Bob Ogley reflects on visit to First World War sites in Flanders

MY FATHER, John Ogley, never said much to me about the Great War, except this. When, as a young guards officer in 1918, he found himself cut off from his unit he was taken to Talbot House in Poperinge, a relatively safe area behind the German lines, and given a bed for the night, a sandwich and a cup of tea. It was, he told me, the best cup of tea he had ever had in his life.

Recently on a visit to Ypres and Passchendaele, courtesy of Visit Flanders, I was anxious to visit Talbot House, where almost 100 years ago Padre Philip (Tubby) Clayton had opened an Everyman’s Club for soldiers preparing for their turn in the trenches of the Ypres Salient. As my father had discovered this was their haven from hell, a house that claimed as its motto “abandon rank all ye who enter here”.

As I walked into the large garden of this historic house at Rue de l’Hospital 35 in the heart of Poperinge, a young lady dressed as a VAD nurse, took me by the arm and gave me a cup of tea.

Although I was not the recipient all those years ago this was a moment to cherish.

And that was not all. As our party of journalists moved on to the military cemetery at Lijssenthoek, the resting place of 10,755 casualties, our guide introduced us to the new interpretation centre, where the biggest burial database in the world has just been opened.

Our guide explained how 50,000 people a day are finding details of their ancestors who fought and died on the Western Front. As an example he brought up on the screen the names of the British soldiers who had died on September 8 (the day of our visit) 1916.

Plenty of names rolled by on the screen, but I only noticed one – that of John Yates Ogley, a 23-year-old Yorkshireman from Ryehill near Doncaster, who died from his injuries on that day. Not my father, but a cousin who shared the same name. He came from a village close to where my father was raised.

Communities all over London were greviously affected by the conflict of 1914-18 and every year thousands of people go to Flanders to learn more about their ancestors. The desolate battlefield landscape that defines the Salient’s horrors in popular memory has long since gone, but many reminders of the profound impression the war made remain today.

I was taken to the In Flanders Fields Museum, located in the famous Cloth Hall in Ypres, which has just reopened after a major refurbishment in preparation for the centenary next year. Here, new scenography, video projections, soundscapes and interactive presentations, via a poppy bracelet, tell the story of a city that was razed to the ground by German shelling.

We moved on to the Memorial Museum at Passchendaele, the scene of one of the biggest and bloodiest encounters of all. In 100 days of fighting in 1917, 245,000 Commonwealth men were killed for the gain of five miles.

I recall an old cricketer telling me about Passchendaele – the stalemate, the mustard gas, the shells, those who sank in the clay and just lay there to die, those whose ear drums were shattered and became stone deaf, those who were blinded or lost a limb and those who somehow made it to the dressing stations.

The museum has a large collection of historical artefacts, images, movies and life-like dioramas. It also explores the British dugout experience of life underground, necessary when there was nothing left above.

I would urge all those who have never been to the Flanders Field country to go soon and see the new museums and the rebuilt villages. Ypres (now known as Ieper), which rose like a phoenix from its ashes, an almost perfect copy of the mediaeval city destroyed during the fighting. Poperinge, described by Edmund Blunden as one of the wonders of the world. Talbot House, where the welcome is as warm as ever. And the Menin Gate where the Last Post is played every night.