2017 Battlefield Tour Page 30

TREADING IN FOOTSTEPS

This spot near Frezenberg, a couple of miles north of Ypres, is very special to me. At the start of WW1, my granddad was a Cpl in the 5th Manchesters, a Territorial Force Regt based at our old Drill Hall St in Powell St, Wigan. In Sept 1914, along with A Sqn DLOY, they sailed for the Middle East and eventually Gallipoli. After being withdrawn from Gallipoli to Egypt in Dec 1915 they eventually landed at Marseilles in May 1916. For the next 2½ years, they moved back and forth between France and Belgium doing tours in the trenches.

By reading the Bn War Diaries and studying trench maps I located the exact field that the 5th Manchesters occupied trenches in on 13 Sept 1917. By luck, it was on our route to the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate in Ypres. It was 13 Sept 2017 so exactly 100 years to the day I was treading in my grandfather's footsteps in the Ypres Salient.

The week before they had been warned off for an attack on fortified Borry Farm in front of the German Bremen Redoubt strong point. This raid was eventually cancelled because the neighbouring unit hadn’t captured their objective and it would have left the Manchesters vulnerable to machine gun enfilade fire.

That’s fate for you, who knows if the attack had gone ahead maybe I wouldn’t be here writing this now.