They called it Passchendaele
HISTORIC ENGLAND has marked the fallen of Passchendaele by announcing 13 new and upgraded listings. The battle on the ridge at Passchendaele was fought in atrocious conditions from July to November 1917—earlier shelling had destroyed the land drainage systems, so the heavy rain created a bog-like landscape. Total casualties on both sides amounted to about 585,000 soldiers.
A memorial in Northampton to Edgar Mobbs, an England rugby international who raised his own 264-strong Sportsmen’s Battalion after his attempt at enlistment was rejected on the grounds of his age, has been listed Grade II*. Mobbs was killed in action on the first day’s fighting and his body was never found.
Rickerby Park in Carlisle, landscaped as a memorial garden to the dead by unemployed servicemen in the 1920s, has been listed Grade II* and, at Westfield War Memorial Village, Lancaster, built by locals to prove accommodation and employment for disabled veterans, the central war memorial has been upgraded to Grade II*.
Also newly listed at Grade II* is the King’s Royal Rifle Corps Memorial in Winchester, Hampshire, a finely crafted bronze statue of a rifleman in full service dress with a Lee-enfield rifle, surveying the battlefield terrain. It was designed by leading war-memorial sculptor John Tweed in 1922 and is strikingly located in the outer close of the cathedral. JW