Somme and Ypres

Tony and Nicky Bird guided the Windlesham and Camberley Camera Club around Ypres and the Somme in what was described by an appreciative guest as ‘a superb and truly emotive Battlefield tour’. A wreath was laid at the Menin Gate ceremony. Special detours were organised so particular graves could be visited, but main and majestic sites like the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing were not forgotten, nor were preserved trenches and battlefields, which give a flavour of that century old war.

Members of the Camera Club, armed with enormous lenses, recorded cemeteries and landscape, which will feature on their website. One word of warning – if you meet them socially don’t refer to their photographs as ‘snaps’, they don’t seem to like it. Just as those people who march about the Somme or Ypres in full 1914 uniform don’t like being called ‘re-enactors’ They are apparently ‘living historians’. So now you know.

Picture: The Camera Club (May 17, 2015) at Essex Farm, Ypres, where McCrae wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’. Standing behind the grave of Rifleman Strudwick of the Rifle Brigade, killed near here aged 15 years and 11 months, in 1916.


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