Regents Review Winter 2019

The Regents Review Winter 2019

DEPARTMENTAL NEWS Humanities Battlefields

a local restaurant followed by the Last Post at the Menin Gate - here our students were able to pay their respects to the fallen heroes, which they did with exceptional respect and pride. The following day after breakfast we began our drive down to the Somme where we met our guide and in very soggy conditions we saw the Lochnagar Crater at la Boisselle, Pozière. This was a crater that was caused by a shell on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme and it was so loud that it is rumoured to have been heard in Buckingham Palace! The soil from the crater went up to 1km in the air and left a massive hole in the ground at the Canadian memorial at Newfoundland Park. Here, students were again lucky enough to experience the confines of a trench and were surprised at how close the enemy was. It was foggy and cold which added to the whole experience of the day. Students were told about how the soldiers needed to keep quiet especially in foggy times as their voices would carry across No Man’s Land. After this we headed to the Thiepval Memorial – the largest memorial in Europe. On it there were 42,000 names of lost or missing soldiers from WW1. Again students were shocked at the amount of names on this memorial. We also saw different graves to the ones visited at Essex farm and Tyne Cot – these were the French graves that were more simple and less ornate than the British graves as the French could not afford the limestone. After the temperatures plummeted further we made the decision to head back early but the students had a full experience of the sites and felt that they had learned a lot.

At 05:00am on Thursday 14th November, 5 teachers and 44 Year 8 students departed Southampton for a visit to the Battlefields in Belgium. After a pleasant journey to Folkestone and a quick shuttle crossing we arrived in a cold and damp France for the journey down to Ypres. As we arrived in Ypres the cloud came in thicker and the temperature dropped but we still managed to see all the sites. We started at Essex Farm cemetery where the students were told about the first battle of Ypres and were shown graves from unknown soldiers who died at the battle but their bodies were never recovered. We also learned about the youngest fatality of the war, a 15 year old boy called Valentine Joe Strudwick who had lied about his age to join up. The students were shocked by the fact that he was not much older than them. Our next stop was some trenches where students could see how cramped and confined the conditions were. From here we went onto Tyne Cot cemetery. This was where one of our students laid the school wreath as a mark of respect for the fallen heroes of WW1. This was a very proud moment for Felix Dobson to lay the school wreath. After this we went to the Passchendaele museum which was a living history museum that students could explore and get a real sense of the cramped conditions in the dugouts and trenches. The students had a great time here exploring all the different parts of trenches such as the kitchen and toilet areas! The evening was spent at leisure getting dinner at

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