98 years on...

98 years after the guns fell silent on the Western Front I find myself thinking of the 3500 US troops killed or wounded on that morning despite the fact that the generals knew that the armistice had been signed at 5am. The assaults on German positions continued right up to the designated 11am end to hostilities. Later, Congressman Fuller asked "Black Jack" Pershing if American lives had been "needlessly wasted" that morning.
Up at Compiegne, the German delegation had been startled by Foch's intransigence. His Gallic shrug and level stare was the response of a man who had seen his country bleeding to death over the course of the 4 years. "Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make" he said, and waved them away.
No proposals, perhaps - but plenty of demands. German troops were to leave France, Belgium and Luxembourg. They were also to return Alsace Lorraine to France - that old wound had barely dried since the Franco Prussian War nearly 40 years back. France and its Allies were out to ensure that Germany would never be in a position to cause trouble again.
But as every History student knows, the severity of the peace treaty at Versailles did much to guarantee that there would be future conflict. It provided fertile soil for the growth of the Nazi Party in the succeeding decades, and the bitter crop was harvested in the self same railway carriage in Compiegne in 1940.
Those History students will be asking some big questions today.
They will see that we descended into World War in 1914 and 1939 because the world order was unstable, and it was challenged by ultra nationalists. Vast economic forces, barely understood at the time, caused tensions inside countries, and beyond their borders. These were exploited by political chancers who had little real understanding of the demons that they were unleashing on the world.
So - big questions...

Wilfred Owen

It was on this day - November 4th, 1918 - that the poet Wilfred Owen was killed leading his men in an attack across a canal near Ors. The war was in its final few days, and the 25yr old's parents took delivery of the dreaded telegram as the church bells were ringing out to celebrate the end to four years of hostilities. There is a link to his poems here - opinion may be divided as to how representative Owen was of the typical WW1 officer, but there can be no doubting the power of his verse, nor the extent of his influence on our own perception of the conflict. The poetry, he said, was in the Pity...

The canal bank nr Ors, where Owen was killed on Nov 4th 1918

Somme Burials

Piece from Times here

Work on site at La Boiselle, Summer 2013

Customised Tours this month

Much of September was spent on the road, with two big bespoke tours here in the UK and Ireland. Both itineraries started and ended in Heathrow, but followed slightly different trajectories.
The first was a two week cultural tour of Wales and Ireland, staying on Cardiff Bay, Dylan Thomas' Laugharne, Dublin, WB Yeats' Sligo, Snowdonia and Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon.
The second tour was with a party of just over 20 people, staying in hotels at Bath, Cardiff and London. Again, the focus was on the cultural and historical sites that make the UK such a popular destination. Are we Brits guilty of taking what we have for granted?

 

Died of Wounds, 14th August, 1916

A hundred years ago, an officer of the South Wales Borderers lay in a hospital near Choques in Northern France, his life ebbing away. The dried mud of No Man's Land on his uniform told the story of the trench raid where he had been wounded. Now, in his final moments, he wanted to know if that raid had been successful.

“Have they got the Hun?”
The answer was yes – the Bavarian he captured was indeed in custody, and undergoing interrogation.
“Well,” he said, “at least I have done my bit.”

With that, Charlie Pritchard died.

“The Battalion lost a gallant officer and a generous and chivalrous gentleman” said the Commanding Officer's letter to his pregnant wife at home. Charlie was also a huge loss to his home town of Newport, where he had captained the top Rodney Parade side for three seasons in a club career of over two hundred appearances. Pritchard was also a loss to Welsh rugby as a whole. He was many people's Man of the Match in the epic 1905 victory over the All Blacks. It was inevitable that a man described by the Daily Mail as "in the thick of the fight" on that famous day should have been leading men on the Western Front a decade later.
For Florence Pritchard, his wife back home in Newport, the 14th of August was a day she dreaded for the rest of her life. The child she was carrying when Charlie died, the daughter he never knew, was born just before Christmas 1916, and died in 1985 - on the 14th of August.

Taken from "Newport Rugby Greats" by Peter Jones (Amberley 2016)

On Tour

Le Tour is the biggest event in France. A sporting public still raw from the disappointment of defeat by Portugal in Euro 2016 gathered in huge numbers to cheer the riders on. On Mt Ventoux, the enthusiasm of those crowds caused a crash that will go down in Tour folklore, as Sky's Chris Froome decided against waiting for a spare bike to be delivered and started running up the infamous slope.
Chaos and controversy have never been far away from this famous race. The winner of the inaugural Tour in 1903, Maurice Garin, was subsequently banned for two years for cheating in the 1904 Tour, effectively ending his career. The circumstances surrounding Garin's ban are still shrouded in mystery, with the Tour de France archives lost after the Nazi invasion of 1940.
Known as "The Little Chimney Sweep", Garin was born in the shadow of Mont Blanc in the Aosta valley in Italy. His family illegally crossed the Alps to France to look for work in the North, and there was a story of little Maurice being smuggled in by a local trafficker/guide in return for some local cheese. After working as a chimney sweep in Reims, Maurice Garin moved to Lens and opened a bike shop.He only returned once to his birthplace in Italy to see the 1934 Tour pass through his home town. It is perhaps interesting in a modern context to remember that he would always see himself as a Frenchman. A properly controlled border would have seen his family staying south of Mont Blanc, and Garin riding for Italy. Much more likely, his impoverished family would never have got within touching distance of a bike.

That Inaugural Tour of 1903 included a mammoth 471km stage from Nantes back to Paris, where Garin was crowned as the victor by a winning margin that still stands as a record - 2hrs 59minutes and 31 seconds. It makes Chris Froome's 2016 winning margin of 4 minutes and 5 seconds look a little less comfortable than it appeared to be. Whatever Garin (and several others) did to justify a ban a year later, there were no doubts raised as to his supremacy in 1903. The Little Chimney Sweep had swept all before him.

This year I took the opportunity to see the Tour as it played out its dramatic final scenes in the mountains around Mont Blanc. The whole event is pure theatre, from the moment you settle into your chosen viewing point to the last view of the exhaust pipes of the team cars. An hour or so before the riders are due to pass, a carnival of all shapes and sizes rolls by, firing various freebies at the crowd from sponsors - dishwasher samples, Madeleines, baseball caps and sausages. Then there is a distant thumping of the hoardings, away round the bend from your chosen stretch of road, and a rider appears, hunched over his handlebars, on a desperate quest for glory. The fizz of tyres on Tarmac, flashes of lycra'd colour, and a great rush of air that follows the back of the peloton as it pursues the leader.


This sequence is repeated over three weeks every summer. Sometimes you're lucky enough to see it live, but TV coverage makes it almost impossible to miss it. For the French, in a world stripped of certainties, it is a constant image in their sporting and cultural year. Reading about an aged Catholic priest having his throat cut at the altar of a church in a sleepy French village will only make them tighten their grip on such certainties. A man at the wheel of a lorry, drunk on the propaganda of a death cult, will not stop their Bastille Day.

2016 has raised questions about the UK's certainties. Are we "European" any more?
An early test - and perhaps an insight into what it means to "Brexit"- came with the huge queues at the Border Control gates at Dover. Brits, of course, are known for their patience in line. It is a national pastime to rival the Tour.The writer George Mikes once noted that "An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one". But 10 hours in a car with screaming children will have stretched the mental resources of the hardiest Brit. There would have been no point suggesting to those folks that the French, faced with the atrocity at Nice, were simply "Taking Back Control" of their borders.

Brexit raises many many issues for those of us who are dependent on travelling to the EU without undue hassle. Tourism between France and the U.K. is important for both economies. It was noticeable in recent days that there were large numbers of UK fans watching the Tour, encouraged by the success of Messrs Wiggins and Froome. Both countries would be the poorer if Brexit meant us retreating across the Channel.

For Single Step Tours, it is in the main UK visitors who travel to France and Belgium to see the WW1 battlefields. Brexit will not stop people wanting to make those pilgrimages. For me, however, there is a sense that the game has changed. When we stop in a vast space such as the Tyne Cot Cemetery on the Passchendaele Ridge outside Ypres, surveying 13,000 headstones, I am invariably asked "Can this happen again?"
My automatic reply before June 23rd ?
"No - because we're Europeans now"
So much better as an answer than a vague shrug of the shoulders and "I don't know".

The Iron Harvest

The so called "iron harvest" continues to amaze and appal in equal measure. The visitor to the Western Front has enough on his or her plate just getting their heads around the body count without contemplating the idea that this dreadful war might still be taking victims today.
A battlefield trip to the Somme with journalists from papers such as the Telegraph and Mirror led to a chance meeting with farmer Claude Samain, whose fields regularly yield piles of rusting munitions a hundred years on. In 1916, his fields were crisscrossed by a maze of communication trenches, filled with the flower of North country menfolk. Lads from Leeds and boys from Barnsley would have awaited their fate out on Claude's land. The ill fated Accrington Pals too. These were Kitchener's volunteers, who joined up in the breathless excitement of the late summer of 1914. They had trained hard, and were desperate to impress. This was their town's chance to make a mark. The Accrington Pals would become famous for the role they would play in the great breakthrough, they hoped. Tragically, they have become synonymous with the blood letting of July 1st, 1916. Accrington is forever associated with a strangely named football team and the fact that out of 700 men who went over the top on that sunny morning, 585 of them were dead or wounded just minutes later. They were, as a witness said, "mown down like meadow grass".
Claude's land is peaceful now. He showed us rusted heaps of metal, plied up against the brick wall of a barn. The weight and sharp edges of the shrapnel makes you shudder - what these red hot pieces of flying metal could do to a human body doesn't bear thinking about for too long. Venomous coils of barbed wire, spent cartridges, shell fuzes and bent rifle barrels had all been collected by Claude over the past few months. And around the corner, the dangerous stuff. Unexploded shells, some no doubt containing poison gas, stood to attention in neat rows waiting for the army truck to arrive. There didn't appear to be any rush.
Claude and his fellow farmers can be forgiven for being a little blasé about it all. He recalled his time as a child in these fields, exploring a nearby copse which had been used a medical post. He would chase around, hunting amongst the shredded pieces of tarpaulin for treasures in a place where  wounded men, some screaming, some at the very point of death, would have been carried in by sweating stretcher bearers. Suffering on an unimaginable scale has always formed the backdrop to his life in this quiet, rural corner of France.

 

STA Neil - kia July 1st 1916

Leeds Pals

All too brief

Cecil Abercrombie - Died at Jutland, May 31st, 1916 

In 1977, a battered, dust covered photo album was hooked out of a builder’s skip on a street in central London. The pictures captured the pre WW1 marriage of a young naval officer called Cecil Abercrombie.  A rugby international and a Hampshire cricketer, Abercrombie was destined to be one of the 8,500 men killed at the Battle of Jutland at the end of May, 1916.

He spent some of his youth with relatives in the New Forest, the Shaw family of Milford House, and on joining the navy he played rugby for the Combined Services side in Portsmouth. A powerful loose forward, he went on to win six Scottish caps. By the summer of 1912 he had taken up cricket, and he impressed the crowd at Lords with some destructive hitting in the Army v Navy match. His quick fire century in the second innings featured a mammoth six that landed on the players’ dressing room balcony. Hampshire lost no time in securing his signature.

In just 13 matches in the summer of 1913, Abercrombie scored nearly a thousand runs.  Most famously, Abercrombie combined with George Brown to produce a huge stand of 325 for the seventh wicket against Essex, a record that is still etched proudly on Hampshire’s records board more than a hundred years later. Abercrombie smashed 165 runs, including 11 fours and 4 sixes.

Hampshire’s supporters would have been licking their lips at the prospect of their new hero dismantling County attacks in the 1914 season, but naval duty called for Abercrombie.

When his ship, HMS Defence, was finally called into action at Jutland at the end of May 1916, Abercrombie was one of 903 men lost. Defence had lasted a matter of minutes in combat. A stunned officer on board a nearby ship, the Obedient, wrote that after a huge explosion “we could see no sign of a ship at all – Defence had gone.”

Abercrombie and his wife had only married in 1913, and the battered photo album saved from the builders’ skip was the record of their time together. Like Abercrombie’s cricket career, her married life had been all too brief.

Fighting them on the Beaches

"Wars are not won by evacuations" Churchill, 1940

Careful preparation of a battlefield tour involves walking familiar ground all over again, thinking practically about the logistics of where coaches can park, starving schoolkids can eat etc etc.
But in the midst of the logistics, Jeremy Banning (www.jeremybanning.co.uk) and I had the time and space to think about the events of 1940. Both of us spend most of our time on WW1, and the tour we're planning for Single Step will take in the Ypres Salient, but the fact that we will be based at Dunkerque means that it is an opportunity for us to tie in the events of WW2.

There are some who see the struggle against Hitler as an extension of 1914-18 - in other words, one long World War, stretching over the first half of the twentieth century. The Kaiser and the Fuhrer were very different men, of course, but the roots of conflict go back to the relative imbalance of power in Europe. Germany, as the growing force at the centre of the continent, was restless. The Kaiser wanted his "place in the sun". Hitler wanted "lebensraum". Same difference?

Preparing a school battlefield tour of the Dunkirk area took us to the beautiful Memorial (see the picture), whose panels are filled with the names of 4,500 men who have no known grave. We also called in on the excellent Dunkirk museum (http://www.dynamo-dunkerque.com/en/) - a place that packs an awful lot into a small space - as well as the beach itself. A view across the level sands towards the Bray Dunes from the Mole is immediately populated by thousands of khaki figures and abandoned trucks in the popular imagination, such is the power of the Dunkirk myth three generations later. Close your eyes and you can hear the satanic screams of the Stuka bombers. Over 338,000 men were lifted from this area in 1940 in one of the most remarkable operations of any war. The Admiralty thought they might be able to rescue about 45,000. Although, as Churchill noted, wars are not won through evacuations, the "Miracle of Dunkirk" meant that Hitler could not assume that Britain was out of the war just yet. Cue graphics and theme tune from "Dad's Army".

Planning for the summer

With a long winter behind us, battlefield guides are shaking themselves down and sniffing the air. Daffodils are out.

The email inbox is filling up with requests to go to Ypres or the Somme - the usual venues - but also to visit small, out of the way cemeteries down quiet tracks to find the grave of a relative killed a hundred years ago. These bespoke battlefield tours are always special, and I learn as much as my clients on these trips.

And away from the WW1 battlefield tours, there are some intriguing cultural trips in the offing. Dylan Thomas' Wales, Yeats' Ireland and Shakespeare's Stratford are all in the mix.

It's all in the planning...

Thoughts from last battlefield tour.

WW1 changed us as a country, probably in more ways than we might imagine. Fighting a Total War meant that the state had to modernise its approach, and it had to pass laws that allowed it to fight that war in the most effective way possible.

The logistics of moving millions of men, feeding them, training them, kitting them out - all this had to be carried out by a High Command that was used to handling a pre war force that was a fraction of the size of the British Army between 1914 and 1918. And, of course, that pre war force had been a fully professional outfit. To turn those keen recruits that joined up in their thousands when war was declared in the late summer of 1914 into soldiers was a mammoth task, and it could only be done with the support of a modern industrial state working at full capacity.

On our last bespoke battlefield tour, where this was discussed at some length, we reflected on the fact that the logistics behind the CWGC was evidence of a highly organised state structure too. This was particularly obvious at Thiepval and the Menin Gate, where the individual names of those who were lost were painstakingly recorded and carved into stone.
Lest We Forget.

Politicians on Battlefield Tours

A little something in the news this week. Mr Cameron and Monsieur Hollande meeting at Pozieres Cemetery, a place that holds great significance for me and my family. There are over 2,700 men buried in the courtyard space just off the Albert to Bapaume road, but it was a name on the surrounding wall that first brought me to the Somme nearly 20 years ago. One name amongst 14000 - those who were missing after the German Spring Offensive in 1918.

William Watkinson was with the Lancashire Fusiliers, and was killed in the German attack launched on a foggy morning in late March 1918. It was the Kaiserschlacht, the last desperate throw of the dice by the German High Command. Although initially successful, sweeping away the hapless Lancashire Fusiliers just north of St Quentin, the offensive eventually fizzled out. The tide finally turned in August 1918, and some of the casualties that lie in Pozieres Cemetery are from that final push to victory. By that time, of course, my great grandmother Rose had received the dreaded telegram, and she was beginning to face up to life with her two daughters.
I still remember the moment when I first saw William Watkinson's name, in the company of my father and his two brothers. The grandfather they never knew.
Bottom left hand corner, if you get a moment Dave.

On this day

On February 29th, 1916 - two entirely unrelated events. Hardly noted at the time, the first event was one of those unheeded warnings that lead on to ultimate disaster, the second so small scale that it would have been noticed by a handful of colleagues and perhaps a proud mum.

Firstly - on this day a hundred years ago, Hollweg, the German Chancellor, warned the Kaiser that pursuing a policy of unrestricted UBoat warfare would run the risk of dragging the US into the conflict. Thirteen months later, Woodrow Wilson stood before the US Congress to ask for their support, and Hollweg was proved right. War, as Wilson put it, had been "thrust upon the United States". For many months the greatest economic power in the world had resisted the call to get involved "over here", but the U Boat campaign was a disastrous misjudgement. Despite the defeat of Russia later in 1917, and the consequent freeing of a million troops that could bolster their numbers on the Western Front, the tide was turning against Germany. Pretty soon, in a war of attrition, the generals knew that the fresh faced "Doughboys" streaming into Europe would tip the balance.

The second event that occurred exactly a hundred years ago today - a keen soldier was promoted to the rank of Corporal. His name - Benito Mussolini. Like his future ally Adolf Hitler, so much of his thinking was forged by the conflict. I find myself wondering what on earth the comrades of both men made of their elevation to power in the 1930's, and of the fact that they were, despite these experiences, so determined to take their countries back to the battlefield. 

Bespoke Battlefield Tour - an example

Lots of people ask me what I do, so here's what I did in the past few days!

Last Friday (19th February) I flew out to Paris to do a couple of days' work on a French Revolution Walk in the capital. It was a productive weekend, and I covered some miles on those French boulevards. Now feel confident about a prospective route, including the crucial lunch venues and occasional patisserie stops. All this takes some in depth research, as I'm sure you appreciate...
The story of the Revolution takes you between three crucial points - from the Bastille to the east to the Place de la Concorde, the old Place de la Revolution, where Madame La Guillotine was hard at work 220 years ago. Then over the river to Les Invalides to see Napolean's tomb. Visiting here brings the story full circle, as the guns and ammunition to attack the Bastille were looted from Les Invalides. The walk back into the centre through the Latin Quarter takes you in the footsteps of the mob in 1789. Along the way are reminders of the fact that Paris has seen the worst of European violence for the past two centuries. Sharpnel holes from WW1 Zeppelin raids and plaques reminding Parisiens that WW2 heroes died at that spot in 1944 are all underlining the fact that this city has played a central role in European history.

On Sunday morning I left the Gare du Nord to make the 55 minute journey to Arras. I was meeting clients that night for a bespoke battlefield tour, a birthday gift from a husband to his Welsh wife. We would be spending Monday on the Somme, and Tuesday afternoon around Ypres. We were going to see the Last Post on Tuesday night, and go our separate ways on Wednesday as they continued their European tour.

Arras was damp and a little on the cold side on Sunday, but the downbeat weather forecasters got it wrong. Monday was overcast, but largely dry, and we started our Welsh theme with a visit to Bois Francais, near the village of Fricourt. This part of the front is described in some detail by Sassoon (who won his MC here) and Graves. Some of their young colleagues are buried at Point 110 Cemetery.

From there, the route took us to Danzig Alley Cemetery, then on to Mametz Wood and its famous dragon memorial. A group of Rotarians from Denbigh broke into hymns at this spot last year, reducing my driver to tears. A place of huge significance for the Welsh.

After a bite of lunch, we were off to Delville Wood, then on to admire the scaffolding poles on the Thiepval Memorial, then Beaumont Hamel, Serre and home - just as it started to get damp...

A conversation over a pression that night on the wartime contribution of the Empire led to a visit to the beautiful Indian Memorial at Neuve Chappelle en route to Ypres. After lunch in "Pop", we took on the Pilckem Ridge, calling in on the poet Hedd Wyn, and admiring the new Dragon on the road to Langemark. The German cemetery there, and the CWGC site at Tyne Cot, pretty much filled our afternoon. The inscription on the grave of a soldier called Aneurin Maldwyn Evans (By fyw in farw/By farw I fyw - He lived to die, he died to live) was a suitable point to stop our WW1 Welsh tour, and we headed into Ypres.

The Last Post that night was just as I like it - not too crowded, simple, and beautifully observed. Plenty to think about and talk about over a goodbye beer at the excellent Ariane Hotel.





If you have a group, big or small, who might be interested in this, or any other, itinerary give me a call on 07515 683456.
Tours are built around what you want!

www.singlesteptours.com

Summer Plans

  "Education is not the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire..."

The words of WB Yeats always struck me as one of the wisest, but most widely ignored things ever said about education. This summer a Single Step Tour will give me the opportunity to visit his grave in County Sligo to pay my respects to one of the great names of Western civilisation.

The bespoke cultural tour will start with a Heathrow pick up, followed by a drive to Cardiff, where there will be some family roots to uncover. After a stay at the beautiful St David's Hotel on the Bay, we will drive to Laugharne. A night of "Poems and Pints" at Dylan Thomas' favourite watering hole, Brown's Hotel should get us in the mood for a day spent around the Welsh wizard's home town.

A crossing from Fishguard to Rosslare takes us next to the Emerald Isle. First up, a stay in Dublin, where we can sample the delights of Temple Bar, as well as retrace the steps of the Easter rebels of a hundred years ago. Our base will be the Grand Canal Hotel

Then the pilgrimage to Yeats country - with a visit to his grave and a trip to the mythical The Lake Isle of Innisfree

The route back to Heathrow will take us back over to Wales - North wales this time, where we will spend some time at Portmeirion and Snowdonia as well as studying the work and creative environment of another Thomas - the priest poet, RS Thomas.

A day and night at Shakespeare's Stratford rounds off a busy few days for the "pilgrim souls" on this bespoke tour...