British families gather at the Menin Gate
Once, the bugles played to a handful of mourners. Yesterday, thousands came to honour the fallen
EVERY evening at sunset, the Last Post sounds under the Menin Gate, in Ypres, the epicentre of conflict in the First World War. Yesterday, legions of British families flocked to honour the fallen as the bugle was played.
Benoit Mottrie, chairman of the Last Post Association and the grandson of its founder Aimé Gruwez, said: “This is the busiest time I have ever witnessed. In the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies it was often just the two police stopping the traffic, the buglers, and maybe a handful of people, sometimes no one when we played Last Post. I don’t think we will ever be alone again.”
Around 90,000 of the British and Empire soldiers who died at Ypres have no known grave. The 47ft high Menin Gate bears the names of 54,395 of them.
Scott Watson, 33, a fireman with six years’ service in the Royal Navy, came to the gate yesterday to pay tribute to his great-great grandfather, killed in 1915 in France.
As he stood with his partner Catherine Shea, 34, and daughter Grace, 13, he said: “This means everything to me and to my family. It is our responsibility to make sure future generations remember them and Grace must make sure her children remember as well. We will never forget.”
Gareth Richards, a former warrant officer with the Royal Engineers, served in Kosovo, Bosnia and Northern Ireland, and travelled to Ypres with 25 veterans of the regiment from Scotland and Northern Ireland. The Royal Engineers fought on the Ypres salient, digging under German positions and planting explosives.
Mr Richards, who lives in Paisley, made the journey in honour of his great-grandfather, Robert Evans, who was taken prisoner in the First Battle of Ypres in August 1914.
Wearing his great-grandfather’s medals alongside his own, Mr Richards said: “This is so important to mark history. There are going to be a lot of tears today.”
Volunteers from every corner of Britain took part in the “poppy parade” on Sunday, holding baskets of the flowers. Poppies were released at the top of the gate so they would float down, and onlookers picked them up and stowed them in pockets and wallets as mementos.
Nearby, at St George’s Memorial Church, muffled bells rang out. For almost 90 years, there were no bells ringing from the “English Church”, but today they rang four times.
The church was built in 1927 to provide a place of worship for those who built the memorials to the fallen. Reginald Bromfield, architect of the Menin Gate, was the brains and heart behind it. But St George’s was never truly finished until last year. Its brick tower, draped on Sunday with a cloak of 1,600 crocheted poppies sent from around the world, never had bells. Funding ran out before they could ever be made.
That changed last year thanks to readers of The Daily Telegraph, who contributed to an appeal to finally “finish the church”.
St George’s eight English bells are engraved with the names of bellringers who fell on the Western Front, and of schools whose boys went over the top to their deaths.
“We call them our remembrance bells because they have the names of fallen soldiers engraved upon them,” said Liz Millward, the church warden and tower captain of the bell ringers.
“When you are ringing, you remember. But we must never forget.
“We never seem to learn. We are at war now, aren’t we? No one must ever forget.”
Alan Regin, steward of the rolls of honour for the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, said: “One thousand, five hundred bell-ringers fell in World War One. At Tyne Cot cemetery there are 35 names on the memorial to the missing, and there are more than 50 on the Menin Gate.”