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...

Looking back, looking forward...

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 21^st 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 1^st 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

www.singlesteptours.com

Chasing the Dragon.

Time to head back to the Somme! A three night trip based in Arras starting tomorrow, 15th September. It's a bespoke tour, following in the footsteps of a Welsh soldier who was killed in the last few weeks of the war as the Allied army chased the retreating Germans across the old 1916 battlefield.

ARTHUR JAQUES



 ARTHUR JAQUES

The figure in the striped blazer in the middle of the front row is Arthur Jaques, a newcomer to the Hampshire side in the two seasons leading up to the Great War. A tall opening bowler, he lived in Bassett, a suburb of Southampton. A hundred years ago, in the late summer of 1915, he was on his way to the catastrophe that became known as The Battle of Loos. He had ended his season, and his cricketing career, with 6 wickets for 55 runs in 23 overs at Dean Park, Bournemouth. Arthur had also just married. By the early autumn of 1914, however, he and his twin brother had signed up.

Having gained commissions in the 12th West Yorkshire Regiment, the Jaques brothers would have undergone training in the Home Counties. The West Yorkshires were part of the 21st Division, which was based near Tring. June 1915 saw them at Halton Park, where they were finally issued with rifles. Soon they were on the move, this time to the camp at Witley. Lord Kitchener inspected them on manoeuvres on 12th August. The losses incurred by the B.E.F. in the failed campaigns of 1915 meant that the 21^st Division was soon sending advance parties over the Channel, and the remainder of the Division left for France from Folkestone on the 7th of September. The different units gathered at a camp near the town of Tilques.

A sense of excitement must have been building by this time, but the worsening weather, allied to a series of taxing forced marches, would have tested that early enthusiasm. The men were marching ten to fifteen miles a night, carrying heavy packs in pouring rain. Exhausted and soaked to the skin, they would be allowed to rest at daybreak, and lay down in the mud by the side of the road. It was up to officers such as Arthur to keep these troops moving and following orders. This would have been no mean feat when the men discovered two days out of Loos that their food supplies had not caught up with them.

One of the great mistakes made at the Battle of Loos was that reserve units such as the 12th Yorkshires were kept too far back from the front. The modest gains of the initial attacks were then lost as German counter attacks wrestled back control of their trenches before Allied reserve units could help to consolidate the ground taken. So it was that the 12th Yorkshires did not get into action until Sunday 27th September. For such inexperienced troops, the sloping ground near Bois Hugo became a killing ground. With most of their officers (including Arthur and Joseph Jaques) dead, the remainder of the men crawled back to their frontline trenches. The 21^st Division had suffered 3800 casualties. No ground was gained. It was the final nail in the coffin for Sir John French, who was sacked as Commander-in-Chief of the B.E.F. shortly afterwards.

According to one report by Major-General Forester-Walker the 12th West Yorkshires did not behave with credit and retired without due cause. When one looks at the shortcomings of the planning and execution of the Battle of Loos, it is easy to see why men such as Forester-Walker were so quick to play the blame game. Inexperienced, exhausted and hungry, Jaques and his men found out exactly what Haig meant when he talked about “unfavourable ground”. For one young officer in the Royal Welsh, it was his first taste of combat. Robert Graves describes Loos as a “bloody balls-up” A hundred years later, looking out from the viewing platform at the Loos Memorial which bears the names of the Jaques brothers, one instinctively trusts the judgement of the junior Royal Welsh officer over the Major-General.

For more on Jaques and other Hampshire cricketers in WW1 see A Torch in Flame

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1897887493?keywords=A%20Torch%20in%20Flame&qid=1441385336&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1