Lochnagar Crater Service
of Commemoration 1 July 2016
Bob Podesta writes:
Due to the limited space available at the Crater, for safety
reasons, authorities have insisted that the number of attendees to the 1 July
2016 ceremony be restricted to 5,000 ticket holders. Roads around the Crater
will be closed to all non authorised traffic and park and ride facilities will
be provided.
French police will only allow ticket holders access to the
Crater.
Application forms for tickets (restricted to two per person)
will be available from the Lochnagar Crater website from 1 Oct 2015 (www.lochnagarcrater.org).
Richard apologises in advance to anyone unable to obtain a
ticket
5th Annual Badged Guides
Dinner – Central London Friday 7th August
Graeme Cooper writes:
The Dining Room for this year’s Dinner can offer 3 more
places. If any Badged Guide wishes to attend the Dinner will they please
contact Graeme Cooper soonest please? info@corporatebattlefields.com
DRESS: Dress is Black Tie for gentleman and ladies
accordingly. Guiding Badges to be worn. No Medals.
COST: The Dinner is 3 course with wine. The cost
will now be under that of last year (£71) Reservation is a commitment on trust.
Payment will be by cheque made out to ‘The Guild of Battlefield Guides’. Exact
cost will be notified shortly.
VENUE: Accordingly the selected venue is unique and steeped
in history.
ACCOMMODATION: As usual accommodation is available at the
Union Jack Club. When booking please state that you are a Guild Member to
secure the reduced price offered.
RENDEZVOUS for the evening will be at 6.45pm at a location
to be notified shortly.
FACEBOOK: ‘Who is sitting in the chair and on which
battlefield’ ‘The Badged Ones’ at it again https://www.facebook.com/TheBadgesOnes
Attending the 5th Annual Badged Guides Dinner:
Bob Darby
Mike Sheil
Andrew Duff
Tim Stoneman
Alan Wood
Ian Gumm
John Hamill
David Harvey
Paul Oldfield
Graeme Cooper
Belgium Tourist Office
Tour
Secretary writes:
Members will recall that for the last two years the Belgian
Tourist Office in London, through the good offices of Philippe Maree, has
organised a tour of some of the lesser known battlefield sites in Belgium for
the GBG. He is proposing to do the same this year for members who have not yet
had the opportunity to go on the trip. The proposed dates are Friday 28th
August until Sunday 30th. The Tourist Board will pay all accommodation costs
but there may be a charge for transport. If appropriate the Guild will consider
hiring a coach to take members over.
Please can you let me know if you are interested in taking
part this year.
City Of Charleroi
Exhibition
Olivier Beaurent writes:
The City of Charleroi logically is organising the "June
1815 - Napoleon in Charleroi - The Ultimate campaign" exhibition.
This exhibition recounts the passage of the Emperor in
Charleroi and the historical facts of the 15th to the 19th of June 1815, in
Charleroi and the surrounding areas and is logically complementary to the other
exhibitions and events organized in Waterloo, Ligny, Fleurus ...
Made with the support of the Napoleonic Belgian Association,
the exhibition will offer to the public many original and unique pieces: for
the first time in Belgium, the Chalençon collection, one of the finest private
collections devoted to Napoleon ... But also many other treasures from private
Belgian and Carolo collections.
The exhibition is open to individuals and groups until the
13th of September 2015 (closed Mondays) and guided tours are possible.
Réservations available at « Maison du Tourisme du pays de
Charleroi » 003271861414 - mail : maison.tourisme@charleroi.be
Arnhem Event 8th - 11th
October 2015
Wybo Boersma writes:
The details of the forthcoming Arnhem event and application
form are now up on the website in the events section.
First War Centenary News
Mike Peters writes:
Members may be interested in these Centenary Updates from
Centenerynews.com:
Gallipoli: Australia & New Zealand to remember August
1915 offensive
Australia and New Zealand are to hold commemorations in
August 2015 marking the 100th anniversary of the last major Allied offensive at
Gallipoli. The Australian service will be held on August 6th at Lone Pine
Cemetery on the Turkish peninsula.
New Zealanders will gather at the Chunuk Bair Memorial on
August 8th to remember their forces' role in the last major Allied attempt to
break out of the beachheads in 1915. Neither service will be balloted or
ticketed but visitors are asked to register their intention to attend. Full
details of the events can be found on the Australian and New Zealand Gallipoli
2015 websites.
New Zealand Veterans' Affairs Minister, Craig Foss, said:
“Chunuk Bair was the site of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force’s most
significant action during the Gallipoli campaign,”
“Hundreds of Kiwi soldiers fought and died in an ultimately
futile bid for control of this strategic vantage point.
“The centenary service on August 8 will honour those
soldiers for their bravery and sacrifice.”
The Battle for Chunuk Bair was also notable as the first
major engagement of the Maori Contingent. The August offensive was a concerted
attempt to end more than three months of deadlock at Gallipoli, a campaign
aimed at knocking Turkey out of the First World War. Allied forces were still
confined to the beaches where they'd landed on April 25th 1915. A series of
attacks was launched on August 6th, with the aim of capturing the heights of
Sari Bair dominating the peninsula above Anzac Cove. Australian, New Zealand,
British, Irish and Gurkha troops were involved in the operation, which also saw
a new British landing at Suvla Bay to the north of Anzac Cove. The Australians
stormed Turkish trenches at Lone Pine to divert attention from the main
assault, taking control after four days of fierce fighting. New Zealanders
occupied the summit of Chunuk Bair on August 8th. Two days later, it was
recaptured as part of an Ottoman counter-attack, led by Mustafa Kemal, that
drove the allies back from the heights. The Australians held Lone Pine until
the evacuation of Allied forces from Gallipoli in December 1915.
Detailed accounts of the August offensive at Gallipoli can
be found on the websites of the Australian War Memorial, the New Zealand
Government's NZ History, and the Gallipoli Association.
Somme Centenary 2016 - UK announces ballot for Thiepval
tickets
The UK Government announced today that a ballot will be held
for tickets to attend next year's commemorations in France marking the 100th
anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. The event, organised jointly with
France's Mission Centenaire, will take place at the Thiepval Memorial on July
1st 2016.
The public ballot will be launched on September 28th 2015.
People will be able to enter online through a dedicated Somme 2016 Ballot
website.
You can also register now for updates - but this will not
enter you for the ballot.
Today's announcement comes as the 99th anniversary of the
start of the Battle of the Somme is being remembered at events in France. The
British offensive of 1916 was launched at 7.30am on July 1st after a week-long
artillery barrage which failed to break the fortified German lines. By the end
of the opening day, 20,000 British soldiers had been killed and almost 40,000
others were wounded or missing. More than 72,000 British and South African
troops who have no known grave are remembered on the multiple arches of the
Thiepval Memorial; the majority of them fell in the First World War offensive
of July-November 1916. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has started major
restoration works at Thiepval as part of the Somme Centenary preparations.
Tickets for this year's Gallipoli Centenary commemorations
were balloted by the Australian and New Zealand Governments because of high
demand and limited capacity at Anzac Cove.
Source: UK Government (Department for Culture, Media &
Sport)
Undeveloped First World War negatives discovered in
German library archives
Centenary News writer, Katherine Quinlan-Flatter, describes
how her research into the life of a young German doctor at the Western Front
has led her to rediscover an undeveloped film of the last days of the war in a
German archive.
Since October 2013, I have been researching the letters of
Dr. Theodor Kiefer, known to his friends and family as “Tor” and the son of
Alexander Kiefer, a well-to-do architect and master mason in our small town of
Ettlingen in Baden, South Germany. These letters are held in our Town Archive
in Ettlingen, but in October 2014 I discovered Tor’s own estate in a library in
Speyer. It contains many fascinating articles and objects, but one of my most
exciting finds to date has been two small packets of undeveloped negatives from
the Western Front in 1918.
By the outbreak of the First World War, Tor’s older brother
Oskar was already a renowned sculptor, who had created statues and monuments in
various German and Swiss cities. It is Oskar’s estate that is held in the Town
Archive in Ettlingen, and it consists mainly of diaries, sketches and letters.
A great many of these letters were written by Tor to his family from both the
Eastern and the Western Fronts. Because Tor was such an excellent reporter and
because, as an officer, his letters were not censored, they provide tremendous
insights to life at the Front, and contribute many details of historical and
military significance.
I had learned in 2013 that Tor’s estate itself had been
bequeathed to an archive in the Rhineland-Palatinate, the state in which Tor’s
adopted home city of Kaiserslautern is situated.
However, as Tor had died in 1985 at the age of 96, nobody
could remember which archive actually held his estate. The town archivist of
Ettlingen and I contacted every archive in the Rhineland-Palatinate without
success, until I stumbled by chance on the Palatinate State Library in Speyer,
which, it transpired, holds around 50 boxes of Tor Kiefer’s estate. My first
visit to the Library in Speyer was thrilling. It was the first time since Tor’s
death in 1985 and the original categorisation by the Library that the boxes had
been removed from the shelves and opened. Many of the contents were completely
unresearched.
I continued to visit the Library regularly to research the
contents of the boxes, and in December 2014 I discovered the two packets of
around 20 individual negatives, 4.5 cm by 6.5 cm, which I could see were photos
from the Front.
No developed photos of these negatives exist, and so I
developed them myself using a smartphone app and a light table provided to me
by the Library. The results were mainly very good, although some of the
negatives are a little damaged. Tor seemed to possess an excellent camera and
most of the photos have an artistic touch, redolent of his creative family
background. The only drawback was that I initially had very little indication
of the time or place where Tor had taken them.
However, together with a friend and the assistance of the
Regimental Histories of the Reserve Infantry Regiments 249, 250 and 251 (to
which Tor was assigned), written in the 1920s and 1930s, we have been able to
find out the stories behind many of these photos. They span the last days of
the War in 1918 at the Western Front and the march home of the German troops.
Following the ceasefire signals blown by buglers at around 11 o’clock French
time on the morning of November 11, 1918, bonfires were lit all along the
Front, states the Regimental History of the RIR 251. Tor, in his memoirs “The
End Of The War”, which I also found in a box in the Library, writes:
“Everywhere, matches blazed under wood that had been painstakingly gathered,
and across the whole Line, one could see the small fires smoking”. Taking into
account the resigned, unhappy expressions of the officers, it seems likely that
Tor shot this photo shortly after the ceasefire signal.
In one photo, the troops have flowers stuck onto the tops of
their bayonets. We thus realised that the men were marching home. The
Regimental Histories describe how the returning troops were greeted with
flowers by the German population and shouts of “Our boys are coming!”
(although, in some cases, they were attacked by young boys who ripped off their
cockades and epaulettes in the streets). The bridge, which my friend was able
to identify from another old photo as the Kaiserbrücke at Mainz, looks
completely different today. The Regimental History of the RIR 251 states that
these troops marched over the Kaiserbrücke on November 30, 1918, to “thunderous
jubilation” from the population of Mainz.
The film also includes other photos of the march home, many
of which can be identified thanks to landmarks and scenery. Two photos show the
troops at the bridge in Bingen, where the River Nahe meets the River Rhine and
through which almost all returning German troops passed. I travelled to Bingen
to try to reproduce this photo of the bridge, but my efforts were not as
successful as Tor’s, who possessed both artistic talent and a far superior
camera. In addition, the film contains a photo of the bugler blowing the
ceasefire signal. To our knowledge, it is the only photo of this kind that
exists. Other photos show troops at rest in the field on the Western Front,
dugouts, explosions at the Line and captured French prisoners.
These photos, together with Tor’s letters, memoirs and his
books of sketches from the Western Front have enabled me to build up a more
comprehensive picture of Tor’s life in the last stages of the War and
afterwards, and to provide, to some extent, an in-depth study of both
historical events and daily social life at the Front.
Copyright: Centenary News and Author
Centenary News Lookahead: Battle of Jutland
31 May 2016 will mark the centenary of one of the most
important naval battles of the First World War – the Battle of Jutland between
the British and German fleets in the North Sea. Centenary News has received
requests for information from a number of descendants and readers regarding
next year's commemorations. In response, we have done a preliminary round-up of
the Jutland events planned in the UK that have been announced thus far.
This page will be updated in the run-up to the centenary as
more information comes through.
- The UK Government has announced that the Battle of Jutland
centenary is one of the six key First World War dates chosen for special
national commemorations. Although specific details have yet to be released,
they are expected to include events on 31 May and 1 June in Scapa Flow, Orkney.
More details are expected to be announced later in 2015.
- The Royal Navy will be leading a commemorative event in
Scapa Flow, from where the Grand Fleet sailed in 1916. The event is likely to
involve modern warships from a number of navies.
- Orkney Islands Council: It is anticipated that a number of
cultural events will occur in the days following the national ceremony on 31
May.
These will culminate in a commemorative event on 5 June 2016
marking the 100th anniversary of the sinking of HMS Hampshire, with the loss of
737 men including Britain's War Minister, Lord Kitchener. In addition, the
summer exhibition at Orkney Museum will focus on the war at sea.
- Scapa Flow Visitor Centre and Museum: Alongside other
confirmed funding, Orkney Islands Council was awarded £25,000 in 2014 from
Museums Galleries Scotland as part of a large scale project which aims to
refurbish and improve the Scapa Flow Visitor Centre and Museum.
The museum is housed in wartime naval buildings at Lyness on
the island of Hoy. The overall project to refurbish the museum is a long
term programme which will start after the Battle of Jutland commemorations.
However, the MGS funding will support the conservation of
key small wartime artefacts from the Council collection, which will be
completed by the time of the commemorations.
- Orkney Memorial Project: The Orkney Heritage Society is
leading a project to restore the Kitchener Memorial tower in Birsay, Orkney,
and to add a commemorative wall to the hundreds of crewmen who died aboard HMS
Hampshire in 1916. The current memorial, raised by the people of Orkney in
memory of Lord Kitchener, was erected in 1926.
- HMS Caroline: the last surviving warship to take part in
the Battle of Jutland was the recipient of a £12 million Heritage Lottery Fund
grant that will see her fully restored and transformed into a floating museum.
The restoration is taking place in Belfast docks, where the cruiser has been
berthed since 1923. In her final years, she served as a static training base.
HMS Caroline's opening will coincide with the Battle of Jutland anniversary.
- Jutland Memorial Project: a project aiming to erect a
memorial and open a museum to commemorate the Battle of Jutland at the Royal
Navy’s home city of Portsmouth. It hopes to create a Jutland Book of
Remembrance to detail and commemorate casualties from the British and German
navies.
Sources: UK Government, Department of Culture, Media
and Sport, Orkney Heritage Society, Orkney Islands Council, National Museum of
the Royal Navy.
100 Years Ago Today: the start of the First Battle of
Isonzo
On June 23rd 1915, Italy began the First Battle of Isonzo by
launching an offensive from northeast Italy across the border into
Austria-Hungary. It was the beginning of a series of engagements, known as the
Eleven Battles of Isonzo, the last of which ended in September 1917. A lot of
the fighting took place in what is now Slovenia. The Isonzo is a river on the
boder between Italy and what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire - and
stretches from the Julian Alps to the Adriatic Sea. In 1915, the river was on
the Austro-Hungarian side of the border.
The Italians initially outnumbered the Austro-Hungarians, but
suffered large casualties as they tried to attack well-fortified positions in
the hills and mountains above the river. The aim was to capture the
Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste, but the Italian forces made little progress.
As Wikipedia puts it: "By the autumn of 1915 one mile
had been won by Italian troops, and by October 1917 a few Austrian mountains
and some square miles of land had changed hands several times. Italian troops
did not reach the port of Trieste, the Italian General Luigi Cadorna's initial
target, until after the Armistice".
'The Dreamers' - new musical remembering soldiers lost at
sea off Gallipoli Date of Event: 29 June 2015
A musical telling the story of a British officer and his
soldiers who drowned at sea on their way to Gallipoli is being brought to the
London stage in summer 2015.
The Dreamers is about Captain David 'Reggie' Salomons and
the troops of the 1/3 Field Company who were lost when the ferry carrying them
to Helles collided with a larger troop ship in Mudros Bay on October 28th 1915.
Salomons stayed on board HMS Hythe, a converted cross-channel steamer, to help
with the rescue and was last seen giving away his life jacket to another
soldier. More than 150 soldiers died in the disaster; most of them were from
the counties of Kent and Sussex.
The Dreamers features original words and music by James
Beeny and Gina Georgio, of the acoustic rock and string band Virgin Soldiers,
who also come from southeast England. Having written a song about 'Reggie'
Salomons in the autumn of 2013, Beeny and Georgio felt it wasn't enough to do
justice to this little known story and they started work on their first
musical. They've won enthusiastic support from Lady Lucy French,
great-granddaughter of the British First World War commander, Field Marshal Sir
John French.
The Dreamers takes its title from a work by the war poet and
soldier, Siegfried Sassoon: 'Soldiers are dreamers: when the guns begin they
think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives." Set during 1914-15, the
musical follows the Great War from its outbreak through the eyes of the
soldiers and the families they left behind. Twenty young actors are joined on
stage by the Virgin Soldiers, with an on-screen narration of events by actors
and broadcasters, including Amanda Redman, Philip Glenister, Sylvia Syms,
Christopher Beeny, Martin Bell, Michael Buerk and the lyricist Sir Tim Rice.
After its premiere in Tunbridge Wells,The Dreamers makes its
London debut at the St James Theatre on June 30th 2015.
The theatre's development director is Lady Lucy French,
whose great-grandfather, Sir John French, led the British Expeditionary Force
to France in August 1914. Lady French, also co-founder of the commemorative
charity Never Such Innocence, welcomed The Dreamers: “This is exactly what the
Centenary should be about; young people engaging, getting involved and playing
their part. This music captures the essence of commemoration across the
generations."
The Dreamers runs at the St James Theatre, a new arts venue
opened in the Victoria district of London three years ago, from June 30th-July
11th 2015. More details and booking information can be found here.
Source: James Beeny/Runner Bean Productions
Best Regards
Tony Smith
Guild Secretary
International Guild
of Battlefield Guides
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