Recent holiday with WW1 connections

Most people get on a plane or a train and head off to the sun or the snow to relax, well this really is not us.

Our recent holiday saw us driving through Europe spending some relaxing! time in Austria and then heading back. The interest to our readers of this kind of wacky race around Europe comes in some of the places we visited.

I our first day we visited another 6 Commonwealth War Graves sites around Loos, Arras and the Somme. This has been an ongoing project of ours that was born out of the research we are carrying out into the names of the men on the Morton War Memorial. One thing we always wanted to do was turn the names into real people and as part of this we set out our goal and decided that as we could never meet these people, the next best thing would be visiting their graves or memorials.

At the start of our holiday we realised that out of the sixteen names on the memorial we currently had visited only eight. One name is commemorated in Gallipoli, Turkey and one we could not find out who he was, so that leaves us with six more that are all in northern France.

So, here we are on day one of our holiday planning to visit four of our fellow Morton Lads but as luck would have it we caught an earlier Eurotunnel train, allowing us an extra couple of hours. In the end we were able to visit all six on the one day.

The cemeteries and men in question are listed below and each contains a link to the photographs we took at each (Click on the cemetery) and our history page for each man (Click on the soldier’s name)

• Bois-Grenier Communal Cemetery – Pte George Plowright

• Rue-Des-Berceaux Military Cemetery – Pte Arthur Ashton

• Cambrin Military Cemetery – Lance Corporal James Wright (sorry no history on our site yet)

• Loos British Cemetery – Private John James Booth

• The Thiepval Memorial – Private John Taylor (sorry no history on our site yet)

• Gordon Dump Cemetery – 2nd Lieutenant William Swift