The Old Front Line

In this episode, we look at the fighting around Villers-Bretonneux on the Somme in April 1918, seeing where Australian and British soldiers stopped the German advance on the key city of Amiens. We vi…

This episode marks forty years since I first visited the battlefields of the Great War. We look back over those four decades and discuss what those first trips meant to me, what it was like to live o…

In this episode we go behind the lines in Flanders and look at the key locations that enabled the British and Commonwealth forces to keep millions of men on the front line near Ypres during the Great…

In this episode of the podcast we look at several objects connected to the First World and ask what they tell us about the wider history of the period and those who fought and died. 

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In this episode we look at the experience of war and how it affected veterans who returned home and live long lives. When did they feel able to talk about the Great War? What did they say? And how wa…

The capture of Vimy Ridge by the Canadian Corps in April 1917 was one of Canada's iconic moments in the Great War. In another of our Battlefields In A Day series we look at the wider Vimy Ridge battl…

In this episode we travel to the Somme battlefields of 1916, see the ground where men of the 13th Rifle Brigade fought in a tragic attack, and walk the route the ANZACs took into Pozières village whe…

In the latest of our Battlefields In A Day series we travel to Arras in Northern France to visit some key locations connected to the fighting here in 1917-1918; from the Arras Memorial to the key bat…

We begin Season 4 of the podcast with a walk between the Somme villages of La Boisselle and Contalmaison, the scene of heavy fighting in July 1916. We see memorials, battlefield cemeteries and discov…

In a new Podcast Series we use the Adjutant's Notebook to look at different aspects of First World War history. In this episode we examine the cornerstone of the British Army in the Great War - the D…

In the second in our series of Battlefields In A Day, we travel to the Somme battlefields in Northern France. The Somme was one of the defining battles of the Great War and we follow it's story from …

During the Great War pilots took their aircraft above the battlefield not only to bomb and strafe, but to photograph the trenches of the Western Front. What do these images show us and how do they re…

In this episode, the first in a series of Battlefields in a Day, we explore one of the iconic British and Commonwealth battlefields of the Great War: Ypres, in Flanders. On our tour we take in some w…

Astride the Arras-Cambrai road a small wayside memorial commemorates a missing British officer. Out in the fields small Comrade's Cemeteries act like beacons to the fighting here in April 1917. What …

Just astride the road between Poperinghe and Ypres, the hamlet of Brandhoek was a main site for the treatment of wounded soldiers. Here women serving as Army nurses got close to the realities of war,…

Among the dark Oak trees of Bourlon Wood, the Bantam Battalions from England, Scotland and Wales experienced their baptism of fire. Who were The Bantams, and did all roads lead to Bourlon Wood in Nov…

To commemorate one hundred episodes of the podcast we take a journey along the Western Front visiting four locations from Flanders to the Somme to Verdun to the Vosges. What does the landscape of the…

In this episode we look at the writer Henry Williamson, best known for his nature writing and Tarka The Otter novel, but in the 1950s he began to publish 'A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight', some fifte…

We visit the small village of Soupir on the Aisne where men of the British Expeditionary Force, known as The Old Contemptibles, fought in September 1914. We visit the British graves here and walk the…

From Bully Beef to Hardtack and Plum and Apple Jam... what did the British Tommy in the trenches of the Western Front eat? How was it supplied, how good was his food, how did it reach him, and having…