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Bargain Travel Europe guide to Europe on a budget for unusual destinations,
holiday travel tips and secret spots missed by travel tours.



ST GEORGE’S MEMORIAL CHURCH - YPRES
Memory of the Fallen in Flanders Fields

St Georges Memorial Church Ieper photoIt is an English church built in Belgium. Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers came to the Fields of Flanders, never to return home. The Ypres Salient in the western part of Belgium was the stopping point of the German advance to the sea, and the brutal battles of trench warfare, attack and counter attack which lasted through nearly the entire First World War. There are a number of sites in Ypres (Ieper in Dutch) commemorating and remembering the war which devastated and virtually leveled the town and turns the fields into killing grounds, museums and cemeteries (see Passchendael and Tynecot).

Two of the locations in Ypres and several war cemeteries were designed by British architect Sir Reginald Theodore Blomfield, who in the height of his career, before the war had redesigned several of the great manor houses of England in the late Victorian and Edwardian age and was the responsible for the shape of London’s Regent Street. After the war, Blomfield was called upon to create memorials. The Menin Gate in Ypres, with its stone arches etched with the rows and columns of the names of the lost, and the nightly pipes ceremony still honors the sacrifice of nations, and St Georges Memorial Church.

Flanders Fields  plaque photoOne of the church dedications reads: “To the Glory of God the Great Cross in this church is dedicated by the 23rd Division in memory of their comrades who fell in the Great War”. There is a a plaque dedicated to Lt Colonel John McCrae, the Canadian Medical Officer whose poem, “In Flanders’ Fields” written spontaneously after the battlefield death of a friend in May of 1815, and reflecting on the image of the poppies which seemed to bloom in the earth turned up by bombs and graves. The brief but poignant poem became the unofficial anthem of the “Great War” and the poppy, the symbol of remembrance. The push for the building of the church was also from a Canadian, Lt Colonel Henry Willson, who was acting military mayor of Ypres following the war in 1919, founded the Ypres League a year later, with the aim of keeping alive the memory of the sacrifices made in the Ypres Salient between 1914 to 1918. Willson was also instrumental in the foundation of Britain’s Imperial War Museum (see Imperial War Museum). The Ypres League had its own magazine, the Ypres Times and organized pilgrimages to the Belgian town and battlefields from Britain (see Flanders Battlefields Museums), and holding an annual Ypres Day on October 31st. A number of sites for the church were considered but land was finally found on the corner of Vandenpeereboomplein Avenue courtesy of the Imperial War Graves Commission, purchased by the widow of town archivist, Arthur Merghelynckand, and the cornerstone of the memorial church and school laid by Field Marshal Lord Plumer on the 24th of July, 1927.

Window Coats of Arms  Ypres photoThe St George’s Memorial Church and a connected school remembering boys killed in the shelling of the town were opened on 24th of March 1929, dedicated by the Bishop of Fulham. An intimate space with seating for 200, the interior furnishing were provided by the families of fallen soldiers, and almost every piece serving as a memorial to the men who gave their lives in the World War I battlefields of Belgium and France. Everywhere the walls and even the etched windows, chosen of clear glass rather than stained to allow light into the solemn space, are marked by plaques, banners and dedications to various regiments and individual officers. The chairs are covered with colorful cushions representing memorial sponsorships of the church by the families.

Memorial Statue and  Windows at Memorial Church Ieper photoSome memorials to look for - in the outer vestry a window dedicated to twin brothers Captain Francis Octavius Grenfell and Riversdale Nonus Grenfell who served with the Ninth Lancers, features the regimental coat of arms and the family’s motto - Loyal Devoir. The choir window entering the church is dedicated to the Guards Regiment. The first president of the Ypres League, Field Marshal John Denton Pinkston French, the Commander of the British Expeditionary Forces has a bust and large plaque among the other generals and Viscounts, with a later brass plaque to Winston Churchill next to him. On the south side is a window commemorating a Captain Loftus Jones, an Australian who was a commander in the Yorkshire Regiment, The South Irish Horse Guards from Dublin are acknowledged with a regimental badge and the image of St Patrick. Also represented are the Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Light Infantries, Monmothshire Regiment, Royal Artillery Regiment and 3rd, 4th and 6th Infantry Corps. Three windows in the northern end of the church commemorate the flyers of the war, Royal Air Force, Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.

Memorian Cushins St Georges Church photoCuriously, during the Second World War, the church was damaged only by an allied bomb which hit in the street. Many of the furnishings and decorations were removed by citizens and hidden. The German occupation soldiers took over the connected school and converted to an officer’s club, using the chairs from the church, but respected the memorials inside as symbols of the sacrifice of all soldiers in war. Any tour visit to the WWI battlefields of Flanders 90 years on should include a stop at St George’s Memorial Church and the Menin Gate to remember the fallen. © Bargain Travel Europe

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St Georges Memorial Church

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