Overview

The Kensingtons, guardians of the right flank on the battlefront at Gommecourt, on the Somme, were ordered to march on the enemy without proper preparation in a move later condemned as foolhardy and suicidal. That summer's day, cut to pieces by enemy artillery, they lost half their men in less than an hour. The author sets out a candid account of the action, examining why this tragic and unnecessary slaughter was allowed to happen. Martha Kearey dressed in black for the rest of her life in memory of the four sons she lost in that battle, during the First World War, proudly wearing each of their medals in turn on Sundays. Nearly a century on, her grandson Terence Kearey has set out to do justice to the memory of his uncles and their colleagues with a full account of the role of their Battalion, the Kensingtons, on the Somme in the summer of 1916.

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9781909304086

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Terence Kearey was born in North Harrow in 1935, one of three children of a hard-working lower middle class family. In the 1950s he embarked on a career in the printing and reproduction industry, but dismayed by the industrial greed and strife of the 1960s and 70s, he abandoned a successful career to become a college lecturer. Along the way he developed a keen interest in history and spent many years researching the story of his own family, all the way back to the Irish Ciardha clan of the Dark Ages from which the family name is derived. He has taken a similar interest in his mother's family, the Collinses of Chard in Somerset. Having studied the lives and times of his forebears over the centuries, he has woven their stories together into a fascinating narrative thread which reaches all the way from the Irish clans of the early centuries AD to his own personal experiences of love, life, work, marriage and parenthood in the 20th century. He is now working on a film script involving moments from the first three of this quartet, Country Ways, History, Heroism and Home and A Changing World. His new book 'Safeguard Our Flank' focuses on a key campaign of the First World War in which his father, Regimental Sergeant Major (later Major) Albert Kearey, played a key role.

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