#6008 Private John Dyson Allison
1ST/4TH YORK & LANCASTER REGIMENT
WHILE BATTLED RAGED AT GINCHY, casualties were still mounting at the northern end of the battlefield as Gough’s army attempted to make progress too. An assault needed to be made on Thiepval and on the Schwaben Redoubt, a particularly menacing German strong point on top of a hill that looked down on Thiepval and to the ground on both sides of the River Ancre.
Private John Allison. (Private collection)
To move forward Gough’s men needed to secure St Pierre Divion and the Strasburg line that ran up to the village. On 3rd September two brigades of the West Riding division lined up as Thiepval was shelled with ammonal and gas to silence the enemy troops protecting the surrounding area from within. At 5:13am they went off and seized a decent amount of the enemy front line amidst smoke and mist. Then fire came from the Schwaben Redoubt and parts of the sector still occupied by the Germans. Elsewhere, the attack could not get forward at all and soon, out of bombs and missing nearly all their officers, the troops now occupying the enemy front line had to withdraw. The two brigades involved had lost 1,200 men. Initially they had been ordered to attack again in the evening, but this was cancelled because the men were in no condition to advance. It had been a frontal assault that the Germans saw coming, made by new arrivals with dubious amounts of training or by exhausted men.
Born in Halifax, John Allison lived in Elland, in between his hometown and Huddersfield, and worked as a woollen piecer in a local textile factory, tying together broken threads during the weaving process. He had been a territorial in the Duke of Wellington’s since 1912 and at the outbreak of war was mobilised swiftly, arriving in France in the summer of 1915. He was at the front for six months before being invalided home to a hospital in Sheffield with a severe case of trench foot. John was not ready to go back to active service for seven months and he embarked at Folkestone in August 1916. On reaching a depot at Étaples, rather than rejoining his unit, he was sent to join the Hallamshire Battalion of the York & Lancaster Regiment.
John’s new battalion had not been used during the failed attack of 3rd September. With thirty-one officers and more than 800 men, the Hallamshires had remained to the rear in the Thiepval sector until they were called forward when the attack faltered to relieve troops in the line. Casualties in the battalion had begun to mount almost immediately, thanks to German howitzer shells. The knowledge of the old hands that they would once again be sent out in working parties to Thiepval Wood in filthy weather was utterly demoralising. On 6th September, John Allison arrived with fifty-one other reinforcements taken largely from his old regiment.
At 2am the following morning the enemy began a rancorous bombardment of the York & Lancaster line, sending over a storm of poisonous gas and high explosives. Then came burning oil drums and chlorine gas fired from trench mortars. For three hours it went on, fire and brimstone, shaking the ground, caving in trenches and mutilating all in its path. More than 100 men became casualties, including John Allison.
He had survived a matter of hours on the Somme. John had married his sweetheart, Nellie, two days after Christmas in 1915 while at home wounded, and she was a few weeks pregnant when he was killed. Their daughter, Phyllis, was born in 1917. John Allison was originally buried in Paisley Avenue Cemetery to the south of Thiepval Wood. This was later cleared and those interred relocated. He was finally laid to rest at Lonsdale Cemetery, plot X.H.6.