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Articles
About the Project
"THEIR
NAMES LIVETH FOR EVERMORE" by Michelle Cooper
On a windy afternoon in November, my husband,
a friend and I sailed to Calais to embark on our second weekend
of research for the Dover War Memorial Project. On the first
occasion we had visited cemeteries and memorials in Flanders and
the Somme, including the unforgettable memorials at Arras,
Thiepval and the Menin Gate. This time we were heading south to
Rouen as we had a personal mission to complete as well as the
task of finding and photographing the last resting places of
Dovorians whose names had been supplied by Maggie Stephenson
Knight.
We set out the next morning to begin our
quest. First we visited the British Cemetery at Namps-Au-Val to
locate the grave of Corporal G F Street of the 2nd/4th
Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment. This small cemetery was set
in farmland on the outskirts of the village of the same name.
Designed by Reginald Blomfield, it has a classical entrance gate
of brick and stone. At the start of the German offensive in
Picardy in March 1918, three Casualty Clearing stations came to
the village. Most of the burials were carried out at this time
but nine graves were brought in at the end of the war from Conty
French Military Cemetery. There are also sixteen French graves
and one from the Second World War. With information obtained
from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s website, it
was easy to find Corporal Street’s grave. This time we had
brought small cards which outlined the Project and gave its
contact details. The cards are part of the Dover War Memorial
Project’s “Dover Remembers” scheme, and show that someone had
visited the grave and the person’s bravery and sacrifice had not
been forgotten in his native town. We left one here, and on the
other graves we visited, in the hope that relatives or anyone
with further information on the casualties would make contact.
We drove to Rouen to the St Sever Cemetery
and Extension, which contained the graves of casualties from
several nations. The war graves are at the far end of this
large city cemetery. Whilst there was little combat in this
area during the First World War, Commonwealth camps and
hospitals were set up in the outskirts of the city, together
with a base supply depot and the 3rd Echelon of General
Headquarters. Most of the 16 hospitals and convalescent depots
remained in Rouen for the whole of the war. The great majority
of those who died in these hospitals were buried in the St Sever
Cemetery and it was soon necessary to begin the extension. The
Cemetery contains 8,346 Commonwealth burials of the First World
War. Only ten of these are unidentified as the hospital would
have held records of the servicemen being treated. The area
served a similar purpose in the Second World War and there were
a further 328 burials in the extension. Alongside those of
Commonwealth soldiers there are graves of Red Cross workers,
French and Polish soldiers, Indian and Chinese labourers and two
areas containing the graves of French and Belgian North African
Colonial troops buried according to Muslim tradition. These
graves are marked by tall metal memorials bearing either a sword
or a pillar featuring the star and crescent moon of Islam.
Here, together with those of six Dovorians,
we located the grave of Lance Corporal William Cooper of the 9th
Battalion, North Staffordshire Regiment. This man from Longton,
Stoke on Trent, who died on 20th May 1918, was my
husband’s Great Uncle. We had only found out about him
recently, following research work undertaken for the Dover War
Memorial Project. My husband had checked the details recorded
in his father’s Family Bible and found them to match. He had
never been told about his great uncle and to his knowledge we
were the first members of the family to visit the grave. We
laid a spray of poppies on the grave and spent a few moments in
quiet contemplation in the wintry sunshine.
Looking at the row upon row of identical
slabs of Portland stone in places such as this, it is difficult
to fully appreciate the numbers of servicemen laid to rest
within the sanctity of its walls. It is much easier to relate
to the smaller cemeteries like Namps-Au-Val, perhaps because
such large scale loss of life is too much for us to comprehend.
Finding individual graves and reading the inscriptions,
especially those at the foot of the grave chosen by the
families, makes the whole experience so much more personal and
gives it a sense of purpose, rather than being a passive
observer. One such grave we found was that of Private Horace
Stokes. The inscription at the bottom reads
Also in memory of his brother
9535 Private C. Stokes
East Yorkshire Regiment
3rd February 1915. Age 25
He has no known grave and is commemorated on
the Menin Gate. We found his name on our visit there in May.
It is difficult to imagine the grief of that family, losing two
sons in such a short period. Sadly this is a familiar story;
Dover’s War Memorial commemorates several sets of family
members.
The following day we visited the Ste. Marie
Communal Cemetery in Le Havre. Le Havre was one of the ports at
which the British Expeditionary Force disembarked in August
1914. It was No. 1 Base and the site for five hospitals and
four convalescence depots. Hospital ships and other naval
vessels filled the harbour. The cemetery has 1689 First World
War Commonwealth burials separated five divisions. We had
graves to find in three divisions. These neat grassed pockets
were in sharp contrast to the civilian graves and memorials
surrounding them, each forming a small oasis amongst the large
dark stone tombs and monuments to French families, some long
forgotten and falling into a state of disrepair. Surprisingly,
plot 62 was arranged in a different way to the other cemeteries
we had visited and we had to abandon our search by grave number
and check every headstone. We located two graves but Engine
Room Artificer George W P Richards of HMS P.26 still eluded us.
Eventually we found his name on the memorial to those soldiers,
nurses and merchant seamen lost when the hospital ship ‘Salta’
and her patrol boat and the hospital ship ‘Galeka’ were mined,
and the transport ship ‘Normandy’ torpedoed. Also in Division
62 there is an area where three rows of graves record the month
of death as January or February 1919. We came to the assumption
that these casualties died as a result of an epidemic in the
hospitals or ships, probably Spanish Influenza that claimed so
many lives after the war.
The stories of some of the servicemen whose
graves we found can be found on the Dover War Memorial Project
web-site. We feel very privileged to undertake these visits and
play our part in recording the histories of Dovorians who fell
in the two World Wars.
pictures by Andy and Michelle
Cooper
Namps au Val
Horace Stokes' gravestone
Maggie's note: Unfortunately, I can't get the pictures to
load into this page! But they can be seen at the relevant
casualty entries for
Private Stokes
and for
Corporal Street George Richards' photographs can be
seen
here and a plaque to him at Lydden church is
here
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