A fascinating place, Falmouth Cemetery, as you will see. There are 197 First & Second World War burials here, some placed together in plots, some individually scattered throughout the cemetery. Far too many to annotate, actually, so I shan’t be doing so, but all the headstones pictured are clearly legible and you can always check the British names against the CWGC Casualty Details List, should you so wish.
There are some interesting and, I suspect, rarely visited graves here; I wonder whether the families of the French sailors we shall visit in Part Two ever discovered, or were informed, that their loved ones ended up in a cemetery in Cornwall? Who were the two unidentified firemen who were killed when the S.S. Clan Cumming was attacked by a German U-boat on 5th November 1917? Where did the Muslim sailors from the same crew who also perished off the Cornish coast that day and are also buried here originally call home?
A drifter base and centre for ship repairs during World War I, Falmouth became an important naval base in World War II, with an associated Royal Navy Air Station and a military hospital within the town. Some of the graves we shall visit are men who survived evacuation from France and Flanders, but who succumbed to their injuries in the hospital at Falmouth.
We begin with some individual Second World War graves, and the Second World War Plot near the western boundary of the cemetery.
And not only men.
The World War II Plot.
Twenty six unidentified sailors, all members of the crew of the H.M.S. Registan, bombed and set on fire by German aircraft on 27th May 1941. Although the badly damaged ship was towed to shore, 63 crew members were lost in the attack.
my grandad william archer was on the hms registan when it was bombed and was killed so he could be one of the unnamed in the graves at falmouth