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.