This website is owned and maintained by Mark Warby

mark@brucebairnsfather.org.uk

Bullets & Billets Tour of the Ypres Salient

26.05.07-28.05.07 Bullets & Billets Tour of the Ypres Salient

Over the Bank Holiday weekend a group of Old Bill Newsletter Subscribers visted Belgium and France, to re-trace Bruce Bairnsfather’s first six months in the trenches with the 1st Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment,

from December 1914 to April 1915. A number of key locations were visited, based on a route plotted from Bairnsfather’s 1916 book Bullets & Billets. The tour began at Steenwerck Railway Station, where the young 2nd Lieutenant had arrived at the Front, and ended at Mouse Trap Farm, the closest point to where he was blown up during the Second Battle of Ypres, on 25th April 1915. We also spent some time at St Yvon, where the plaque commemorating Bairnsfather instigated by Tonie and Valmai Holt in December 2003 can be seen.

A highlight of the trip was the Dedication ceremony for a new plaque commemorating Bruce Bairnsfather, which has been erected in St George’s Memorial Church, Ypres. The plaque was proposed by the Editor of The Old Bill Newsletter, and the Dedication took place on Monday, 28th May and was attended by the Bullets & Billets tour group and other invited guests including descendents of the Charlet-Flauw family, with whom Bruce Bairnsfather had been billeted in April 1915.