PLAY TELLS INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY OF HEROES WHO
On the centenary of the Battle of Passchendaele, dignitaries and descendants of those who fought gathered at the imposing memorial in the Belgian town.
Poppies were scattered to mark the victims – estimated at 325,000 Allied and 215,000 German casualties killed, wounded or missing – in a ruthless, horrific battle for just eight kilometres of sodden ground.
And then came the smiles. Writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman read excerpts from their play The Wipers Times – the true story of a satirical paper printed in the trenches amid the chaos of battle.
And it helped make the memories of those Great War soldiers much more colourful.
Ian, editor of Private Eye and a regular on Have I Got News For You, narrated excerpts from the paper.
The duo’s comic play is about Captain Fred Roberts and Lieutenant Jack Pearson, two officers who, amid the carnage of the battlefields of France, fought to bring a smile to the faces of the troops via a trench newspaper.
Ian and Nick appear in Ypres Market Square, featuring musical and spoken performances which were dutiful and dignified.
The name of the town lent itself – albeit mistakenly – to the name of the show and the paper it was based on.
Fred and Jack had discovered a working printing press and created their publication, which took its title from Ypres being mispronounced Wipers by British soldiers. The newspaper poked fun at their desperate circumstances and lifted the spirits of those facing death.
Nick, cartoonist for Private Eye among other publications, said: “Taking part in the Passchendaele Centenary was an unbelievable honour. “We did a couple of sketches and a couple of songs from the show and then on the Cloth Hal l, which had been destroyed in
the First World