Trench Map NE of Pozieres 1916

[GregO]

Does anyone have a good trench map of Munster Alley, Gloster Alley and Switch Line Trenches which includes X35,36,5,6,11 & 12 sectors?

[Roger H]

Here are Munster and Gloster - courtesy of the TNA trench map DVD.

Roger

[GregO]

Thanks Roger, I haven't seen or heard of Peg Trench before, does the map date to a particular time?

[GregO]

Its OK, found it. Peg Street dug towards the end of August 1916.

[Graham Wagner]

The Switch Line was renamed Cameron Trench in August of 1916. The map on the left is from Sept 1916 and shows Munster Alley and the Switch now renamed Cameron Trench....further East Cameron Trench became Sanderson Trench, the latter named after Basil Sanderson whose diary I quote as follows from Mid-August 1916: 

 

It was a very quiet morning and I went up to the left first by Munster Alley. Munster Alley was just the same as ever, and the stench was if anything worse, but when I got to the end of it I couldn’t find a sign of Cameron Trench (the old German Switch Line). The whole place was simply a mass of shell holes without a vestige of a trench to be seen. However, knowing the way in which it had run, I did a bit of shell hole dodging and after about 50 yards came upon the trench again. Apparently, the portion between that and Munster Alley had been shelled so heavily day and night that it had been given up. I then walked right along Cameron Trench to the Switch Elbow. This wasn’t the slightest bit knocked about, having been too close to our lines for that, and was a very good example of Bosch work, being very wide and about nine feet deep. I continued on for about 300 yards, until I came to our bombing block, which was as far as we held. I was talking to the men there when a gunner subaltern came crawling back over it. I asked him where he had been, and he said that he had been over the Bosch block and about 30 yards beyond, and there wasn’t a soul there. I asked him whether he would come along again, and he said that he would......We went about 100 yards down and never found a living soul, so we came back. The trench had about 3 dead Germans in each bay and was full of rifles and equipment of all kinds. I picked up a very nice souvenir in the shape of a long saw-bayonet, the thing that everybody raised such a yell over at the beginning of the War as being an instrument of torture, which was absolute nonsense. 

The second map at the right is from April 1916 and is from the collection at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada (URL at bottom left)

Edited 27 October , 2016 by Graham Wagner
Editing !

[Graham Wagner]

Sorry! Here's an enlargement of the Munster Alley - Switch Line (now Cameron Trench)  area of the above map. The old Switch Elbow Sanderson refers to in his diary above is located between the words Cameron and Trench.

Edited 27 October , 2016 by Graham Wagner
mistake and additional information!