Faces in the sand draw big crowds to beaches

HE had gone to school in Hanover and Bonn but he was barely 22, a lieutenant with the Royal Berkshires, when he fell victim to a German bullet.

Yesterday, on the shores of his homeland, his face appeared once more in the sand.

On the coast near Mablethorpe, Basil Perrin Hicks, younger son of the founding chancellor of Sheffield University, came briefly alive once more. As his image faded again into the darkness, the tide washed it away.

His was one of 32 faces drawn by sand artists on Britain’s beaches on the 100th anniversary of the armistice. The filmmaker Danny Boyle, architect of the opening ceremony of the London Olympics six years ago, had commissioned the portraits from a studio in Hebden Bridge, along with a sonnet from the poet laureate.

Mr Boyle, inset below, was on the beach in Folkstone in Kent, where a portrait of the war poet Wilfred Owen had been created.

Owen was 25 and shellshocked when following recuperation in Scarborough and Ripon, he was sent back to the western front. He was killed a week before the peace, and his mother handed the news on Armistice Day.

Yesterday, as the portraits were lost to the tide, those gathered on the shore recited Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, The Wound in Time.

“History might as well be water, chastising this shore;

for we learn nothing from your endless sacrifice.

Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea.”

As morning broke through the gloom on the beaches, people gathered to pay their personal respects.

In Blackpool, a single white rose was placed on the sand portrait of Lance Corporal John Edward Arkwright, born just down the road, in Lancaster.

He landed in France with the 1st Battalion, King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment on August 23, 1914. Three days later he was dead. He was aged 23 and left a wife, Isabella.

Abigail Wrigley brought faded family photos to the beach to remember her own relatives who died serving their country. Clutching pictures of her great-grandfather and two great-uncles, she said: “There are a few of our family that have been in the services and this is what we are bringing today to think of them. “They felt they had to serve their country and it meant that we have all the opportunities and liberties we do have today.

“I heard on the radio someone saying it’s about glorifying the dead, it’s not, it really isn’t. It’s about remembering gratefully those who gave their lives so that we could have what we have.

“It’s really poignant. These are the people who didn’t come home. These are the people whose lives stopped. They are the reason why we are where we are.”