Amid all the Ashes excitement in Australia, you wouldn’t imagine that there is a small grave in a field in Belgium with profound and poignant relevance to the world’s oldest sporting rivalry. But I traced that very link from a last minute invitation to a very small ceremony in the Oxford Road Cemetery in Ieper (previously known as Ypres and colloquially known as “Wipers” by British troops during the First World War.)
Colin Blythe was a Sergeant in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and was killed somewhat arbitrarily - like so many others - by a random shell in the battle of Passchendaele in November 1917.
Colin, also known as Charlie, was also thought one of the finest spin bowlers of the pre-war period, and played several tests for England - including Ashes series in England and Australia. In 2009, the year that England reclaimed the Ashes from Australia after the debacle of the 2006/7 series, the England cricket team visited the Oxford Road Cemetery where a stone cricket ball was laid at the grave of England and Kent bowler Blythe. "It was a deeply moving and humbling experience," said captain Andrew Strauss.
Also laid at the grave was a small miniature cricket bat, which was recently and astonishingly stolen. And so it was decided by members of Kent Country Cricket Club (for whom he played) that it should be replaced and a ceremony was scheduled to dedicate it. It was a very small, brief (6 minutes) but dignified ceremony – conducted by my father, the Chaplain to the nearby St George’s Memorial Church, Ieper (which you can watch here on You Tube.)
The whole experience put today's Ashes events in quite startling perspective for me.
It’s an arresting place to visit. Certainly not one of the large grave yards – for there are several vast cemeteries in the area to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of war dead in the area through 1914-1918. But the Oxford Road Cemetery in particular is important for its location as well as for its significant resident. Situated just metres away from an important field dressing post on the road back from the Passchendaele Battle front. Of the several hundred graves there, many of them all died within a few days of each other – between the 24th October and the 7th November 1917. Of the graves there, all are of gentlemen younger than myself – which makes me very sad.
But as you tour around the rest of the area, you appreciate how lucky Mr Blythe is to have such a grave at all, let alone one so well attended. Many of the graves in that cemetery are of an “Unknown Soldier” – sometimes its not even clear of what nationality. But so many of the war dead were never even found. The grand Menin Gate in Ieper town centre records the names of some 56,000 British Empire dead – Canadian, Australian, Indian, New Zealand and South African as well as British – the remains of whom were never even found amid the mud of the Ypres Salient.
(More pictures of the Oxford Road Cemetery here.)