Our November meeting followed Remembrance Sunday and continued the theme with a talk about the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Brian Wingate is a local volunteer and one of his activities is to visit local grave sites to report on condition.
The CWGC was set up to record the names and graves of the fallen in WW1 and subsequently extended to WW2. Parliament set the dates of death for WW1 as 4 August 1914 to 31 August 1921 whilst for WW2 the Allies agreed on 3 September 1939 to 31 December 1947. The time lag after 1918 Armistice day in WW1 and VE Day and VJ Day in WW2 allows for individual countries Peace Treaties to be signed and for the effects of gas in WW1 and PoW treatment in WW2 to be a cause of early death. It is funded proportionally by the six sponsoring Governments of UK, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa and covers deaths from Military and Auxiliary groups. Sir Fabian Ware was the driving force behind its creation. In 1914 he was commanding a motorised Red Cross Section in France and started noting the graves of soldiers when out on his rounds, so that next of kin could be informed. A Royal Charted in 1917 was the start of the Commission and its founding principles were that each death should be commemorated by name on a headstone or memorial, it should be permanent and uniform design. The Headstone has a standard layout of Regimental Badge, service rank, name and number, date of death, Religious emblem and a personal inscription – to be requested by the family and limited to 26 characters and charged at 3½d per character. With the end of WW1, the battlefield burials were concentrated in set sites. If more than 40 burials a Cross of Sacrifice was erected and for over 1000 a Stone of Remembrance. For the half a million Missing, specific memorials on the main battle fronts were designed. The three most well known today are Menin Gate (54000) and Tyne Cot (35000) on the Ypres Front and Thiepval (72000) on the Somme. The UK has 306000 burials and the CWGS website has a map of the locations, so you can see that for our area, in Hatfield Heath there is 1 grave at the URC and 4 burials at Holy Trinity whilst in Hatfield Broad Oak at St Marys there are 4 graves. Little Hallingbury has 2 in St Mary’s and 3 in the Old Burial Ground. It is remarkable how quickly defined objectives and then how the Main Architects contributed individual components (Lutyens’s Stone of Remembrance, Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice in 4 sizes, Kipling’s quotation ‘Their Name Liveth for Evermore’ and the Headstone design) within the plots boundary wall gave instant recognition of the structure, but each cemetery is unique for its location. With 1.7M names recorded, the bulk of the names are in Europe (1.2M) but it is a global commitment in Africa, Asia and Pacific. For this it has a staff of 900 which includes 500 gardeners, as the range of sites means it major horticultural business with different planting regimes for all the climate zones to give the effect of an English country garden. With most cemeteries/memorials approaching their centenary, maintenance is high on the agenda. The Thiepval Memorial has just completed a 2 year restoration scheme and the Menin Gate restoration will commence in the spring. They also must contend with war damage in Iraq and have only recently been able to start restoration work there. It was sad to learn that in some places the copper sword on the Cross of Sacrifice is a target of metal theft and alternative materials are being considered. A straw poll at the end of the meeting indicated the audience had family connections to cemeteries/memorials in Belgium, France and Italy, so this wide ranging talk that touched on history, politics and gardening was much appreciated by our members. We have no meetings in January or February but wish our readers a peaceful and safe New Year. Quentin Spear |
Editor
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