Students set History Straight on Tour

During the Easter holidays, 35 Year 11 historians and 5 members of staff visited the battlefields of northern France and Belgium where they saw for themselves the harsh reality of life on the Western Front.

The students visited British, French and German memorials, where they were moved by the meticulously cared for cemeteries. They also visited Talbot House, a rest home where everybody, regardless of rank, was always welcome. A trip to Ypres led them to the Lijssenthoek Cemetery which contains a grave for each day of the war as it was the site of a major casualty

clearing station. The cemetery really impressed upon the girls how the ‘Empire' as a whole participated in the war, as there are also graves of soldiers from India, Australia and New Zealand.

Interestingly, Lijssenthoek Cemetery is also the final resting place for some members of the Chinese Labour Corps. Upon examination of the gravestones, two of our students, Noon V and Rachel M, were able to identify two female names on Chinese Labour Corps graves. The very existence of women in the Labour Corps has never been recorded, let alone the discovery of two graves in the war cemetery. More poignant still was that one of the tombstones, like so many on the Western Front, had a small sentence of poetry or memorial writing, which now incorrectly refers to the occupant as ‘he'.

The group's tour guide, Alan Reed, was impressed with the students' discovery of the graves of Chinese women in the British cemetery and said he would now be able to tell future visitors about the women buried there.