Fight to get recognition for soldiers in unmarked Polish graves

Retiree campaigns for MOD to provide headstones for 30 British war dead

A RETIRED estate agent is in a bureaucratic battle with the Ministry of Defence to get recognition for 30 British soldiers who died on a peacekeeping mission in Poland in the aftermath of the First World War.

Jim Powrie discovered that the men had all been buried in unmarked graves in a corner of a graveyard in the south-west Polish town of Opole when he tried to track down the resting place of his father’s first cousin.

He found that Sergeant Henry Powrie, a Royal Artillery sergeant, and holder of the Military Medal, who had fought at Gallipoli and been wounded three times during the First World War, had no headstone or memorial. Neither had the 29 of his comrades who had died between 1921 and 1922 in a long-forgotten British Army peacekeeping mission.

“I was originally very angry about Henry but now I’m angry for all 30 of them,” Mr Powrie told The Telegraph from his home in Italy. Since then he has waged a two-year campaign to get the MOD to take responsibility for the soldiers ignored for the best part of a 100 years and who have nothing above them but grass.

The only indication that the ground in Opole holds 30 British soldiers is a handful of crosses and poppies Mr Powrie placed during his last visit to the cemetery.

The men were dispatched as part of a British force to help keep the peace in the Opole region as Europe wrestled with the death throes of the Great War.

Poles and Germans vied for control of the region and with tensions threatening to boil over into conflict.

In total 41 British troops died of hostilities, disease, accidents and suicides. But while the bodies of 11 were later exhumed and re-buried in a British war cemetery, those who died after the official end of the war on 31 Aug 1921, were buried with no recognition.

Taking up the cause of the 30, Mr Powrie started pushing the MOD to reinstate the headstones but with little luck. The ministry says it bears no responsibility for the graves and only interwar graves in a military cemetery qualify for maintenance.

“While we spend over £50 million a year through the Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintaining War Graves, unfortunately we cannot do this for every site across the world,” the MOD said in a statement to The Telegraph.

“We do everything we can to make sure that sites are maintained where they can be, including through encouraging local or private funding.”

But Mr Powrie rejects this. After trawling through the ageing records on the Opole 30 he says he has found archive documents indicating that the maintenance of the graves was a “matter of policy” for the ministry, and that had it actually helped in the upkeep of the Opole graves until 1938.

This has, so far, failed to push London into organising a headstone for Sergeant Powrie MM now lying in an unmarked grave, but it comes as little surprise to his descendant.