Finding my grandfather's grave: a journey, a legacy, and peace
JH Davies - whose grave his granddaughter Roz Crowley and family travelled to Ypres in Belgium to see.
Every year on Remembrance Sunday, the day of commemoration for those who died in the world wars, my mother would go quiet. One year I remember her standing beside me scrubbing potatoes at the kitchen sink, her lip quivering. There may have been tears, but she didn’t shed them, not wanting to upset us.
Perhaps there wasn’t much to tell, just the memory of waving goodbye to her father from the door of their house in Southwark, London. A stark memory for a six-year-old.
My mother, Rose Alexandra Davies, lost her father, James Henry Davies, when he was conscripted into the British army to fight in WW1 — the war to end all wars — and died from injuries six months before the end of the war.
Like so many of her time, my mother rarely talked about the war. Judi Dench, in a recent episode of , said the same of her father who had been injured in that war but never revealed that it was the cause of his debilitating knee trouble.
For my mother, the silence could have been stoicism or lack of information, or perhaps an unwillingness to face the horrors of what could have happened to my grandfather.
In recent years, having visited the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and feeling that a visit there was somehow paying respects to victims, I felt an urge to honour my own grandfather, to pay respects at his resting place, to acknowledge the service which ended his life at the age of 35, and which had left behind a widow and six children — the eldest 14 years old, the youngest a year and nine months.
A distant Australia-based cousin-in-law, Valerie Farthing, is interested in heritage, and she started the e-journey to create our family tree. Our family friend, Aisling Lyons, uncovered further details on my grandfather’s final years.
My niece Cara and my daughter Lynn and I formulated a plan to travel to where my grandfather had fought and died. My niece Rosa having just finished her Leaving Certificate, was more interested in joining our travel party than partying in Ibiza, with the added attraction of starting our pilgrimage in Paris.
My grandfather, we understood, had died near Ypres in Belgium, so Aisling found a tour guide online. Jacques Ryckebosch, with his researcher wife Genevra Charsley, plans tailor-made tours of the Ypres Salient area.
We settled overnight in Ypres, the city British soldiers called 'Wipers' during the war, and now referred to locally by its Flemish name, Ieper. A pretty city, with a population of 35,000, it is enclosed by the original seventeenth-century stone walls.
Between 1914 and 1918, an estimated 4.8 million artillery shells fell on Ypres, demolishing almost every building. It had to be rebuilt completely. For years after the war, brick-coloured blood stained the streets.
Our guide picked us up from our hotel at 9.30am in his people carrier — a stack of maps, photographs and documents piled on the front seat. Our first stop was at a series of dugouts where my grandfather was likely to have sheltered.
Soldiers would settle down to rest in the cold, dark, concrete bunkers to eat in more comfort than in the muddy trenches. The ceiling contained regulation five holes, to let out any poisonous mustard or chlorine gases inflicted on them.
“Not only were the soldiers battling the enemy,” says the illuminating Jacques, “they were also battling the weather over the four years of changing seasons. When the ground got sodden with rain and blood, adding to the difficulty of walking through open ground or trenches, soldiers would often come across a solid area. That was when they knew they were standing on corpses.”
Jacques said one veteran told him, “We lived like rats and smelled like pigs … Everything would be over by Christmas. It was a different war than expected.”
A statue in the nearby quiet town of Mesen commemorates the 1914 Christmas truce. It was not so much to celebrate the birth of Christ, but to catch up on the burial of soldiers for hygiene reasons. We stop there to eat our packed lunch, and hear the whoosh of cyclists who come out at least once a week, racing around the inside of the walls. Cycling is a religion here.
We drive past the village of Wytschaete, one of the sites of the Battle of Messines. From there to Passchendaele, synonymous with the horrors of WW1. At Kemmel Hill, we see how German troops commanded a key strategic position over the salient, where they could observe all the movements of Allied troops.
On 25/04/1918, some 9,000 soldiers were killed in half an hour — an obscene statistic, which includes a man I never met, but who gave my mother life.
Then to the site of Number 36 Casualty Clearing Station in Rousbrugge, where my grandfather appears on a list of the injured and where he died of wounds on 25/04/1918.
On a very warm, sunny day we arrive at Haringhe (Bandaghem) Military Cemetery at Poperinge, West Flanders. With 812 burials — a small cemetery by WW1 standards — Haringhe seems comfortingly personal, well-marked with gates and pillars, and housing a book with details of the occupants. Super Trouper roses brighten up graveyards in the area. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is meticulous and sensitive.
Jacques leads us to Plot 5, Row B, and the grave and headstone of my grandfather, Driver James Henry Davies, service number 84389, B Battery, 88th Brigade, 19th Division, Royal Field Artillery, British Army.
The three of us, my two nieces and I, don’t talk. We stand together, then move away to give each other space to cry, to take it all in. We circle back. As we hadn’t expected to find a headstone — believing we would only see a name on a memorial wall, like so many of his comrades — we didn’t bring flowers or a shrub to plant. It’s bare.
Jacques, reminding us that, “every headstone has a face”, went to his car and brought us back a cross with a poppy attached to place at the grave. This wasn’t his first rodeo.
Feeling sad, hollow, and light-headed, I am missing the man I would love to have met.
Searching for a connection.
He had been a packing-case maker so must have been skilled with his hands. I made my own clothes as a teenager. He signed a nurse’s autograph book sweetly and appreciatively.
I think James Henry would have enjoyed meeting his two great-granddaughters: 18-year-old Rosa, and Cara, seven months pregnant carrying a great, great grandson. With us in spirit were my daughter who couldn’t join us, and Aisling, who was hit with Covid the day before.
My grandfather’s division, the 19th, was known as the Butterfly Division. In the cemetery, a butterfly flutters around and lands on his gravestone as if to say “You got here!”.
Tears as I type. Tears for a man I never met. It’s surreal, but real. It’s lonely, but he’s with me now.
Though there’s nothing more to do, it’s hard to leave. Reluctantly we do, slowly, looking back, wordless. We have honoured him. We will plant Super Trouper roses in our gardens.
- For further details on tours of the Ypres Salient, contact: Jacques Ryckebosch: ypres-fbt.com
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