As together we remember the 100th Anniversary of the one of the bloodiest muddiest battles of WW1 I would like to share some glimpses of the ripples that spread out from Passchendaele and that we can still appreciate today. This way of using personal memoir to inform mass mourning and remembering has become something of a mark of our commemoration of the 100th anniversary of what, in the Register of Silcoates School, is interestingly referred to as The Great European War.

A father and a son
Abraham takes Isaac up a mountain and prepares to slaughter him. Wilfred Owen uses the same image in on of his war poems ‘The Old Man and the Young‘. There must have been many fathers and sons died in WW1, and I know one pair.
Harry and Ronald Moorhouse, father and son, both formerly of Silcoates School, died on the same day, at the Battle of Passchendaele: it is said less than thirty minutes separated their dying. They were professional soldiers. Harry had first served in South Africa, and was a contemporary of John Yonge the war-time Headmaster of Silcoates. The story goes that on 9th October 1917, Ronald was brought in wounded. Harry lept up to find medical help for his son and was killed in the process. Even though this story is recorded their names were never reunited with their bodies: they are listed with thousands of others on the walls that surrounded Tyne Cot Cemetery. We visit them every year with our students.

Two women
Nellie Spindler was killed on 21st August 1917. She was a Staff Nurse from Wakefield, serving with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, and is one of only a very few British nurses who were killed in action on the Western Front to be buried with full military honours. Brought up a Roman Catholic, she was the daughter of a police sargeant in Wakefield. She trained as a nurse in Leeds and eventually found her way to the Western Front under the command of a Matron from Batley. She was killed, aged 26, when a shell fell on the tent in which she was sleeping and is burried in Lijssenthoek Military Cenemtery. We visit her every year too.
Constance Coltman is a different matter. She was a pacifist. On the 17th September 1917, at the height of the Battle of Passchendaele, she was ordained to the Christian Ministry in the Congregational Union of England and Wales by four other pacifist ministers, one of the first women to be ordained in Britain. Many men had gone to war, and quite a few women, and that had changed Britian quite a bit. Women did war work, and some campaigned for peace: Constance was one of them. We will remember her ordination in September this year.

The story of war is always the story of the lives of ordinary people, both women and men. Wars also often mark a change, geographical maybe but also social. Many things change with war, some of which are forgotten and some remembered a long time later. We are still learning lessons from WW1. ‘Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it’: best we keep learning then.

In our coming and our going
The peace of God

30.07.2017, being the 100th Anniversary of GS Golding, remembered at Thiepval.