GLORY BRITISH BAYEUX TAPESTRY OF THE
Revealed at last – 70ft long masterpiece by WWI veterans telling their own heroic story ... left forgotten in a warehouse for decades
DEATH, destruction and warriors in action. Here hangs an epic pictorial history of conflict and conquest, captured on fabric in intricate detail for the benefit of future generations. Except I am not looking at the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy. I am in the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.
There is no sign of Norman ships in this tableau, nor King Harold with an arrow in his eye.
Instead, we see the wreckage of Ypres, rats in the trenches, artillery barrages and an enemy pilot plunging to his death.
Yet, as in Bayeux, the theme is timeless: war on a grand scale.
In this case, it tells the story of one battalion’s valour and sacrifice through the Great War. It is a memorial to the fallen by those lucky enough to make it home. This is the ultimate Roll of Honour.
Not that many people have ever seen this stunning work unrolled to its full 70ft length. Were it not for a stroke of luck last year, it might have disappeared for ever, having long ago been dumped at the back of a municipal storeroom. There it sat for years, wrapped in a sheet with a faulty label attached to it saying ‘Tram Map of Stoke-on-Trent’.
Now, however, it is in pride of place in the city’s museum, ahead of the centenary of the end of World War I next month.
It has never enjoyed the fame of that illustrious needlework in Bayeux, which recounts William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066. None the less, there is a similar magical quality to what we should call the Great Wall-Hanging of the West Midlands. It, too, commemorates a monumental, bloody cross-Channel military expedition.
It honours the 5th Battalion of the North Staffordshire Regiment, a unit which suffered almost double the average casualty rate on the Western Front. Running beneath it are the names of nearly a thousand men from the Potteries who never returned.
The first thing that strikes you as you enter the gallery is the size of it. Though a third of the length of the Bayeux model, it is much taller — 9ft from top to bottom. This is not actually a tapestry, of course. At a 1921 reunion of veterans, Tom Simpson MC proposed the idea of a pictorial Roll of Honour for the battalion and recruited a small team of old comrades who, like him, had an artistic flair.
It was painted in the same year on to an industrial roll of canvas. It was then brought out for display at regimental gatherings. But when the last of the old
‘Terriers’, as the North Staffords called themselves, ended their reunions in the Seventies, the great canvas disappeared with them. Eventually, last year, it was found (wrongly labelled) in a warehouse. As they unrolled it, the staff were astonished.
For here was a warscape on both a grand and human scale, set amid towns and villages with tragically familiar names like Ypres, Lens and Passchendaele. And the colours have not faded because they were never exposed to daylight. The canvas still needs expert conservation work before it can go properly on display. So, for now, only a central section is on show, alongside a facsimile version of the original. Once £50,000 has been raised, the original will go on display in a new gallery.
‘These are the teardrops of a lost generation,’ says Levison Wood, 65, the former teacher and Territorial Army officer-turnedhistorian who started the hunt for the lost work (his son, Levison Wood Junior, is the television presenter and explorer who walked the length of the Nile). Levison Senior has spent four years recording every fallen member of the North Staffords in a magnificent two-volume register.
As we inspect the replica version of the ‘tapestry’, he talks me through the scenes which open in Flanders in 1915 when the battalion saw its first action.
Shortly afterwards, they were stationed at a notorious pinch-point in the Western Front’s trench network known as Hill 60. Here the men witnessed their first aerial
dogfight. Many regimental accounts refer to a grim scene on June 25, 1915, when a German pilot leapt from his burning plane right above the British lines — in preparachute days. And there he is.
In the same year, the 5th North Staffords suffered their worst losses at the Battle of Loos when 800 men went over the top and 500 were lost in half an hour (including three brothers). They endured similar carnage a year later during the Battle of the Somme where they were ordered to charge an impregnable German bunker at Gommecourt Wood.
By the start of 1918, so many men had been killed that the battalion was disbanded and its survivors transferred to other units, including the 6th Battalion which helped capture the Riqueval Bridge over the St Quentin Canal, a pivotal action at the end of the war. As a result, the bridge features right at the end of the ‘tapestry’.
After the war, survivors resumed civilian careers. The last of the ‘Terriers’ is now long gone, of course. And yet, thanks to the efforts of Tom Simpson and his comrades, their memory lives on. The North Staffords became part of the Staffordshire Regiment. They, in turn, became part of today’s Mercian Regiment, who served with distinction in Afghanistan.
‘Stand Firm and Strike Hard’ is their motto. Take a look at this profoundly moving testimony to their forebears and you can see why.
For The Fallen is at Stoke’s Potteries Museum until November 18.