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The Somme Memorial
To the Missing

By Martin Middlebrook


The Thiepval Memorial - oringinally designed to straddle the road at Pozières?
The cemetery plots were an afterthought.



Two aspects of the 1916 Somme Battle have long puzzled me. Why is the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing located at a position so far from the main 1916 battlefield? Why was the area around La Boiselle so obviously cleared of graves and cemeteries after the war?

Looking first at the Thiepval Memorial, a glance at the map shows that it is close to the north-western corner of the main 1916 battlefield. (I am ignoring the one-day diversionary action at Gommecourt on 1 July 1916.) This comparative remoteness from the main battlefield is probably not realised by the many visitors to Thiepval and the millions of TV viewers at 1st of July ceremonies.

Looking at La Boisselle, the centre of the attack front on 1 July 1916 and the scene of prolonged and bitter fighting for several days thereafter, as well as being on the main road from Albert to Bapaume along which so many troops later moved into the battle area - the Menin Road as it were of the Somme - why are there no military cemeteries in or close to the village, nor all along that long, open ridge towards Fricourt which was captured by the 21st Division on 1 July? There is a gap in front-line cemeteries of two miles between Ovillers Military Cemetery and Fricourt New Cemetery, by far the largest such gap on the 'old front line'.

Two factors concentrated my attention on this gap. My only local man to win a Victoria Cross was Sergeant Harold Jackson of the 7th East Yorks - 17th (Northern) Division - who was awarded his Victoria Cross early in 1918 but was killed and buried at Thiepval in August of that year. In March 1927 his family received a letter from the Imperial War Graves Commission to the effect that 'in order to secure the relevant maintenance of the grave in perpetuity' his remains had been transferred to the A.I.F. Burial Ground near Gueudecourt, six miles from Thiepval. A study of that cemetery shows that up to 1,500 graves were moved there from the Thiepval area, an obvious clearance of wartime cemeteries in preparation for the building of the Thiepval Memorial and the surrounding park which commenced in 1929. As for the 'La Boisselle gap', it is obvious that a similar clearance took place. When my wife and I were preparing our guide book, The Somme Battlefields, we found graves moved from La Boisselle to places as far away as the French National Cemetery at Cerisy-Gailly and the Cayeux Military Cemetery, nine and fourteen miles away respectively.

It is well known that the originally planned locations of British memorials to the missing had to be changed because of objections by the French. Standing on that ridge between La Boisselle and Fricourt - no farm buildings, no cemeteries, no unit memorials - I could not help wondering whether that area had been cleared of wartime graves in preparation for a major memorial together with a surrounding park and access roads, geographically such a more suitable location on the 1916 battlefield than Thiepval so far to the north.

I decided to ask the Commonwealth War Graves Commission whether my theory had any validity. Mr. Jeremy Gee, Director of Information and Secretariat, was kind enough to delve into old correspondence on the Thiepval Memorial and came up with the answer that Thiepval was not the original choice of location for this memorial. But my theory about La Boisselle was wrong; Pozières was the earlier choice.


The Imperial War Graves Commission originally wished to build thirteen free- standing memorials (i.e. not in or attached to war cemeteries) to the missing in France and two in Belgium. The two in Belgium - at Nieuport and at the Menin Gate at Ypres - were not challenged by the Belgians and were duly erected without difficulty, although an overflow of names at the Menin Gate had to go to the memorial wall at Tyne Cot Cemetery. The French list, however, suffered a drastic reduction, mainly because the French objected to such a large number of memorials in addition to the approximately 2,000 proposed permanent British war cemeteries. The Imperial War Graves Commission had proposed two free-standing memorials on the 1916 battlefield - at Contalmaison and at the Butte de Warlencourt, but in or around 1923 changed these to one large Somme memorial at Pozières, thus reducing the list for France to twelve. In 1927 that list suffered a massive further reduction to only four because of the continuing French objections. These were three relatively small ones at Neuve-Chappelle (the Indian memorial), La Ferté-sous- Jouarre (for the 1914 missing from Mons, the Retreat, the Marne and the Aisne), and Soissons (Aisne, Marne and other 1918 actions), and a major Somme memorial at Thiepval, this name now appearing for the first time, probably as a result of a French objection to the preferred War Graves Commission site on the main road at Pozières. The other six proposed free- standing memorials - at Armentières, Bethune, Arras, Cambrai, Amiens, and St. Quentin - were all abandoned and the names of the missing were incorporated into various cemeteries, the ones intended for Armentières even being banished over the frontier into Belgium at Ploegsteert. I will refer to the St. Quentin relocation later.

It is interesting to speculate whereabouts at Pozières the main Somme memorial would have been built before the switch to Thiepval. It was one of my battlefield tour customers, Bill Marsh from Guildford, who last summer was looking at the Thiepval memorial and observed that, if one took away the built-up interior of the memorial on which the Stone of Remembrance now stands, the memorial started to look a little like the one at the Menin Gate, designed to straddle a road. The design for the Somme memorial must have been prepared before the late change to Thiepval. The old Imperial War Graves Commission correspondence confirmed that the architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, had originally envisaged that his Somme memorial would straddle a road in this way, just as his colleague, Sir Reginald Blomfield, designed his memorial at Ypres to stand astride the Menin Road. Two obvious sites near Pozières immediately spring to mind - the position on the main Bapaume road south-west of the village where the Pozieres British Cemetery is now located, and the place on the main road on the north-east side of the village where the Australian Memorial, the Tank Memorial and the French telecommunications station are grouped around what is the highest point of the 1916 battlefield. The second being where the Pozières Windmill once stood (actually equal in height to a position just east of High Wood). Both locations at Pozières would have been much closer to the heart of the 1916 battlefield than Thiepval and the memorial would have been visible from a much larger area of the battlefield.

So, we have the interesting revelation that the main Somme memorial to the missing would now be at Pozières had not the French objected. Of the two road- straddling sites at Pozières, I fancy the Albert side of the village for reasons which I will discuss later. It would obviously have been a more apt place for a British memorial which was due to be rivaled in importance only by the Menin Gate at Ypres but, in view of modern traffic development, perhaps the French were wise to veto the site.

Before leaving Pozières, let us look at one more feature there. The walled Memorial to the Missing of Gough's Fifth Army of 1918 is located around the perimeter of the large Pozières British Cemetery. This is another compromise born out of French objections to the original desired location.

Could it be that the process of decision-making went as follows? The Imperial War Graves Commission wanted its main Somme memorial to be astride the road south-west of Pozières and its Fifth Army Memorial to be at St. Quentin where Gough's Fifth Army had its front line when the Germans struck on 21 March 1918. Because of French objections, the main Somme Memorial was moved to Thiepval and the proposed Pozières site, instead of being cleared, had its small wartime cemetery (about 250 graves) enlarged to the present 2,733 and the Fifth Army names recorded on the wall surrounding that new cemetery. The irony of all this is that, to my mind, both memorials finished up at unsuitable locations. Thiepval is a relatively marginal part of the 1916 battlefield and the Fifth Army, in its fighting retreat through this area in March 1918, was never at Pozières; the nearest Fifth Army units in the retreat were nearly seven miles away to the South, beyond the River Somme.

And I never did discover why the graves were all cleared away from La Boisselle and that empty ridge towards Fricourt. Can anyone supply the answer?

Notes: Martin Middlebrook, F.R.Hist.S., is the author, of fourteen books, including The First Day on the Somme, The Kaiser's Battle and, with Mary Middlebrook, The Somme Battlefields, and has organised more than 100 tours to the battlefields. The photo is from Trevor Tasker and the map was drawn by Mary Middlebrook. This article is presented by permission of the author; it originally appeared in the September 1997 issue of Stand To!, the Journal of the Western Front Association.



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