6. Oct, 2022

6. Oct, 2022

6. Oct, 2022

THURSDAY 6-10-22

We had a stroke of luck yesterday evening when The Chef spotted a chap walking away from the boat mooring area with a watering can. So I was quickly out there to investigate, and yes indeed, there were two fresh water taps side by side on the mooring pontoon. I was so annoyed with myself, I should have realised that boats need water too and investigated. Never mind we were soon sorted out with sixty litres loaded onboard.

This gave us the option this morning of having a nice hot shower before setting off, but we decided instead to forgo the pleasure and have one tomorrow morning instead.

Neither of us slept too well, and I'm certain that when I woke at about 03:30 our German hippy former next door neighbour was outside playing his guitar. I'm so pleased we moved parking spaces as I would have fallen out with him over it at that time of night.

This morning I was keen to get away in good time for our final visit of the trip. The Chef said she didn't want to pick up a baguette as we pulled away which saved some time as I was prepared to drive to the other end of the village to pick one up from the one and only supermarket. We had enjoyed our little visit to AY, but don't feel the need to return.

So on to the toll road for a couple of hours until we reached our destination in Beaurains, just outside Arras. We pulled in to the car park of the Commonwealth War Grave Commission Experience www.cwgcexperience@cwgc (N50.257385° E2.780688°). I must confess however, that despite having fed the GPS co-ordinates in to the satnav I pulled in to the car park of the business right next door. We even took a lot of trouble to park the vehicle as best we could in the rather short parking spaces. It's just as well I spotted the mistake before we went in to their Reception. I can just imagine the receptionist going to her boss and saying there were two English people outside asking for a tour of their factory.

At 11:40 we popped in to Reception at the 'Experience' and told them we would like to tour their facility. I was keen we did that just in case they closed between 12:00 and 14:00 for lunch. Having established that they remained open by the helpful staff we made our way back to the motorhome for our lunch.

At about 13:00 we were back for our visit and to be very pleasantly surprised to find that we were to be given a personal tour of the facility by Megan, one of the staff members. This would be so much better than holding an audio guide to our ears.

So a bit about the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC):

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) is an intergovernmental organisation of six independent member states whose principal function is to mark, record and maintain the graves and places of commemoration of Commonwealth of Nations military service members who died in the two World Wars. The commission is also responsible for commemorating Commonwealth civilians who died as a result of enemy action during the Second World War.The commission was founded by Sir Fabian Ware and constituted through Royal Charter in 1917 as the Imperial War Graves Commission. The change to the present name took place in 1960.

The commission, as part of its mandate, is responsible for commemorating all Commonwealth war dead individually and equally. To this end, the war dead are commemorated by a name on a headstone, at an identified site of a burial, or on a memorial. War dead are commemorated uniformly and equally, irrespective of military or civil rank, race or creed.

The commission is currently responsible for the continued commemoration of 1.7 million deceased Commonwealth military service members in 153 countries. Since its inception, the commission has constructed approximately 2,500 war cemeteries and numerous memorials.The commission is currently responsible for the care of war dead at over 23,000 separate burial sites and the maintenance of more than 200 memorials worldwide. In addition to commemorating Commonwealth military service members, the commission maintains, under arrangement with applicable governments, over 40,000 non-Commonwealth war graves and over 25,000 non-war military and civilian graves. The commission operates through the continued financial support of the member states: United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa. The current President of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is Prince Edward, Duke of Kent.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Fabian Ware, a director of the Rio Tinto Company, found that he was too old, at age 45, to join the British Army. He used the influence of Rio Tinto chairman, Viscount Milner, to become the commander of a mobile unit of the British Red Cross. He arrived in France in September 1914 and whilst there was struck by the lack of any official mechanism for documenting or marking the location of graves of those who had been killed and felt compelled to create an organisation within the Red Cross for this purpose. In March 1915, with the support of Nevil Macready, Adjutant-General of the British Expeditionary Force, Ware's work was given official recognition and support by the Imperial War Office and the unit was transferred to the British Army as the Graves Registration Commission. The new Graves Registration Commission had over 31,000 graves of British and Imperial soldiers registered by October 1915 and 50,000 registered by May 1916.

When municipal graveyards began to overfill Ware began negotiations with various local authorities to acquire land for further cemeteries. Ware began with an agreement with France to build joint British and French cemeteries under the understanding that these would be maintained by the French government. Ware eventually concluded that it was not prudent to leave the maintenance responsibilities solely to the French government and subsequently arranged for France to purchase the land, grant it in perpetuity, and leave the management and maintenance responsibilities to the British. The French government agreed under the condition that cemeteries respected certain dimensions, were accessible by public road, were in the vicinity of medical aid stations and were not too close to towns or villages. Similar negotiations began with the Belgian government.

As reports of the grave registration work became public, the commission began to receive letters of enquiry and requests for photographs of graves from relatives of deceased soldiers. By 1917, 17,000 photographs had been dispatched to relatives. In March 1915, the commission, with the support of the Red Cross, began to dispatch photographic prints and cemetery location information in answer to the requests. The Graves Registration Commission became the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries in the spring of 1916 in recognition of the fact that the scope of work began to extend beyond simple grave registration and began to include responding to enquiries from relatives of those killed. The directorate's work was also extended beyond the Western Front and into other theatres of war, with units deployed in Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia.

In 1918, three of the most eminent architects of their day, Sir Herbert Baker, Sir Reginald Blomfield and Sir Edwin Lutyens were appointed as the organisation's initial Principal Architects. Rudyard Kipling was appointed literary advisor for the language used for memorial inscriptions.

In 1920, the Commission built three experimental cemeteries at Le Treport, Forceville and Louvencourt, following the principles outlined in the Kenyon report. Of these, the Forceville Communal Cemetery and Extension was agreed to be the most successful. Having consulted with garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, the architects created a walled cemetery with uniform headstones in a garden setting, augmented by Blomfield's Cross of Sacrifice and Lutyens' Stone of Remembrance.After some adjustments, Forceville became the template for the commission's building programme. Cost overruns at all three experimental cemeteries necessitated some adjustments. To ensure future cemeteries remained within their budget the Commission decided to not build shelters in cemeteries that contained less than 200 graves, to not place a Stone of Remembrance in any cemetery with less than 400 graves, and to limit the height of cemetery walls to 1 metre (3.3 ft).

At the end of 1919, the commission had spent £7,500, and this figure rose to £250,000 in 1920 as construction of cemeteries and memorials increased. By 1921, the commission had established 1,000 cemeteries which were ready for headstone erections, and burials. Between 1920 and 1923, the commission was shipping 4,000 headstones a week to France. The engraving on all headstones was done by hand. In many cases, the Commission closed small cemeteries and concentrated the graves into larger ones. By 1927, when the majority of construction had been completed, over 500 cemeteries had been built, with 400,000 headstones, a thousand Crosses of Sacrifice, and 400 Stones of Remembrance.

The commission had also been mandated to individually commemorate each soldier who had no known grave, which amounted to 315,000 in France and Belgium alone. The Commission initially decided to build 12 monuments on which to commemorate the missing; each memorial being located at the site of an important battle along the Western Front. After resistance from the French committee responsible for the approvals of memorials on French territory, the Commission revised their plan and reduced the number of memorials, and in some cases built memorials to the missing in existing cemeteries rather than as separate structures.

Reginald Blomfield's Menin Gate was the first memorial to the missing located in Europe to be completed, and was unveiled on 24 July 1927. The Menin Gate (Menenpoort) was found to have insufficient space to contain all the names as originally planned and 34,984 names of the missing were instead inscribed on Herbert Baker's Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing. Other memorials followed: the Helles Memorial in Gallipoli designed by John James Burnet; the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme and the Arras Memorial designed by Edwin Lutyens; and the Basra Memorial in Iraq designed by Edward Prioleau Warren. The Dominions and India also erected memorials on which they commemorated their missing: the Neuve-Chapelle Memorial for the forces of India, the Vimy Memorial by Canada, the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial by Australia, the Delville Wood Memorial by South Africa and the Beaumont-Hamel Memorial by Newfoundland. The programme of commemorating the dead of the Great War was considered essentially complete with the inauguration of the Thiepval Memorial in 1932, though the Vimy Memorial would not be finished until 1936, the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial until 1938 and stonemasons were still conducting work on the Menin Gate when Germany invaded Belgium in 1940

I'm aware that I normally bombard guests to this site with lots of photographs and the odd short video, but today will be different. Firstly because there was an awful lot of reflection from the glass today when shooting through it, and secondly, and most importantly, I wanted to pay attention to what Megan, who was very knowledgeable, had to say. Not to have paid attention to her and took pictures and video shots instead would have been just plain rude.

I was so pleased to have been shown the workshop where the headstones are made. They were once all carved by hand, so imagine the monumental task of providing hand-made headstones at a time when the demand for them after the creation of the CWGC was so enormous (some 500,000). These days the headstones which are made from Portland stone, arrive at the facility already prepared and ready for engraving. That work is now done on computer controlled engraving machines. One machine can cut two headstones side-by-side at the same time whilst the other can handle four. To engrave the reference number on the side of each gravestone showing its position within the cemetery, the stone is transferred to another machine and turned on its side before being engraved. These headstones incidentally are shipped around the world to any CWGC cemetery requiring a replacement etc.

The facility also has a mortuary which, quite rightly, is out of bounds to the public. In there any remains which are still found to this day are documented and every effort made to identify them after which they are given a funeral with full military honours.

We also got to peak through the window of the carpenters workshop who repair and create items within any CWGC cemetery in France, this was followed by the workshop which produces the standard design signs to all cemeteries. Megan had never seen anybody in the workshop which suggests that the demand for replacements is pretty small, which wouldn't be the case if they were made out of something like brass (they’d likely be stolen).

Then it was a peek through the window in to the forge workshop where highly skilled blacksmiths make and repair all manner of items required within the cemeteries. To the extent that if they find remains with a watch etc nearby they will try to repair it and get it to work again - after 100 years that's skill indeed.

Our thanks to Megan for a very interesting and informative tour. The Chef said afterwards that we've done it the wrong way round. We should have gone there before touring around visiting CWGC cemeteries, and she's right, and it's something I would recommend anybody else do who would like to look at such cemeteries - go visit the 'Experience' first for a better understanding of what goes in to providing such wonderful facilities. As I have said in the past, I begrudge not one penny of the tax I pay which goes towards funding the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. A truly wonderful organisation.

Following our visit we made our way to our supermarket overnight rest area (N50.714141º E2.108954º) where we spent our first night having crossed the Channel some five weeks ago, so we've gone full circle.

 I have deliberately arranged this 'chapter' to be a short one so that it can be easily amended at a later date with regard to the CWGC Experience.

Right now we're parked up watching a bun fight at the supermarket's filling station. It had run out of fuel and has just received a new delivery due to a strike by French workers at the oil refineries. Gosh, strikes - it's like being at home.