger E 2003 Storm of Steel, Allen Lane
Lloyd N 2017 Passchendaele: A New History, Penguin Books
Moorhouse G 1992 Hell’s Foundations: A Town, its Myths and Gallipoli, Hodder & Staughton
Sassoon S 1930 Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Faber and Faber

Over thirty years ago, on a warm day in August 1987, a small group of young people carrying axes and saws made their way along Woodhill Road, crossed old Burrs Bridge, and began to cut and hack their way back into the dense canopy of self-seeded woodland which had obscured the remains of Burrs Mill for over three decades. Inauspiciously, and without ceremony, and certainly with no concept of the final scale and massive cost of the reclamation project, which on that day they were pathfinding…

In the early 1980s, concerned at the scale of job losses as the UKs old industrial base was disappearing, and shaken by the resistance which the miners had brought against them, the Thatcher government developed ways in which to ‘massage’ the rising unemployment figures. One of these was the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) scheme. The basic premise was that an employer could engage a number of unemployed people; they would work for three days a week, for £20 per day. It doesn’t sound like much now, but for some it would have been the first wage they had.

And for some, it may have been the first structure in their lives after leaving school. Anyone not present at Bury Interchange at 8AM to catch the van would be left to walk to Burrs. It certainly got them out of bed. And many made good friends, and learned skills which they would otherwise have remained ignorant of. And all worked hard, and demonstrated to observers that unemployed did not mean unemployable.

Some of these people may have felt as if they had been thrown onto the scrapheap. But none of these people were wastrels. Some had been employed, but had been laid off. Some had been in the Forces; some older ones had taken early retirement, and some had done little since leaving school. A few of the team even had degrees, and another was studying for one in his own time. I suspect that most went on to have useful careers, and some will have done really well for themselves.

The clearance of hundreds of mature and near-mature trees quickly presented us with a problem of where to put the stuff – until someone suggested burning it all in the chimney. We then had a visceral demonstration as to why such chimneys were erected, as the atmospheric draw created an inferno of 30ft high flames, which threatened to suck inside anyone who foolishly stood too close to the chimney flue! For the first time in decades, a pall of black smoke issued forth from the chimney top, and concerned local residents put a stop to our conflagration, although we had depleted most of our trees by then.

After this, it became clear that the sunken areas of the mill had been infilled with great depths of demolition debris in 1952, including the massive square slabs of local flagstone which had originally formed bleaching tanks. Most of this could never have been moved by hand, so for two weeks we engaged a 30 tonne hydraulic excavator and a 20 tonne dumper. The demolition of old Burrs Bridge, with its 2 tonne weight limit, required the construction of an ex-army ‘Bailey Bridge’ just downstream, and our heavy plant used this for access. Within no time at all, we were creating a veritable mountain of spoil on the site of the present car park. At the end of each day, to clean his tyres, the dumper driver charged upriver through deep water, throwing up a bow wave like a tug boat!

But there were limits as to what could be done by machinery, and what then followed was months of hard manual graft, by men and women using shovel and mattock, to clear masonry gulleys, pits and channels, to expose fabric which had been buried for up to a century or more.

The spoil mountain had grown ever larger, and there was no way it could be taken away from Burrs. The solution lay close at hand. To the west of the Feeder Canal was a vast dump of cinders, generated by the mill boilers, and between this and the canal embankment was a narrow but capacious little valley. A little later, an antiquated but powerful Ruston Bacyrus 22 crane creaked onto the site, equipped with a dragline bucket the size of a mini car.

And what then followed was utterly mesmerising to the viewer, as the expert operator performed a slow-motion balletic repetition by which he drew back the drag bucket, heaping it with spoil, and then released it to let gravity draw it away in a great arcing pendulum; and as he slewed the great machine sideways, the bucket unerringly flew across the canal, before releasing it’s great load into the little valley. And he did this every day for three weeks, and the mountain gradually disappeared.

I reckoned that by the end of the scheme, we had shifted somewhere around 5,000 tonnes of spoil across the canal. And perhaps 500 tonnes of this was dug out by hand. And then there was all of the tree-felling, dam building, and conservation work, with cement and concrete, and all of the drawing and recording work. To say nothing of the excavation of the midden at Burrs Cottages, and the big wheelpit at Higher Woodhill. And the many public tours and lectures, and the many visits by councillors and sponsors and local residents…

But it didn’t last. Within 18 months, MSC became Employment Training (ET), and it became unworkable. Our scheme at Burrs closed down then, but the remains of Burrs Mill were now exposed for all to see, and the grand design fostered by Bury MBC was now flying along at breakneck speed, as other grant-aid and contractors came on board.

For restoration schemes, like Burrs Country Park, MSC projects were far more than just cheap labour. They were a lifeline to much-needed government funding. But there was something else as well, less obviously tangible, which ran deep into human perceptions. The East Lancashire Railway had a large MSC team out on the tracks in all weathers, and the Ellenroad Engine House had one too, performing tasks nothing short of miraculous. None of these success stories could have been progressed without their MSC teams. They provided the muscle and the impetus around which everything else was constructed. So that when Local Authority planning officers brought potential grant-givers to these reclamation schemes, no amount of clever talk or piles of paperwork could inspire beneficiaries more than the sight of 30-odd young people shifting tonnes of muck and masonry with their bare hands.

And several decades on, the spearheading role of the MSC team in the creation of the Burrs Country Park is all but forgotten. But I look back over all of the years which have since expired, and I remember you. And I marvel at all that we achieved together, and I thank you for all your hard graft and cheerfulness, despite your own personal adversity. And for initiating what was to become a marvellous venture.

Mark