Sir Frank Sanderson, Bt
Businessman behind the Battle of the Somme museum at Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing
SIR FRANK SANDERSON, 3rd Bt, who has died aged 89, campaigned for the erection of a museum about the Battle of the Somme next to Lutyens’s great arch, the Memorial to the Missing, at Thiepval.
In the late 1990s, Sanderson, a retired insurance broker and chairman of his local branch of the Royal British Legion, was an usher at the annual remembrance service at Thiepval. Afterwards, he was accosted by women looking for the lavatory, but he was told that there were none. “We must build some!” said the baffled Sanderson. Colonel Piers Storie-pugh, the British Legion’s Head of Remembrance Travel, suggested they might as well build a proper visitors’ centre.
Traditionalists in Britain had blocked proposals for a Somme museum, in case it cluttered up and “Disney-fied” the hallowed site. When Sanderson wrote to the Defence Secretary George Robertson, asking the Blair government to support – or even pay for – a visitor centre at Thiepval, Robertson told him that senior civil servants opposed anything that risked “over-heritisation”.
Sanderson argued that the mute eloquence of the battlefields was no longer enough, given that many of the 200,000 annual visitors to Thiepval were children. Moreover, as the French had a museum at Verdun, the Belgians at Nieuwpoort and the Canadians at Vimy Ridge, it was only the British and Commonwealth soldiers’ stories that were not being told.
Sanderson’s Thiepval Project, launched in 1998, raised £700,000 from more than 2,300 separate donors. Some were regiments, some were civic institutions, some were businesses, some were pensioners who sent in £5 notes. One octogenarian, Mrs ED Thomas, sent more than 10 cheques. Readers of The Daily Telegraph raised nearly £30,000 when the appeal was in danger of missing its target.
Many of the “pals battalions” that suffered heavily on the first day of the Somme came from the northern cities, Manchester, Leeds and Hull, so Sanderson courted businesses there, including Manchester United. One anonymous businessman gave £72,000, a pound for each name inscribed on the arch – one being that of his own great-uncle, a soldier in the Black Watch.
The donations were supplemented by €709,000 from the EU, and Sanderson, with his fluent French, persuaded the Conseil General of the Somme to contribute €951,000 towards the eventual total bill of €2,633,000 (£1,896,000). Sanderson made fortnightly trips to France with Storie-pugh, who recalls him conducting the delicate negotiations with “steely determination and consummate charm”.
The visitors’ centre was sunk into the ground so that it would not disturb the setting of Lutyens’s monument. While digging the foundations, many more bodies were uncovered and laid to rest.
Inside, computers gave details of every British and Commonwealth soldier lost in both world wars, and texts explained the background to the Somme. The narrative conveyed by the museum was that the battle had been inevitable rather than futile: the allies had no choice but to make a frontal attack on the heavily fortified German lines.
It was aimed at a British audience, but translated into German and French as well. As Thomas Compère-morel, director of the French Great War museum, told the press: “French people know so little about what happened, which I think is shocking.”
The museum opened on July 1 2004 at a ceremony attended by descendants of Lutyens, Haig and Kitchener, along with the Duke of Kent, President of the War Graves Commission, and bemedalled Chelsea pensioners. Eurostar laid on a special train.
Asked by the Telegraph what he thought of the soldiers who had given their lives on the Somme, Sanderson said: “Most of them had a degree of patriotism we simply would not understand today. But even that doesn’t explain it. They died for their mates, because that’s what you do in warfare.”
Frank Linton Sanderson was born on November 21 1933 to Sir Bryan Sanderson, 2nd Bt, and his Polish wife Annette (née Korab-laskowska). The baronetcy had been created in 1920 for his grandfather, Frank Bernard Sanderson, a Yorkshire businessman and Conservative MP, for his unpaid wartime work as Controller of Trench Warfare National Shell Filling Factories and Stores at the Ministry of Munitions, and of Aircraft Ammunition Filling and Chemical Ammunition Filling.
During the Second World War, Frank’s father served as a pilot with the Fleet Air Arm, while Frank was brought up in Sussex by his mother and grandmother and their French maid. The language spoken at home was French; Polish pilots stationed nearby used the house as an officers’ mess.
After Stowe, he did his National Service in the Navy, extending to a third year, serving in Greece during an earthquake and in the Caribbean; he remained a Royal Naval Volunteer Reservist until 1965.
He had a place at Pembroke College, Oxford, but would have had to wait a year, so he went to the University of Salamanca, adding Spanish to his immaculate French.
In 1961, he married Margaret Ann Maxwell, a New Yorker. He worked in Minet as a marine insurance broker, and in the 1960s for his wife’s family, who ran Knott Hotels and the Westbury in London. He was Master of the Curriers’ Company in 1993-94.
Storie-pugh described him as a man with “a most incisive brain and a bulldog-like determination”. Tall and distinguished, he was noted for his courtesy.
In 2005 he was appointed OBE.
He is survived by his wife and by three daughters and two sons, the older of whom, David, succeeds in the baronetcy.
Sir Frank Sanderson, Bt, born November 21 1933, died November 9 2023