The opening ceremony for ‘19240 Shrouds of the Somme‘ commenced at Northernhay Gardens in Exeter at 7:00am on 1st July 2016 and finish with the blowing of whistles at 7:30am to symbolise the first wave of soldiers ordered to go ‘over the top’ exactly one hundred years before in the Battle of the Somme.
When the shelling stopped, the Germans simply emerged from their bunkers and took up position again behind their machine guns. And that is where they were as the whistle sounded for the British to ‘go over the top’ at 7.30am on the morning of 1 July 1916.
