THE effects of the Great War on Dorset and the part its people played in the conflict are examined in detail in Rodney Legg’s posthumous book Dorset in the First World War.

As well as detailing the build-up to the conflict, starting with the mobilisation of the Fleet off Portland, Rodney’s book looks at the effects the war had on the county’s towns, from Blandford in the north to Bridport in the west and Bournemouth in the east.

The Queen’s Own Dorset Yeomanry, who were to chase death and glory in the Middle East, have a chapter to themselves, as do the six battalions of the Dorsetshire Regiment.

There are chapters on airships and flying boats, airfields and their crews and the book also moves off-shore and devotes a whole chapter to The Formidable Tragedy, when the 15,000 crewman battleship Formidable was torpedoed by an enemy submarine on New Year’s Day, 1915, 20 miles off Start Point.

Only 233 of the ship’s crew of 780 survived – among those lost were the ship’s terrier Bruce, who ‘was last seen standing on duty beside his master captain Loxley, who remained with Commander Ballard on the bridge’. The Rev G Brooke Robinson, former curate of Burton Bradstock, also went down with the ship.

But there was some lightness too. Sailor John Cowan had been left for dead on the floor of The Pilot Boat Inn in Lyme Regis, but during the night, the landlord’s dog started licking his face and hands and the ‘dead’ man suddenly resurrected.

During the war, the seas off Dorset became a maritime front-line, patrolled by Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff’s U-Boat force, which sunk 860,000 tonnes of shipping and forced neutral merchant sailors to stay in port.

But Dorset in the First World War is not just about blood and thunder. Chapter 16 examines the county’s war poets, including Rupert Brooke who holidayed in Bournemouth and then rented rooms at Lulworth Cove, which he described as ‘the most beautiful village in England’.

It was while Brooke was stationed at Blandford Camp that he wrote his famous sonnet The Soldier – ‘If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England’ – and he went on to die of blood poisoning from a mosquito bite and was buried on the island of Skyros. Thomas Hardy, at the height of his fame, was often called upon to comment on the war and was moved by the plight of prisoners in Dorchester’s POW camp at Poundbury.

The chapter Heroes and Prisoners concentrates on the personal price paid by many of the county’s families and there is also a tribute to Dorset’s many Red Cross hospitals which sprang up in every town.

The end of the First World War was brought to Dorset’s attention via a wireless message from Paris to the Royal Naval Airship Station at Powerstock at 06.30 hours on November 11, 1918.

n Dorset in the First World War is an excellent, comprehensive read that puts a local, human face on the ‘war to end wars’. Dorset in the First World War (Halsgrove, £19.99) and is available now.