GRAVE HUNTERS & MYSTERY SOLVERS
RETIREES BATTLE OVERGROWN U.K. CEMETERIES TO FIND RESTING PLACES OF CANADIAN SOLDIERS
Diana Beaupré and her partner, Adrian Watkinson, have spent the past nine years trudging through some 867 graveyards in 89 counties in all corners of the United Kingdom. Their ambition is to visit, document and create a comprehensive memorial to the 3,897 long dead and mostly forgotten Canadian servicemen and women who perished, not on the battlefields, but in Great Britain during the First World War — some from wounds suffered at Vimy Ridge. They do this work for free. “We have never given ourselves a label,” Diana said with a laugh from the couples’ “headquarters” (a.k.a. their cottage-home) in southeast England. “I don’t know what we are — are we grave hunters?”
Grave hunters, amateur historians, adventurers — interminably curious folks — all are apt descriptions for the septuagenarian retirees from Canterbury, England. It is a hobby rooted in the past, but with a tangible connection to the present.
“It is outstanding that Diana and Adrian have shown so much interest in discovering the final resting spots of these Canadian soldiers,” said David Brierley in Toronto.
Brierley’s great-uncle Henry died of “lung disease” in 1919, about three months after being discharged from the army. He was believed to be buried somewhere — though no family member could pinpoint where — near the Brierley’s ancestral home in English coal-mining country.
Enter Adrian and Diana, whose ability to charm innumerable priests and parish clerical staffs into scouring their records to determine who lies where, in the half-forgotten graveyards out back of their churches, led to great-uncle Henry’s discovery — beneath his wife’s family marker in a churchyard in Abram village. Now he is in line to receive his own white-marble headstone with a maple leaf on it, denoting his war service, to be paid for and cared for in perpetuity by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Meanwhile, his greatnephew now has somewhere to pay his respects while Adrian and Diana have the satisfaction of knowing they have solved another Canadian family war mystery.
“My great-uncle Henry would not have got his gravestone otherwise,” David Brierley said.
The grave hunters are meticulous planners. This is somewhat surprising, given how their later-in-life passion evolved. About 15 years ago, Diana, a professional dog-groomer by trade, was cleaning out her mother’s house. Back then, Diana’s last name was Baldwin, a name she inherited from the man she believed was her father.
Back then she didn’ t spend her days thinking about dead Canadians.
Then she found an envelope in her mother’s room. It was about the size of a box of chocolates. There were several love letters and a photo of a handsome French-Canadian soldier inside. His name was Paul Beaupré. Diana had stumbled upon her Dad.
“I had always felt that there was something that wasn’t quite right with me,” she said.
She became intrigued by all things Canadian, enrolled at university — at age 60 — and took several Canadian studies courses on her way to earning a degree. Eventually, she went to Canada, to visit her biological father’s final resting place in Boucherville, Que. Diana located the cemetery where he was buried. But she couldn’t find an actual headstone, so there was nowhere to lay flowers, to cry, no physical marker whatsoever to conjure a physical sense of closeness.
“It was so, so frustrating,” Diana said.
“There was nothing to see at the graveyard, and I felt devastated by that.”
Out of the devastation came inspiration for the project Adrian and Diana affectionately refer to as “Far From Home.”
Each “mission” they undertake requires about a year of preparation. The couple scours web databases and, in years past, visited the archives in Ottawa to build a soldier profile for every Canadian casualty in England. About 60 per cent of the Canadians who fought in the war emigrated from the U.K. before the war. Their roots in the Mother Country were still active, to some degree. As a result, in death, they were often buried near their ancestral home, which is generally where Adrian and Diana start sleuthing.
Their mission to Scotland in June 2015 involved driving 6,500 kilometres over 27 days to document 308 Canadians buried in 162 locations.
“It was the coldest and wettest June in 42 years,” said Adrian.
When they locate a grave, often after the furious application of garden shears to clear away the over-growth — and elbow grease to scrub away 100 years of grime from the grave marker — they experience a “eureka” moment. Then they chat awhile to a dead Canadian, some of whom they have been researching for several years, and most of whom will not have been visited by a living soul for decades.
“It is quite an emotional time when you are actually standing at a grave,” Diana said. “I thank these men ... and I let them know — and it is the biggest thing — that they are not forgotten.
“You have this sense of them, and I am not just being soft and sentimental here. But I often have a joke with them and tell them how long it took us to find them, and I ask them why they had to make us get all muddy just to get to their spot.”
What Adrian and Diana have discovered through their search is just how rare it was for a Canadian in the U.K. to die from a battlefield wound. Their ends came, for the most part, from the epidemics and illnesses of the day: influenza, tuberculosis, measles, tonsillitis and more. Others were killed in workplace accidents, while about two per cent took their own lives.
Diana gives the example of William Dowler, a captain in the Canadian medical corps. He survived the war, wandered around the English countryside for about a year afterwards and then slit his throat in a farmer’s field. He was 38 years old.
“Suicides are the ones that get to us the most,” Diana said. “Such awful lonely deaths.”
The couple clean every gravesite as best they can, and leave behind a tiny memorial cross and a Canadian flag to mark it. They later report its exact location — with photos as proof — to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, so that the official records can be updated and a veterans’ headstone erected where necessary.
Then they are off to the next churchyard or cemetery, wherever it may be, to tick another name from a list that, after nine years of hunting, is down to 40 Canadians.
Diana and Adrian hope to visit the final 40 by the end of the year.