On this day, after working on the Western Front since the early autumn of 1914, Fabian Ware of the British Red Cross’s Mobile Unit, wrote to Arthur Stanley, Unionist MP and chairman of the Joint War Organisation of the British Red Cross. Ware was clearly delighted to inform Stanley that the Mobile Unit had been officially recognised by the French government and military authorities ‘as the only organisation authorised to deal with the question of the locality, marking and registration of graves of British officers and men in this country’.
Ware noted that the work would come under the remit of the Adjutant General and would be known as the Graves Registration Committee. Despite this closer alignment with the command structure of the British Expeditionary Force, Ware stressed the need for continued funding from the British Red Cross. He wanted a budget of £3000 to pay for four sections, two working in the British zone and two in the French (where many of the earliest British burials were found). Playing his cards wisely and revealing his brilliant head for administration combined with public profile, Ware added that an expanded team would be able to furnish the British Red Cross headquarters with a regular supply of information helping it to deal with the flow of enquiries from next-of-kin.
Amongst the earliest crosses erected by the Mobile Units were seven marking the graves of soldiers killed in the First Battle of Ypres. Originally buried in Ypres Reservoir South Cemetery (also known as Ypres Reservoir No. 1, Broadley’s Cemetery and Prison Cemetery No. 1), the graves are now in Ypres Reservoir Cemetery where they were relocated in the spring of 1922. Private F. Atwell of 1 Royal Welch Fusiliers, Lieutenant R.T. Stainforth and Private C. Over of the 2 Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and four soldiers of 2 Queen’s, Corporal Albert Claxton, and Privates H. Punter, E.G. Tickner and S. Williams are all to be found in Plot II, Row B, in the rear left corner of the cemetery near the special memorials.
To stand in that row and see the graves provokes a deep reaction. It is to touch the links in the chain that stretch back through time, back through the history of the Imperial War Graves Commission and into its prehistory, into the evidence of its evolution. It puts us in touch with the very moment when a profound vision began to take shape.
Let’s go to Ypres Reservoir Cemetery and experience that connection together.
