Diss Family History Group

When Rosemary asked me to join her on a trip about the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, I was pleased to say yes. At this time of Remembrance, it seems the right time to tell you about an interesting and informative trip.

We started the first full day by visiting the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) Experience at Beaurains. Opened in 2019, the CWGC Experience aims to show behind-the-scenes the work that is needed to commemorate the Commonwealth casualties from the First and Second World Wars. We saw new headstones being made, learnt a little about how bodies are still being recovered – up to 150 annually, and looked at the origins of the CWGC, which was first founded as the Imperial War Graves Commission.

Fabian Ware, who at 45 was too old to join the British Army in 1914, managed to become commander of a Red Cross unit and arrived in France in September 1914. With a lack of official record keeping, he began keeping records of graves he found and, as municipal graveyards became full, went on to negotiate for more land with the ultimate agreement being that France (or Belgium) would purchase the land and grant it in perpetuity to the British, who then took over responsibility for building and maintaining the cemeteries. Ware and others became concerned about the fate of graves after the war and in May 1917, the Imperial War Graves Commission was founded, changing its name to the CWGC in 1960. By 1918, 587,000 graves had been identified and 559,000 casualties had no known grave.

The founders of the IWGC were determined that all the men and women of Britain and the British Empire who fell on the battlefields of the First World War, on land, in the air and at sea, should be commemorated equally, so they did not differentiate between the dead on the grounds of social or military rank, or by religion. For most of the bodies from the First World War found today, is not possible to establish the identity of the casualty. However, occasionally artefacts found with the remains might suggest that they belonged to a particular regiment/unit or was an identifiable individual. Every effort is then made by the military authorities to trace present day relatives and, where appropriate, carry out DNA tests. Whether identification is successful or not, a military burial with full honours will take place in a CWGC cemetery close to where they were found. The grave will be marked and cared for by the CWGC in perpetuity. We saw the graves of eight soldiers from the Northumberland Fusiliers who had recently been interred at Tyne Cot; unusually, all but one of whom had been identified.

We went to Forceville cemetery, one of the first three cemeteries to be built. This cemetery was built near a field hospital and so because many of the dead had died of their wounds in hospital only a handful of graves were of unknown soldiers. Here we also saw the original wording for an unknown soldier which was deemed too long and expensive to engrave, so the text was changed to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘An unknown British Soldier, Known unto God’ text. We learnt about the Stone of Remembrance and the Cross of Sacrifice, the latter being in every cemetery but the former only if there were more than a certain number of graves.

We explored the different types of cemeteries: those which were added next to already present civilian cemeteries, the field hospital ones, battlefield-based cemeteries and then concentration ones where casualties who had initially been buried in small cemeteries were then reinterred in one larger cemetery. What I had never thought about was the relationship of the headstone to the body, and that the headstone marks the body being in the cemetery and not necessarily where the body is!

On our final day we went to Bedford House cemetery, a concentration cemetery with different sections, but the main reason for our visit was that the headquarters of the gardening team was based there. Here we learnt about the CWGC’s commitment to making all their own fertiliser by composting materials from their sites and not using insecticides. We saw composting making in action. The gardeners shared that they had been sceptical but that the pilot projects had been a huge success – their main concern now was the impact of the drought on their plants.

Learning about the headstones was fascinating. The shape of the cross to fit in with the regimental badge. The fact that a soldier who had stated ‘none’ to his religion would not have a cross on his headstone, but if his parents were religious, they could place a religious text at the base. The woman, a relative or friend perhaps, who just had her name inscribed at the base; could that have been because that was all she could write? We must never forget that behind each headstone is a story.