To commemorate the centenary of the start of the First World War, DEP’s April 2014 production was Peter Whelan’s The Accrington Pals. On the eve of the First World War the men in the Lancashire town of Accrington answer Kitchener’s call for a New Army and becomes the smallest town in England to raise a Pals’ Volunteer Brigade. When they arrive in France, the brutal reality of the trenches is beyond anything that they were prepared for. On the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, 1st July 1916, the Accrington battalion suffered devastating losses. Of some 720 Accrington Pals who took part in the attack, 584 were killed, wounded or missing. Back home for the women they leave behind nothing can ever be the same again. The Accrington Pals is the story of these womenfolk who grew into their new-found independence and who slowly came to realise that the propaganda they were being fed was based on lies.