Belgium 1917: Third Battle of Ypres

Ieper, A walk around Ieper

St Georges Church Elverdingsestraat

St George’s Church, Ypres [DVA]

Download a PDF map of the walk around Ieper (Ypres)

From late 1918 the great task of clearing the Ypres battlefield and building the British cemeteries and memorials began. Initially military graves units did much of the work of bringing scattered burials from the battlefield into large consolidation cemeteries such as Hooge Crater and Tyne Cot but eventually the task passed to the Imperial War Graves Commission. By the mid–1920s, British–born Commission employees – gardeners, stone masons and administrators – constituted a small but distinct community in Ypres. This little band of British expatriates found a focus in the group of buildings erected at the corner of the Elverdingsestraat and the Vandenpeerboomplein.

Foundation stone, St George’s Church, Ypres. [DVA]

The main building is the St George’s Anglican Church with its distinctive cross reminiscent of the Cross of Sacrifice in the British cemeteries. The idea for the church originated in the early 1920s as both as a memorial to the British dead but also as a place where bereaved relatives visiting the cemeteries could gather. An organisation called the ‘Ypres League’, set up in Britain to perpetuate the memory of the Ypres Salient and with its own newspaper, the Ypres Times, pushed for the construction of the church and the foundation stone was laid by Field Marshall Lord Plumer of Messines on 24 July 1927, the same day on which Plumer unveiled the Menin Gate. On 24 March 1929 the Anglican Bishop of Fulham officially opened and dedicated St George’s.

Kneelers, St George’s Church, Ypres. [DVA]

Postcards showing the ruins of French and Belgian towns bombarded by the Germans were a feature of the 1914–18 war. This card shows the ruins of the convent of the Irish Benedictine nuns in Ypres. [Stedelijke Musea, Ieper]

View towards the altar, St George’s Church, Ypres. [DVA]

In addition to the church a school, a chaplain’s house and Pilgrim’s Hall were erected on the site. The school was supported by the old boys of one of Britain’s most exclusive private schools, Eton College, in memory of the more than 360 ‘old Etonians’ who had perished in the war. At its height the school catered for about 130 students nearly all of them the offspring of Imperial War Graves Commission employees. Staffed by teachers from Britain it aimed to stop the children ‘going native’ by using a British curriculum and even British–style school uniforms. The emphasis on ‘Britishness’ extended to observing Empire Day and saluting the flag as well as dancing around the Maypole on May Day and Nativity plays at Christmas. With the coming of World War II and German occupation the British community fled and the school was not resumed after the war.

The core of St George’s, however, was, and remains, the memorial function of the church and the ongoing religious observance conducted through the presence of an Anglican vicar in Ypres. An annual service, for example, is held here on Anzac Day attended by the Australian and New Zealand ambassadors to Belgium. The interior of the church is lavishly decorated with commemorative stained glass windows to British units who fought in the Salient as well as dozens of personal plaques and commemorative objects to servicemen and women who died in France and Belgium during World War I.

Memorial to Field Marshal Sir John French, St George’s Church, Ypres. French was the Commander–in–Chief of the British Expeditionary Force when it defended Ypres from German attack in October–November 1914 at the First Battle of Ypres. [DVA]

Commemorative window to the South 4 Irish Horse, St George’s Church, Ypres. [DVA]

One of the most moving personal tributes to a lost loved one at St George’s is the so–called ‘Doox’ book on display in a glass cabinet at the rear of the church. ‘Doox’ was the nickname of Second Lieutenant Charles Dean Prangley, Lincolnshire Regiment, son of Reverend Charles Prangley of Bexwell Rectory, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Second Lieutenant Prangley was killed at the Battle of Flers–Courcelette in France on 25 September 1916 and was buried near there in the Guards’ Cemetery at Lesboeufs. The ‘Doox’ book is an illuminated manuscript of the Holy Communion Service of the Church of England produced for the grieving father in memory of his 19–year–old son by calligrapher and artist George Smith. The name ‘Doox’ appears on every page, the cover of the book was made from the bark of a tree in the rectory, and the gold cross on the cover came from Doox’s mother’s wedding ring. She is believed to have died in childbirth.

The sense of family and individual grief grief in St George’s is powerful and brings to mind a famous verse from A E Housman’s ‘The Shropshire Lad’, well known to the ‘Great War’ generation:

On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flower of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.