BRIAN OGLE REFLECTS ON HIS MANY VISITS TO THE BATTLEFIELDS OF YPRES AND THE SOMME
ON Remembrance Day I will as always be following BBC TV’s coverage of events at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, but my thoughts for at least some of the time will be hundreds of miles away at Canada Farm cemetery at Elverdinge, a few miles outside Ypres in West Flanders.
It’s now almost 30 years since I first visited the last resting place of my Great Uncle, Rifleman George McClure from Moira. I can vividly remember the excitement as we pulled up at the cemetery for the first time, identifiable with its six distinctive trees of Canadian Maple, then hurriedly leafing through the logbook at the entrance and almost running to the far end of the plots to see for the first time the last resting place of a family member whose tragic death in 1918 had been a mystery to his family, not least of all to his sister, my grandmother.
Apart from a framed scroll from the King expressing his condolences which hung proudly on my granny’s living room wall, George McClure’s death in WWI had been something of a mystery. The family in fact thought that he had died at the Somme, but it turned out he had survived the great but disastrous Somme offensive and actually died towards the end of the War, in what was the Germany army’s final push around Ypres in Belgium.
The town of Ypres (Leper in Flemish and Wipers to the troops) was never captured by the Germans but was totally destroyed as it was just a few miles from the front line and the hottest of the hot spots on the Western Front. Just a few minutes drive from the town centre are places like Messines, site of the Ireland Peace Park, and Passchendaele, a name synonymous with horror and sacrifice, Tyne Cot Cemetery, the biggest British Commonwealth War Cemetery in the world, and the last resting place and memorials to poets like Francis Ledwidge from Slane, County Meath, and John McCrae, who wrote the famous lines ‘In Flanders Fields…. the poppies grow…..”
The British and Commonwealth troops marched out of Ypres to the Front line through the Menin Gate which spans the main road and it is the Menin Gate which provides a remarkable and ongoing memorial to the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives, with its nightly Last Post ceremony.
Ypres has an incredibly beautiful town centre, centrepiece of which is the stunning Cloth Hall which houses the ‘In Flanders Fields’ Museum and the tourist centre. Just a couple of hundred metres away is St George’s Church which provides a place for those who come from the British Isles and the Commonwealth to reflect and remember.
The inside of the church itself is covered in plaques, memorials and embroidered cushions/kneelers remembering regiments and particular individuals. And I’m proud to say that on one of the brass plaques as you enter St George’s you will find the name of my great uncle, Rifleman George McClure, installed in the church some 15 years ago after a moving dedication service organised by Patricia McBride MBE, (now Patricia McBride-Windsor) originally from Carrickfergus. Pat lived in Lille on the French side of the border, and had then a close association with St George’s as did her late husband Maurice, who worked for many years with Belfast engineering company James Mackie on the continent.
The excitement of being the first family member to visit George McClure’s last resting place about 30 years ago, was only surpassed a year later when I took my mother, then in her sixties on the first of a dozen or so visits to Canada Farm, highlight of which was the dedication of the memorial plaque in St George’s, Ypres.
Sadly my mother passed away nine years ago, but I remember every year the excitement in her eyes weeks before her annual trip to Flanders. She had her bag packed weeks in advance and looked forward so much to visiting Canada Farm and the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme – in fact she often remarked she was more familiar with the streets and traders of Ypres than Lisburn; and particularly enjoyed the Saturday morning market in front of the Cloth Hall in the great square.
For more than a decade she accompanied my cousin and I to Flanders, and it was a sad day when her mobility was impaired enough for her to forgo her annual pilgrimage to the battlefields.
I haven’t been to Canada Farm or Ypres myself for a few years now, but hopefully with Covid continuing to weaken I will be back next year to place another poppy on great uncle George’s grave, say a few words inside St George’s, stand again at the Menin Gate for the Last Post, and, as was the custom of previous trips, drive down the motorway to Bapaume, to visit the Ulster Tower, Thiepval, Delville Wood, the Newfoundland memorial park, not forgetting of course a snack lunch in the sunshine in the garden of Ocean Villas, surrounded by the empty trenches and the memories of the many thousands who did not return home from The Somme and the Ypres Salient.
The 'Travel' Life of Brian 