I delved into the collection to bring you this Christmas card from exactly one hundred years ago (censored, you will note), featuring a painting of a place we visited on our trip to the Somme earlier in the year, Delville Wood. To all those of you who have followed our travels this year, thank you for so doing, and to all of you who have gone one step further and posted a comment at some point, I thank you too.
Have a Cool Yule y’all, and an even better 2017.
Merry Christmas to all.
Joyeux Noel.
Good morning from Bangkok. I “follow” you carefully. Great posts and photos. Seldom comment.
Very interesting material. Keep up the good work
Have a Cool Yule
A Very Merry Christmas from Down Under Western Australia
A perfect Summer’s day here – clear blue sunny skies with 31C maximum temperature
Just off to enjoy Christmas Lunch with our family – wild caught WA Tiger prawns for entrée followed by turkey, ham and all the trimmings then home made Pavlova dessert or for those who can fit it in, traditional Christmas Pudding
Just left out the cookies and milk and heading to bed Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas to all from Canada.
Happy Christmas everyone.
Joe
Camberley
Surrey
Cheers guys! Australia, Canada, Bangkok (I shall do my best, Bruce) and a few miles down the road. Love it.
I’ve only just discovered your website and it is truly fascinating – your photography and text amazing, with just the right amount of detail. I’ve not visited the Western Front anywhere near as much as you but have made a number of trips to the Somme (especially the Beaumont Hamel area) over the past couple of years, both through personal interest and to acquire material we used to create just over 100,000 special Somme Centenary Poppy Pins for the Royal British Legion this year. It’s intriguing to see the photos you’ve taken of areas I’ve been to and to read your comments – I’ve learned a lot from them!
For 2017 we are embarking on a project to mark 100 years since Passchendaele, an area I’ve yet to explore, and I look forward to reading those sections for a bit of a pre-visit briefing!
The amount of work, quality detail, absence of irrelevancies, interesting narratives and excellent photos make this site second to none. Worthwhile getting all the ” back-issues” and catch-up. Great article, btw, on Brookwood Military Cemetery in England, where my own parents are buried.
Hello Bruce. Praise indeed. Thank you very very much. It is so nice when someone like your good self finds this site of mine and ‘clicks’ with it, and what I’m trying to achieve here. As my regulars know, any older post is likely to be updated at any given point, so catching up is always a good idea (imo!) as I am pleased to see you point out. Glad you enjoyed the Brookwood post; amazing place, and it’s time I returned there.
Hey Chris! Thanks for your wonderful comments. I try to pitch the site right – we have readers who are very knowledgeable, and others who are less so – so your comments are truly appreciated. Glad you enjoyed the Baumont Hamel posts, by the way – I have had two fantastic trips there in the past two years. Unfortunately, although I have visited all the Passchendaele cemeteries and photographed them copiously, only a handful have so far been published; I make no promises as to when the others will get published, but watch this space anyway! Have a great trip when you go (just to make you jealous I’m off to Flanders in a couple of weeks for a long weekend) and let us know about the project. Please!
I do think you pitch it perfectly…
Funnily enough it looks like we (myself and wife) will be visiting the Ypres area for the first time mid January – partly to hook up with some new contacts, partly to have a bit of a familiarisation tour and partly to (hopefully) have an enjoyable short break in Ypres. We just need to decide where to stay!
You’re too kind. I can’t tell you where to stay, but I can tell you who to speak to. Although I haven’t met him and he doesn’t know me (yet!), the guy who runs the restaurant/bar at Polygon Wood, I have it on very good authority, knows as much about Passchendaele as anyone needs to know. Sounds like we will be over there at pretty much the same time – I am very lucky to have some Belgian friends (actually, one is Argentinian, but that’s beside the point) who live in Wervik, which has proved a fantastic base for me over the years. And I am also lucky enough to have a Belgian chauffeur (Baldrick – don’t ask) who, for a vast fee, takes me wherever I need to go – you may have met him already on this site – seriously, I couldn’t do this stuff without him.