It never fired a bullet. It never exploded. It didn’t even move. And yet barbed wire, a farm fence technology adapted for war, helped turn a few hundred metres of ground into a place that could cost thousands of lives.
This episode walks the length of that wire, from Joseph Glidden’s 1874 patent through the mud of Passchendaele to the tanks that finally crushed it at the Canal du Nord.
We look at why an agricultural invention became one of the defining weapons of the First World War, and how a wire belt was actually engineered to kill rather than simply block. We get into the artillery problem, why shells struggled to cut wire at all, and what that failure meant for the first day of the Somme.
We follow Piper James Cleland Richardson’s Victoria Cross at Regina Trench, alongside a British parallel most listeners won’t have heard, and we look at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele through the specific, unglamorous problem of getting a human body through a fence.
Throughout, five archival voices carry the story from the inside: Roy Henley, Captain Wilfred Dancy Ellis and Private Jack Featherstone from the Veterans Affairs Canada Audio Archive, and Lance Sergeant George Harbottle and four unnamed Somme veterans from the Imperial War Museums and BBC sound archives.
Where memory endures, valour lives on.
Full source list is available in this post’s Sources section below for anyone who wants to dig further.
Sources
Veterans Affairs Canada, First World War Audio Archive: oral history interviews with Roy Henley (166th Queen’s Own Rifles / Quebec Regiment), Captain Wilfred Dancy Ellis (4th Division), and Private John Stephen “Jack” Featherstone (46th Battalion); also the official account of Piper James Cleland Richardson, VC.
Imperial War Museums and BBC sound archives, presented by Dan Snow: interview with Lance Sergeant George Harbottle, 50th (Northumbrian) Division, recorded by historian Peter Hart in 1986; testimony of British veterans of the Somme, 1 July 1916.
Library and Archives Canada: the Victor Lionel Pimm trench panorama near Ypres; supporting material on James Cleland Richardson, VC.
Dictionary of Canadian Biography: entry on James Cleland Richardson, VC.
1914-1918-Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, on wire entanglements and the artillery-versus-wire problem; C.R.W. Nevinson’s Paths of Glory.
Imperial War Museums: holdings and history of Paths of Glory by C.R.W. Nevinson; Bangalore torpedo collection record.
firstworldwar.com: background on the Bangalore torpedo, developed 1912 by Captain R. L. McClintock, Madras Sappers and Miners.
Canadian War Museum: reference material on corkscrew (screw) pickets.
Wikipedia, “Screw picket”: citing period sources on the adoption of silent pickets, c. 1915.
U.S. National Archives, Hagley Museum & Library, and the Glidden Homestead: Joseph Glidden’s barbed wire patent, granted 24 November 1874.
Government of Canada (Canada.ca): Vimy Ridge, the Hindenburg Line, the Canal du Nord, and the Drocourt-Quéant Line.
