Next to Reninghelst church, there’s a purpose-built churchyard extension, with a Cross of Sacrifice front and centre. Reninghelst had been occupied by British troops in the late autumn of 1914 and would remain in their hands throughout the war.
Once inside, a single long line of headstones awaits,…
…beginning with the penultimate burial made here, Australian Army Chaplain 3rd Class Reverend Michael Bergin M.C., who was killed on 12th October 1917.
We’ll return to the chaplain later, because it makes more sense to start at this end of the burial ground, and work our way backwards, as the earliest burials are at this end, and be warned; it’s quite possible that we will find ourselves sidetracked somewhat as we go. Actually, it’s guaranteed. The single headstone on the far right,…
…is the earliest burial made here, and marks the grave of Private J. Devaney, Royal Irish Fusiliers, who died on 21st March 1915.
And then, between Private Devaney and the next burial, there is this large gap, which seems rather curious.
This GRRF gives us an explanation. Working from Private Devaney, at the bottom, up, the second name is Private W. J. Barr, D.L.I., who died on 4th September 1918 and was thus buried here considerably later than all the others, and whose headstone is, today, the first one after the gap. And then we have what is referred to on the GRRF as ‘One Memorial Cross’, on which there were eleven names, all men of the Duke of Wellington’s (West Riding) Regiment – ten 2nd Bn. officers and one decorated 9th Bn. N.C.O. – whom you might be forgiven in assuming are, or were, buried here. Well, I can tell you that the first four men are all buried in Hautrage Military Cemetery, around ten miles west of Mons, a long way from here, and they were all killed on 24th August 1914, the day after the Battle of Mons.
During the retreat from Mons, war diaries were impossible to keep up-to-date – this page from the official 2nd Bn. Duke of Wellington’s Regiment’s war diary covers the battles of Mons & Le Cateau in just two lines – as explained on the far right of the page,…
…cunningly rotated here for your pleasure (click on any diary extract to enlarge).
Hence this private diary – ‘Extracts from the private diary of Major Macleod, who commanded the 2nd Battalion, West Riding Regiment, after Lieut. Colonel Gibbs was wounded.’ – masquerading as the war diary for the 2nd Bn. On 24th August 1914 they ‘failed to get the order to retire’ with ‘many hit and missing’.
The aforementioned Lieutenant Colonel Gibbs’ account of events would later – this letter is dated 1924 – form part of the battalion war diary.
Gibbs’ account includes these references to Captain Denman-Jubb & Lieutenant Russell,…
…and the fate of Major Strafford, three of the first four names on our memorial cross.
Gibbs’ notes also include this map, showing a cemetery, just to the east of the village of Wasmes, shaded (by me) in green in the bottom right hand corner,…
…which is accompanied by a list of men headed ‘Graves of those interred by Belgian Red Cross in the “COMMUNAL” of WASMES 25.8.14’. The names include Major Strafford, Captain Denman-Jubb & Lieutenant Russell, and a note, on the right, explains how some of the men’s bodies were found.
Both map & notes are referred to here as Gibbs confirms that the graves were later moved, by the Germans, to the cemetery at Hautrage, around five miles from Wasmes. Hautrage Military Cemetery was begun by the Germans in August 1914 and later in the war used, by them, to concentrate British burials that had originally been buried on the surrounding battlefields and in local cemeteries.
The names of Captain Denman-Jubb & Lieutenant Russell are listed here, along with Lieutenant Thompson, another of the names on our memorial cross, on a GRRF for Hautrage Military Cemetery,…
…with Major Stafford (changed here to Strafford) listed on another GRRF for Hautrage, originally ‘Buried in this Cemetery, actual grave unknown’, but later ‘Grave accepted’.
Lieutenant Colonel Gibbs is shown here, with cane, alongside other wounded British soldiers and hospital staff at Wasmes, after his capture. He was eventually repatriated to Holland, where I presume he sat out the rest of the war.
None of which explains why there was once a memorial cross here to these men in the first place. Nor why the headstone marking the 1918 grave of Private Barr is at the far end of the gap, as opposed to next to Private Devaney (foreground), which is where the GRRF suggests he is actually buried. I have no solution to this latter problem, other than ‘these things happen’, but it may be that we can solve the conundrum of the memorial cross.
If we return to the names on the cross, other than the final name, of whom I can find no trace, Captain Travers, who died on 8th November 1914, is buried in New Irish Farm Cemetery, and Captain Taylor, who died on 18th April 1915, in Oosttaverne Wood Cemetery. The other four men, Sergeant Haigh & Lieutenants De Wend, Owen & Thackeray, have no known grave and are all remembered on the Menin Gate in Ypres. Lieutenants Owen & Thackeray also both died on 18th April 1915, and ‘Hill 60’ is typed next to their names,…
…their deaths recorded here,…
…and here, along with that of Captain Taylor, in the 2nd Bn. war diary for 18th & 19th April 1915.
Reninghelst (red circle, bottom left) is, for your information, around seven miles from Hill 60 (small mauve circle, far right, Ypres in green at top),…
…but if we continue with the war diary, it reveals that on 20th April 1915 the battalion moved into hutments at Zevecoten, marked on the map by the small blue circle adjacent to Reninghelst, where they stayed for a few days,…
…and where they had been before, at the end of March. It would seem likely that the memorial cross was erected in nearby Reninghelst at around this time, the name of Serjeant C. Haigh D.C.M., the one 9th Bn. man, who died in March 1916, added later.
A quick check in the 9th Bn. war diary for February (above) & March (below) 1916 does indeed place the battalion in camps at Reninghelst both before (note the reference to a German bombing raid on Reninghelst)…
…and after an attack they made on the Germans on 2nd March (above & below). One wonders whether the ‘bombing Sergt’ mentioned here was Serjeant Haigh.
What happened to our memorial cross after the war, we shall likely never know. Being, presumably, made of wood it has probably long rotted away, although it would be nice to think it still survives, perhaps inside the church (which was locked when I visited, but a recent quick YouTube tour of the inside revealed nothing relevant), or perhaps, as these things occasionally were, returned to England where it now resides, forgotten, in the back of someone’s lock-up. Awaiting rediscovery. You never know.
I told you we’d get sidetracked. Let’s continue.
Half of the men buried in the row died between 2nd & 7th May 1915 during the Second Battle of Ypres, most from either the 2nd Bn. Duke of Wellington’s or the Dorsetshire Regiment.
The first ten Dorset burials are all, according to the GRRF, men killed on 3rd May 1915. And yet a close look at these headstones reveals that seven of the same men have been given a date of death of 2nd May instead, which is a bit odd. What does their war diary have to say?
The 1st Bn. The Dorsetshire Regiment were also in the trenches at Hill 60 at the start of May 1915,…
…where they suffered serious casualties from gas that the Germans had poured, almost literally, into their trenches on the evening of 1st May. According to the war diary, one lieutenant and fifty two other ranks were killed by gas poisoning, with many others missing or hospitalised. Casualties on 2nd May are recorded as ‘2 killed, 2 wounded’,…
…and on 3rd May, ‘one killed, five wounded’. The men buried here are most probably men who were severely gassed on 1st May and who then died once they had been evacuated to the field ambulances behind the lines.
The row continues with three more Dorsets, all of whom died on 2nd May according to the GRRF, or on 3rd May, if you believe their headstones,…
…followed by three men from different regiments, from left, XII Royal Lancers, Bedfords & Lancashire Fusiliers, whose headstones say they died on 2nd*, 3rd & 4th May respectively.
*the GRRF gives this man’s date of death as 4th May.
And then we have eleven more men of the 2nd Bn. Duke of Wellington’s (West Riding) Regiment, the first nine pictured here, and all nine headstones are inscribed with a date of death of 5th May 1915.
The Duke of Wellington’s were in the trenches on Hill 60, where, on 5th May, they too suffered from German gas attacks, ‘Nearly all the men were very badly asphyxiated and large numbers died from the effect’.
And, most likely, these men were among them.
The final two Duke of Wellington’s burials, on the right , and at the top of the GRRF, are both given dates of death of 7th May on their headstones, after which we have a South Staffordshire burial from 26th August 1915, and, on the left, another Dorset burial, Second Lieutenant Curwen Vaughan Rawlinson, attached to 1st Bn. from 3rd Bn.,…
…and who is pictured here. Rawlinson was killed in action on 21st May 1915 at Hill 60, his death recorded in the 1st Bn. Dorset’s war diary.
The final three May 1915 burials in the row, privates all, are, from right, men from the XVIII Hussars, Royal Fusiliers & R.A.M.C.,…
…followed by a single man of the West Kents who died on 1st June (right), and on the left, an officer of the Royal Scots Fusiliers who died on 3rd August.
The second GRRF for the row takes us through the remaining months of 1915 up to the last, at the time, burials in early November.
Four more privates, Manchester Regiment & South Lancashires (above), and Yorkshire & South Staffordshire Regiments (below),…
…all four August 1915 casualties,…
…and here, on the right, a Royal Engineers officer who died on 25th August, with, on the left, the only unidentified man buried here.
Two more privates, a Lancashire Fusilier and a man of the York & Lancaster Regiment, who both died on 5th September,…
…followed by more September burials, from right, Lincolnshire Regiment, Royal Fusiliers, Notts & Derby Regiment & Monmouthshire Regiment,…
…with two more late-September 1915 Monmouth riflemen casualties here right & centre, and a Northumberland Fusilier, on the left, who was killed on 1st October 1915.
Another October 1915 casualty, a Royal Fusilier private, on the far right, and then one of two World War II R.A.F. pilots buried among the Great War casualties, probably by local civilians. Flight Lieutenant Thomas Glyn Finlayson Ritchie was commanding a flight of Spitfires escorting Sterling bombers attacking Lille on 21st July 1941 when he was shot down and killed by Messerschmitt Bf 109s. Third from the front,…
…a Lieutenant Major!
Second from the right, between two men of the North Staffordshire Regiment who died in October (right) & November 1915, is the grave of the second of the World War II casualties buried here, another Spitfire pilot shot down by Bf 109s, Pilot Officer Kenward Ernest Knox, killed on 5th July 1941. The burial on the far left,…
…is that of Second Lieutenant Kenneth Theodore Dunbar Wilcox (pictured), The Queen’s, who died on 8th November 1915 aged 20,…
…his headstone second in line here as we find ourselves back where we started, with the grave of Australian Army Chaplain Reverend Michael Bergin M.C. (pictured), in the foreground. Bergin, born in Ireland, was a Jesuit priest working at a Catholic school in Syria when, on the outbreak of war, the Turks interned him as an enemy civilian. Extradited after several months in prison, he found himself in Cairo, where he offered his services to the Australian Imperial Force (A.I.F.) which was, apparently, short of Roman Catholic clergy. Joining the 5th Light Horse Brigade, he served on Gallipoli, where illness resulted in his evacuation to England. Recovering, he would later serve on the Somme and at Messines. He was well known for defying orders forbidding chaplains from entering the front line, becoming well-respected for so doing among troops of all faiths, and was killed near Zonnebeke on 12th October 1917 by a German shell which burst close to the aid post where he was working. One of very few men who served with the A.I.F. but who had never, and would never, set foot in Australia, he was the only Catholic chaplain serving with the A.I.F. to have died as a result of enemy action in the Great War. He was 37.
Inlaid into the wall opposite, the ‘In Perpetuity’ tablets in English, French & Flemish.
Late-wartime view of the church, with the line of British burials clear to see in the close-up below; annoyingly, I can see no sign of our memorial cross.
But we aren’t quite finished here, yet. In the churchyard itself, on the other side of the wall,…
…there are three CWGC Great War graves,…
…although only two are pictured here, despite the evidence of three headstones (the wall in the background separates churchyard from extension). The two headstones on the left…
…mark the graves of Rifleman C. Edwards (right), The Rifle Brigade, who died on 1st April 1915, and Lieutenant Charles Geoffrey Butcher (left), Dorsetshire Regiment, killed in action on 2nd May 1915 aged 23.
You may remember that we encountered Lieutenant Butcher, or at least notification of his death, in the Dorset’s war diary earlier.
Both men’s names are listed here on this somewhat unusual GRRF.
The third headstone is a special memorial, remembering Lance Corporal W. Till, North Staffordshire Regiment, who died on 2nd November 1915 aged 31, and who is ‘Known to be buried in this cemetery’, as the inscription at the top of the headstone tells us,…
…and his GRRF confirms.
Drawing of the church from the 2nd Bn. Duke of Wellington’s Regiment’s war diary from June 1915; these coffins are laid out at the rear of the church,…
…and perhaps this row of French graves, now long removed, shows where they were once interred.
Post-war view of the shattered church,…
…and the rebuilt church today. It would seem odd, would it not, if burials in Reninghelst suddenly ceased, pretty much, near the end of 1915. And indeed that was far from the case, just the location changed, as we shall see next post.