BBC Arts

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, 30-year-old artist Scarlett Raven is launching an ambitious and groundbreaking visual arts experience, The Danger Tree. 

Raven is the first oil painter to work in the world of augmented reality. Using a smartphone app, visitors to her Greenwich exhibition can reveal the creative journey behind each artwork with animation, music and poetry, read by actors including Sean Bean and Vicky McClure, superimposed on the artworks. BBC Arts is presenting three examples of Raven's multi-layered, experiential art ahead of the show's launch.    

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Actor Brian Cox is back with the fourth short episode following the fate of the Scottish troops on the first day of battle.

The power of artillery determines whether your troops live or die. On 1 July 1916, the British didn't have enough. The men on the battlefield paid a terrible price.  

Some 10,000 people are taking part in a commemorative service at Thiepval. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Wales's First Minister Carwyn Jones and Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon are among those taking part.

Image source, PA

Image source, PA

Image source, PA

Image source, Callan Chevin

Callan Chevin, 24, from Stoke-on-Trent has travelled to France to mark the anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme.

He is there to honour his great-grandfather John Chevin and his great-great-grandfather's cousin Alfred Saunders.

"It's important for me to remember the men in my family who fought so bravely," he said. 

Read more.

History of World War One

Image source, National Portrait Gallery

World War One generals did not just command men in battle. They had many other roles, from administrators to medical consultants.

British military leaders have often been blamed for the carnage on the first day of the Somme. But is this fair?  Professor Gary Sheffield asks whether we have misjudged the generals of World War One, external.     

Today Programme
BBC Radio 4

Paul Fussell, in his book The Great War and Modern Memory, conjures a farmhouse in Picardy, hours before the Somme attack, where men from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry stood with glasses raised. A barrage of shells was reaching its crescendo, so intense it could be heard in England. It was meant to destroy German defences and clear a path for the Somme advance. The commander gave a toast – ‘Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts’ – and they drained their glasses. Within a day, of that one battalion of 800 men, more than 700 lay dead on the battlefield. The bombardment failed to account for the ingenuity of German defensive tunnels.

'When the barrage lifts’ was a toast to courage, but also a prayer. You find yourself wanting to finish the sentence for them – ‘When the barrage lifts, may you live to see your families again’. But within a day, that toast falls into self-mockery. ‘When the barrage lifts, you will be cut down’. It becomes a prophecy. For decades after, every 1 July, an anonymous message was posted in the Times’ In Memoriam column, saying ‘Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts’. An officer’s off-the-cuff toast turned from grim prophecy to a memorial, a single-line elegy.

The French Christian mystic Simone Weil tells a story of prisoners in adjoining cells, communicating by knocking on the wall, so the wall is both what separates them and their only means of contact. ‘Every separation’, she says, ‘is a link’, between creator and created, between us. Our Somme commemorations will be soon be finished, tidied up. Stories like that toast in the Picardy farmhouse will recede into the distance. The separation of history is stark. We are not them. But we are like them, and a story, a line from a poem can be a means of contact.

One of the great poets of the Somme – David Jones – describes in his epic poem In Parenthesis an injured soldier struggling for cover: ‘It’s difficult with the weight of the rifle’, he writes. ‘Leave it, under the oak. / Leave it for a salvage bloke, / let it lie bruised for a monument/ Leave it for a Cook’s tourist to the Devastated Areas’. Even as battle raged, the poet was imagining people like us, in the future, touring battlefields. Our separation had already begun. How quickly the spark falters, and history falls back into myth. But the poems of Jones, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg still hold the voltage to connect us, however briefly, when the barrage lifts.

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BBC Radio 5 Live

Starting now on Radio 5 live (you can also listen at the top of this page) is news and coverage of the Battle of the Somme commemoration in Thiepval, France, with Sam Walker and Nicky Campbell.  

Image source, London Transport Museum

London buses commandeered for the war effort were used to transport troops to France in World War One.

Packed with men, the cheery red paint replaced by utilitarian khaki, and with the windows boarded over, the vehicles bore little resemblance to the omnibuses familiar to London.  

Now, 100 years later, the London Transport Museum has sent one of the original battle buses - No. B2737 - across the channel to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.  

Read more on how London buses went from red to khaki.

Image source, WESTERN FRONT ASSOCIATION

A century after they gave they lives in one of the bloodiest days in British army history, more than 160 men of the Devonshire Regiment still lie buried in the trench they once occupied.

Read more here

BBC Radio Scotland

Brian Cox continues with the third short episode telling the story of the first day of the Somme.

At 09:45 the tiny army of Newfoundland – troops trained in Scotland – go over the top. Iaian Sands from Ayrshire tells us about his great grandfather.  

A battalion of 656 ordinary men from the 6th Royal Berkshire Battalion completed their Somme mission in just 23 minutes.

Their story has been preserved in detailed minute-by-minute records and diary entries which show the enthusiasm that led them to outperform their colleagues of regular troops.

One was the great uncle of Andy Teal from Bracknell.

Mr Teal has told the story of those men - as it happened, in the words of those who survived.

Read more.

Robert Hall
BBC News correspondent

Image source, AFP/Getty

Across the rolling Somme landscape, the whistles shrilled again; a century ago they sent tens of thousands out of their trenches, and across No Man’s Land.

Today they were sounded on the lip of the Lochnagar crater, three hundred feet wide and seventy deep, the result of a British attempt to breach German defences.

Sixty thousand pounds of explosive sent debris 4,000 feet into the air; no one knows how many were killed.

At the cross of remembrance, a carpet of wreaths was laid by representatives from Britain , France and Germany, along with families and local children.

In the base of the crater, beside a giant poppy, a lone bugler sounded the last post as clouds of poppies fluttered down on the breeze.

Image source, Exeter City Council

Image source, Steven Haywood

An artwork marking the beginning of the Battle of the Somme has been unveiled in Exeter.

Figurines representing the 19,240 Allied soldiers killed on the first day, each wrapped in a hand-made calico shroud, have been placed on the grass next to the World War One memorial by artist Rob Heard.

He found the names of each man in military archives and gave one to each figurine as he clad it in the shroud.  

Read more.

BBC One

Live now on BBC One and at the top of this page, Huw Edwards introduces live coverage of the centenary Somme commemoration at the Thiepval Memorial, France, to remember the one million casualties sustained on both sides during the 141 days of the battle. 

The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Henry of Wales join heads of state and 10,000 spectators. 

We have collected some of the images of the commemorative events so far.

See our picture gallery here.

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, CBC

The 1st Newfoundland was made up of around 800 volunteers from the British colony of Newfoundland (now a part of Canada).

They were supposed to follow up the main push. They formed up in a reserve trench 200 metres behind the British front line near Beaumont Hamel and awaited orders.

At 09.15am 752 men went straight over the top from their reserve trench 200 metres behind the British front line and advanced through their own barbed wire.

The Germans were ready for the attack and fired their machine guns relentlessly at the advancing British soldiers.

Most of the soldiers did not make it across No Man’s Land.

Find out about the Newfoundlanders in WW1, external

History of World War One

Image source, Getty Images

Wilfred ‘Billy’ Nevill of the 8th Royal East Surrey Regiment, brought four footballs and gave one to each of his platoons. He said there will be a prize to the first one to kick one into the German trenches. One platoon painted “The Great European Cup. The Final. East Surreys v Bavarians. Kick-off at Zero. No referee” onto their ball.

There was no prize. Captain Nevill was killed before he got 20 yards out of his trench.

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