Whitby High School
Battlefields Tour 22nd-25th March 2009
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Whitby High SchoolBattlefields Tour 22nd-25th March 2009 |
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A few weeks before we left England for Belgium we arranged with the Last Post Association (who oversee the ceremony) for Whitby High School to take part in the Tuesday evening ceremony. After a meal at a restaurant next to the Cloth Hall, our party walked up to the gate which had now been cordoned off at each end by the police to prevent traffic passing through. By the time the buglers began their call, the crowd was several hundred strong.
It was a proud moment to see two Year 11 representatives from Whitby, in full school uniform, lead the proceedings. After a one minute silence, Caitlin Kennedy and Bethan Mills stepped forward to read the exhortation after which they led the wreath laying ceremony. This was the third time Whitby High School has led the ceremony and it is such an honour to be an integral part of these moving and distinguished proceedings.
Every evening at 8.00 the traffic is stopped and buglers from the Ypres Fire Brigade blow the last post. This has happened every evening since 1928, with the exception of those years in the Second World War when the town was held by the Germans. Click buglers to hear the Last Post
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Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, WE WILL REMEMBER THEM. |
Laurence Binyon 1869-1942 Taken from For The Fallen (4th stanza)
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Caitlin and Bethan lay the first wreath dedicated to the men on the Ellesmere Port war memorial
The Menin Road had been the main supply route from the town into the Salient. Sir Reginald Blomfield, the commissioned archiect, saw the site of the town gate, through which so many troops had passed, as the obvious site of the major memorial to the British and Empire missing from the battles around the town. Work began in 1923, and it was officially inaugurated in July 1927. It was meant to hold the names of all those with no known graves, but when designed the number was still not known. It turned out to be about 100,000, of which 54,896 are commemorated here. (The remaining are recorded at Tyne Cot - click link, left).
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Men of the Cheshire Regiment
Alex McCosh Dixon finds Wilfred Dowie |
David Hughes finds T.W. Piercy |
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Peter Hyndeman finds Henry Godbold M.M. |
Lois Bowckett finds George .H.Spicer |
There were several more names found which will soon be the subject of research by Year 9 pupils for the
Ellesmere Port War Memorial project
Thanks to Hannah Mather-Coe, Zeta Chase-Davies, Kirean Ireland, Rhys Jones, Cherry Finlay, Jacqueline Gemmell and Jordan Hall for their efforts in locating the names on the memorial.
Evening meal
Ypres Town Square. The restaurant for our evening meal is on the far left
 After being wounded in April 1917 Sassoon was sent back to England for recuperation. He had developed increasingly angry feelings concerning the conduct of the war. He now published in The Times his famous anti war statement, "A Soldier's Declaration," written on June 15, 1917. It was even read before the House of Commons. It detailed how he felt that the war was being deliberately and unnecessarily prolonged by the authorities.
Sassoon narrowly avoided punishment by courts martial via the swift assistance of Robert Graves, who convinced the military review board (with Sassoon's reluctant consent) that Sassoon was suffering from shell shock. Consequently Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart military hotel to recover. It was while at Craiglockhart that Sassoon met and struck up a friendship with Wilfred Owen. Sassoon subsequently edited and arranged publication of Owen's work after the war.
After the war Sassoon stayed angry and cynical and, could not forget his dreadful memories. When on July 24, 1927, in Ypres, Flanders, the Belgian king Albert inaugurated the new Menin Gate, Sassoon was there.
In this large memorial 54.896 names are inscribed - names of allied soldiers who died nearby but whose remains could not be identified, or who are still missing. ( Yet the memorial proved too small: 34.984 names were left over; these were inscribed on a wall a few miles away at the Tyne Cot war cemetery. )
At the opening ceremony the Last Post was sounded - to signify a call for the missing. ( every evening since then the Last Post was and will be sounded at this gate ). Sassoon witnessed it all and became bitter.
The next day, in his hotelroom in Brussels, he wrote the first words of a heartbreaking poem that he never dared to publish. It became known only after his death. He had been alone in his anger.
Here was the world's worst wound. Siegfried Sassoon |
