Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Finding Captain Walker
Back in July I was privileged enough to be part of an archaeological dig in Belgium on a WWI battle site south of Ypre near a small village called Wijtschate (Whitesheet to the Brits) as part of an initiative called Dig Hill 80.
I have just seen a post on our Dig Hill 80 Facebook page what includes some footage of the guy who lead the dig I was on showing them recovering a solider who lay where he fell in 1915. It is brief, but I thought you may appreciate it. Captain Henry John Innes Walker from New Zealand was killed at the second battle of Ypre, April 1915. Captain Walker's remains were identified, but the vast majority of those ever recovered are never appropriately identified.
The Menin Gate in Ypres was built as a memorial to the many who lost their lives on the Allied side and whose remains were never recovered. It lists 54,000 names. I think this goes up to those lost some time in min 1915. By the end of the war over 200,000 Allied servicemen were lost with no know grave. 200,000! on the Allied side alone. That could extrapolate to 400,000 on all sides
We excavated an area twice the size of Fairland's park that had sat as a field at the edge of the village of Wijtschate since the war where people walked their dogs and played football. We recovered the remains of over 120 soldiers in this patch alone. 399,880 to go.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Bethany Burrow Atherton on
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Hi Justin - the cut off for Menin inscriptions was in August 1917, after which they were put on the Tyne Cot memorial. We went on a trip to France and Belgium in January this year to research the men from St Paul's Harringay who fought in the war, which was research for my (fairly shortly) forthcoming book on the subject. I ended up addressing a rather bemused group of about 40 French teenagers at Thiepval who were finding it hard to believe that British people would still go there to look up their relatives (which was one of the more terrifying audiences I've ever had!) - perhaps we should exchange, ahem, war stories at some point?!
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Permalink Reply by Justin Guest on
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You know what, I knew it was April 1917 as soon as saw your comment Bethany. Must have been having a senior moment. I think what I wanted to convey was that it ran out of space there were so many casualties...
Would love to compare notes and chat about what you are doing.
What was interesting was the site we were on had a predominance of German remains, not British or French. Some of the locals simply could not understand why we gave a hoot about German remains... They thought we were mad.
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Some of the cemeteries we went to had a few German graves as well as Allied ones and they were buried back to back with the Allies - not all the cemeteries did this, but I thought that was interesting. But then the Germans repatriated nearly all their dead and the ones who are in Allied cemeteries are mostly those who were PoWs/in Allied field hospitals.
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