Single Step Tours
is now three years old, and a look back over the trips I’ve done with people
shows that there is a huge appetite for battlefield tours, and particularly bespoke WW1
battlefield tours. From the Somme tour with 50 inquisitive 14 yr olds to taking
two sisters to a cemetery outside Ypres to stand by a graveside on the
centenary of the death of a member of their family, all sorts of people are
drawn to the Western Front.
People wonder if all this interest will melt away after
2018, but the truth is that the centenary is just part of the picture. The
various events give bespoke battlefield tours the oxygen of publicity, of course. The
Somme in July 2016 will see the downside of that, potentially, as the little
Somme villages are overwhelmed. Iconic points on the First World War map will
be holding their own events – Thiepval, La Boisselle to name but two – and
these events will be heavily over-subscribed.
But beyond all the headline stuff, the desire to travel to
the Western Front, to make a 21st century pilgrimage, is more than
just a desire to “be there” a hundred years later. Tens of thousands of people,
of course, will be able to make a connection with the 57,000 killed or wounded
on the 1st of July 1916. What’s been clear to me in the last three
years is that every family has its own centenary, however. The key date may be
linked to a major offensive, but it’s just as likely to be the centenary of the
arrival of a random shell in some support trench well behind the front line. It
was a war that defied sense in so many ways, but the work of such figures as
Edwin Lutyens at least gives families a focal point, an opportunity to make a
journey a century later to try to understand what happened. And that focal
point could be a grave, but could just as easily be a name inscribed on a wall,
many miles away from where their relative fell.
The hunger for ww1 tours, and particularly bespoke
battlefield tours, has been generated by the advent of the internet. WW1 is
just beyond living memory, and as people try to assemble their family trees,
the Ancestry links inevitably take them to www.cwgc.org,
and a reference to some cemetery in a sleepy French village. A customised tour
is the next step, the last piece in the jigsaw. For many people, there is a
passing interest in the idea of a mass service at a place like Thiepval, but
most would probably prefer one of those quiet evenings, when the crowds have
dispersed, and the last of the sun’s rays pick out the names. There, with a
view out over the Ancre Valley, people can truly “be there”.
Peter Jones
