Fourths Battlefields Trip to Ypres 2025
On the Thursday morning before Summer Half Term, twenty-eight bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Fourth Formers, plus four members of staff, journeyed to the small market town of Ypres, which lies on the flat land of the Flanders Plain in northern Belgium.
We travelled to visit the “Salient”, the name given to the arc of the Allied front to the east of Ypres that bulged forward into German held territory. This was the scene of some of the costliest fighting of the First World War. The battlefields around Ypres were, for four years, the main British and Commonwealth sector on the Western Front. One in four of the British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the war fell here, and it was also where sixty-seven Old Merchant Taylors’ (OMTs) made the ultimate sacrifice for king and country.
After a day of travel, we arrived in Ypres for check in at the hostel, a spot of dinner, and a mosey around Grote Markt (the Market Place). The whole town is an elaborate reconstruction, built between the 1920s and 1960s. The aim was to make it look as much as possible like the old town before the war as by 1918, Ypres and its many beautiful buildings, including the fourteenth century Cloth Hall and St. Martin’s Cathedral, lay in ruins.
The next morning, we departed our hostel for Essex Farm cemetery, where perhaps the most famous poem of the war was penned. John McCrae was at Essex Farm with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in May 1915 where he wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’. Mr Manley performed a beautiful rendition of the poem, and we paid our respects to Valentine Strudwick (killed aged fifteen years old), Harry Squier OMT, and Charles Thompson OMT.
We then visited the fantailed cemetery at Sanctuary Wood, where we read about the life of Reginald Salter OMT, before enjoying lunch and a museum visit at Hooge Crater. This private museum has renovated trenches and is chock-a-block with First World War paraphernalia, eerie waxworks, and possible souvenirs for those with money to burn.
After lunch, we travelled to Vancouver Corner. This remarkable, dramatic memorial represents a brooding soldier standing with ‘arms reversed’. It marks the battleground where 18,000 Canadians withstood the first German gas attacks on 22-24 April 1915 and Mr Manley read Wilfred Owen’s powerful poem ‘Dulce et Decorum est’.
We then visited the German military cemetery of Langemark. The 44,324-war dead lie in an atmosphere that offers a stark contrast to open, bright feel and planted blooms of the British and Commonwealth cemeteries. In the dappled half-light under the oak trees, Dr Hesketh gave a masterful account of the German experience on the Salient. He also spoke about the myth of Langemark that grew in potency in post-First World War Germany.
Next stop was New Irish Farm, where we remembered John Barrett OMT. Mrs Stubbs read one of his last letters to his wife Evie, written in early 1917, where he considered the prospect of losing his life in the battle that was to come and not seeing his fourth child, who had yet to be born. We then laid a wreath on his grave and observed a minute’s silence.
After dinner at the hostel, we attended the Last Post Ceremony under the Menin Gate. Carved over all the walls of the great gate, inside, up the stairs, and around the top on each side are the names of 54,900 soldiers who fell in the Salient between the beginning of the war and 15 August 1917. These men simply disappeared. The names of eighteen OMTs and one school master Thomas Callinan are etched on the Menin Gate.
Despite its size, the Menin Gate was not large enough to take all the names of those listed as missing. The remaining 34,888 names are inscribed at Tyne Cot, which we visited on Saturday morning. The heavy rain we encountered was very much in the spirit of 1917, but it did not dampen our ardour. This is the largest British and Commonwealth War Cemetery in the world, with 11,871 registered graves and we paid our respects to Frederick Grenhill OMT and John Greenup OMT, two of the six OMTs commemorated at Tynecot.
Dodging the raindrops we made our way to the south of Ypres to the Messines Ridge. Here the British detonated nineteen enormous mines within thirty seconds of each other in the successful offensive of June 1917. The Lone Tree mine that created the Pool of Peace was the largest single mine used on the ridge. It took 91,000 lbs of ammonal and 1,000 lbs of dynamite to blow this vast crater.
The rain abated after lunch, and we finished our tour with a visit to Lijssenthoek, where we remembered four OMTs: Arthur Botham, Francis Hewkley, Harold Noakes, and John Raphael. Widely regarded as the best all-round athlete to have attended Merchant Taylors’, Raphael was capped nine times for England at rugby union, captained the British and Irish Lions on the 1910 tour of Argentina, and played first-class cricket for Surrey. After laying a wreath on his grave and observing a minute’s silence, we listened as Seb F. played ‘The Lark Ascending’ by Vaughan Williams on his violin. This beautiful rendition brought our memorable trip to a close.
We then embarked for England, tired, happy, and enlightened by our experiences. We hope the boys enjoyed the fascinating history and sensational war poetry during the trip. Their behaviour was excellent, and they were a credit to themselves and the school.
M.W.S. Hale, Esq.
