Tuesday 26 November 2013

Under the Somme

The La Boisselle Project  involved in a fascinating BBC programme in the next few days, taking a relative down into the tunnels, the last resting place of a Wrexham miner.

Wednesday 23 October 2013

 
NOT NOW
BUT IN THE COMING YEARS
AND THEN
SOME TIME, WE’LL UNDERSTAND.
 
On one of my last stops in my last tour of the season, this inscription on a grave at the Ypres Reservoir Cemetery stopped me in my tracks. The first line was all raw emotion – the hand raised in front of the face – “Not now…” Then there was the hope – “in the coming years”, and the power of that last word – “understand”.
After my first season as a full time guide, can I claim to “understand” any more than I did 12 months ago? More importantly, do the various people I’ve met along the way feel as though they “understand” any more than they did as a result of my work?
 People feel moved to visit these cemeteries in ever increasing numbers. Do people visit hundred year old churchyard graves in the UK in similar numbers?  Of course not. It is this war, above all others,  that we all seek to “understand”. Those left behind after WW1 struggled to do so, as the inscription suggests. The grieving mother of Ronald Leighton said that she and her peers were suffering from what she described as “heart hunger”. A golden Edwardian summer had been blown away by a four year winter spent scouring the casualty lists and listening for the steady footfall of the postman.
A century later, we realise that to “understand” this war is no easy matter. To comprehend some of the facts that a battlefield guide deals with is in itself a struggle. 684 Newfoundlanders out of 752 dead or wounded in a matter of minutes on July 1st 1916. 225,000 shells fired in half an hour before the Somme offensive.  The 12,000 graves at Tyne Cot.  73,000 names on the Thiepval Memorial is just those missing in that campaign. The scale of the conflict, the enormity of some of these facts, partly explains the interest in the war, but it is also part of the challenge facing the guide. How to move towards understanding, how not to alienate. Always remembering that to “understand” is not necessarily to accept.
This war changed more than the landscape. The shells reshaped European society. It is no exaggeration to say that to “understand” this war is to go some way towards understanding the way we are today. The author of the inscription would be pleased to some extent that we have not given up trying to do so. There will be a raft of programmes on BBC, we were told earlier in the week, and book publishers will be busy too.
And at the Menin Gate, a few minutes’ walk from the Ypres Reservoir Cemetery, tourists will gather in ever increasing numbers to listen to the Last Post being played. To call these good people “tourists” seems a trifle harsh. I have had the privilege of leading some people this summer who would wish to be classified as “pilgrims”, perhaps. Families who travelled from thousands of miles away, like so many of the troops, to come to this corner of Europe. And my school groups would say they were not on holiday, rather they were in a series of different outdoor classrooms. I hope they feel that they were effective learning spaces, each and every one.
So I hope all these people feel as though they were more than “tourists”. I also hope that they began (at least) to “understand”.
 
 


Tuesday 1 October 2013

Somme Dawn


Q - how best to see the Somme?
A - like this. Quietly. Reflectively. At your own pace!

Saturday 31 August 2013

Dawn breaks over the Thiepval Ridge

Another good week's weather on the Western Front, with the blue skies and bucolic calm making it difficult to conceive of this place as the setting for a tragedy of epic proportions.
My guests this week stayed in Ypres for one night, having followed the story of their great uncle to Passchendaele, and to the Menin Gate memorial. Nights two and three were on the Somme. Hoping they can all answer the usual question - why pay more for a "bespoke" or "customised" trip.

Saturday 24 August 2013

 
In a War noted for its sense of tragedy and waste, the story of James Crozier still has the power to stop us in our tracks. He was a teenager, quite possibly underage when he signed up in the early days of the war, and had to be carried out to his execution because he was so drunk. The commanding officers feared that there would be a rebellion amongst the troops because of his youth, and the perceived cruelty of the judgement. To some extent they were right - the firing squad to a man fired wide of the mark, and Crozier's young life was ended by a single shot to the head by the junior officer in charge. Bizarrely, the commanding officer of the 9th Irish Royal Rifles was also a Crozier. Although unrelated to the hapless youngster, Lt-Col Frank Crozier had been present at James' enlistment, and had been able to promise his tearful mother that he would keep an eye on the boy. Sixteen months later, Frank Crozier, as his commanding officer, recommended that the death sentence be carried out. Later he attempted to cover up the whole story by including James in the list of those killed on active duty. He may have done this to ensure that Mrs Crozier should not be deprived of her son's army pension. When the story leaked out, as it was sure to do in such circumstances, Mrs Crozier had lost her son, and the money.
James Crozier lies in the Sucerie cemetery, near the village of Colincamps, close behind the original Allied lines. On a blue sky day on the Somme, with the butterflies playing around the headstone, there should have been a sense of peace here, but the young Ulsterman's story is a difficult one to forget. 

Monday 17 June 2013

Somme Fine day...

The indifferent 2013 "summer" continues to play havoc with our plans, but a party from the Tennis Club in Milford-On-Sea, Hampshire managed to avoid too many Wimbledon-style rain breaks on our overnight trip to the Somme on the 11th-12th June.

Thursday 6 June 2013

Single Steps to TV fame...

Fans of Flanders TV were backstage with us to get a flavour of life as an extra. Here's what they made of it all...

Saturday 25 May 2013


In December of this year, Belgian TV will begin the screening of an ambitious 10 part series called "In Vlamsee Felden" - "In Flanders Fields" - a story that follows the fortunes of a Belgian family from 1914 to 1918. It will be interesting to see if it is picked up by British TV, as our perspective on the conflict is inevitably centred on the struggles of the Commonwealth troops on the Western Front. For us, Ypres was a salient in the line, one of the dreaded postings for a Great War soldier. For the inhabitants of Brave Little Belgium, the war was nothing less than a struggle for their country's very existence. "In Vlaamsee Felden" will afford us the opportunity to see Belgium as more than a battlefield.
So it was through the magic of the Twitterscape that I idly answered a call for volunteers to help with the filming of the programme. The exact nature of the help was as yet unknown, but when I was called up by an exotic sounding creature called Tiffany I was hooked. I hardly noticed that I had begun to fill in the attached form with a series of my measurements. I was going to be an extra. As a parting shot, Tiffany told me I would need to grow a beard, and let it grow untouched until filming day. My wife was unimpressed that I seemed to spending so long on the phone with a mysterious woman. She was deeply suspicious of anything that might be being filmed in the Low Countries. But - a beard???
Having used up pretty much all of what are known as Domestic Brownie Points ( ask any married man for a definition. He'll shift uneasily in his seat and claim they don't apply to his marriage/relationship, but push him for an answer...) I crossed the Channel sporting the kind of beard that meant that I bore a stark resemblance to the caddy in "Happy Gilmour". As I travelled towards Antwerp, I wondered what kind of people I'd meet. Star-struck wannabes? Addicts queuing up for a few euros to feed their habits? Pale starving students trying to make it to the next Happy Hour? 
The people I met turned out to be nothing of the sort. Unless their acting skills were way above those required to be an extra...
All of us were inquisitive about the project, and equally uncomfortable in our newly acquired facial furniture, but we were an interestingly disparate band of brothers. There was a parish priest ( come on, it was mid week...), a trainee teacher, an ex Royal Engineer and about a terabyte's worth of IT folk. Most of them lived in Belgium, many of them English speaking Europeans in the broadest sense of the term, perhaps living the kind of European existence (free, tolerant) that world wars were fought to preserve.
We were based in the Old Judiciary buildings in Antwerp, and during the two days of filming there we did a lot of waiting. In poorly lit rooms and dusty corridors, we waited for a summons from a higher power, to be told to go one way or the other. A version of Catholic Purgatory, I muttered to our resident Anglican priest. Maybe that's exactly what it is, he replied. The twinkle in his eye suggested that he was joking, but that didn't make me feel any better. 
The extras were the responsibility of Nico, a young, energetic character who would encourage us between takes by saying that the previous 6 attempts had been "perfect". After a brief pause there came the punch line - "so we're going to do it again..." I couldn't imagine getting away with that line when I was squeezing coursework out of bored 16 year olds in my teaching days. So there would be another half dozen versions of perfection filmed before we were returned to our room to our ongoing scene from "Waiting for Godot".
Although he never showed it, there must be times when Nico doubts his calling. Organising a motley crew of inquisitive characters must have been like trying to herd cats on occasions, as various individuals whipped out I-phones to take photos of backstage scenes. The anachronistic sight of people dressed in uniforms from a hundred years ago brandishing modern technology was keeping the continuity editors on their toes, quite apart from anything else.
There was a bewildering range of jobs to be done on set. When the cameras rolled, all was in order. There was a clear focus. The director stood, arms folded, occasionally shaking his head mournfully. Scenes unfolded in all their choreographed splendour. Once we heard the call of "Stop" however, a version of Chaos descended. Intense conversations would break out among teams of technicians, people would scramble up ladders, screens would be moved a few centimetres to left or right to adjust light levels. The director would have a sharp animated exchange with his actors, who were young, but experienced enough not to fight over the point he was making. And the extras would walk back to their starting positions, winking to colleagues to acknowledge their own small but significant victory in the battle to be in shot. 
But as we reflected on things back in Purgatory, a battle may have been won, but the war itself would be decided by the post production team between now and December. Like a group of men in a damp dugout in the front line, we wondered how many of us would make it through the whole process, and how many would end up as casualties on the cutting room floor. 
We'll have to wait again - until December


Monday 13 May 2013

TV Filming

In Vlaamsee Verden (In Flanders Fields), a 10 part Belgian TV blockbuster that follows the fortunes of a family in WW 1, is in production. Single Step Tours will have a representative on the set next week in Antwerp!
Rudyard Kipling's son John (or Jack, as he was known to the family). Died in the Battle of Loos, 1915. His body was not identified until just recently, and there is still considerable doubt over the authentication. When pressed for an answer, most of those in the know will give a shrug of the shoulders. The grave is at St Mary's ADS Cemetery, just off the D39 towards Vermelles.
Whether it's him or not, it's a tragic story - a father who used his considerable influence to get his boy into the Irish Guards, despite the fact that he had failed the medical due to poor eyesight.

If any question why we died
Tell them because our fathers lied..


The Loos Memorial

Thursday 14 March 2013

Friday 1 March 2013

On St David's Day

 
 At Mametz, the dragon stares out over the valley, and up the gentle slope into the deep green of the Wood. In July of 1916 the 38th Welsh Division lost four thousand men in this tranquil place. Single Step Tours will be taking a trip there in May 2014.