There's a photo on my table,
from 1914,
of five young lads in scruffy clothes,
Larrikins you can see
What draws me in to the First World War
is the personal stories; that's always what will draw me in.
It's very easy to
get carried away with the statistics and the figures.
Ultimately they don't mean anything if they're not translated
into names and faces. I think these are the things
that enable us to at least
get something of an understanding of the conflict
I think reading these personal stories,
seeing photographs is the basis of beginning to empathise
with their situation.
In the trenches' thickening air,
they shared the shortest life.
And the photograph is signed,
Yours sincerely,
The Dirty Five
Jim, my great-grandfather, had written around this photograph
'Yours sincerely, the Dirty Five'.
And the photograph shows him with four other lads
at Redcar Training Camp.
I thought, 'There's got to be a story here'.
So I, frankly, got very lucky.
I had a massive fluke of research,
stumbled upon some accounts and letters
that Jim had written and sent back during the war
along with a lot of other photographs he'd sent.
And I found out the story of the Dirty Five.
They stuck together for quite a time,
they fought together in the Barnsley Pals Battalions
which most famously saw the first bit of their action
at the Battle of the Somme.
They had been in Egypt before, but they then went to the Somme.
You turned 22 the summer of 1916,
and the Dirty Five had stayed together, everywhere they'd been.
The order came, one last campaign,
then you could all go home.
On the first day, 60,000 lay
on the burning fields of the Somme.
And it was during the Battle of the Somme that the Dirty Five
were split up. They were together
working a Vickers gun. They were given orders to fall back from the line,
and as they were packing it up, a German mortar strike hit.
And it killed two of the lads instantly and one was never found.
Sadly Jim and a friend were the only two
to return out of the Dirty Five.
You came to in the silent world
as hellish fire rained down.
Harry burned up in the chalk.
And Jack and George they never found.
I didn't just want to write about the mud and blood of war because
frankly, there's enough songs that do that. I think
I wanted to try and talk about
the jokes and the jaunty songs that they'd share together.
Because when you look at the photograph you think, 'Here's
five larrikins probably
quite rough about the edges, the Barnsley working-class lads.
So I just wanted to write a song that
told the two sides of their war.
Oh, from the first day you were singing
in the dorm,
working up a storm.
The Dirty Five were usually the ones
behind it all.
I think we're drawn to conflict in general because it's
I don't really want to use the word 'fascinating', but it's
certainly an aspect of human nature which draws you in.
It's at once fascinating
and at the same time terrifying.
All so young and gone so fast
under a burning sky.
A band of brothers made to last,
the Dirty Five.