Military History | St George's Memorial Church, Ieper — Where the War Graves Staff Sent Their Children

On Palm Sunday, 24 March 1929, the Bishop of Fulham opened an English church on a corner site in Ieper (Ypres) and, in the same act, the school built beside it.

The pair answered a problem the Imperial War Graves Commission's own work had created. Building and then tending the cemeteries and memorials of the Ypres Salient required a permanent British workforce of gardeners, masons and clerks, and those men brought wives and children to a Flemish-speaking town that four years of shelling had flattened.

Sir Reginald Blomfield designed both buildings and Jules Anneessens built them. Blomfield had also designed the Menin Gate and the Cross of Sacrifice that stands in Commission cemeteries.

The campaign ran through the Ypres League, with Field Marshal Sir John French, Earl of Ypres, at its head. Lord Plumer laid the foundation stone on 24 July 1927, the day the Menin Gate was unveiled about six hundred metres east.

The school opened as the Eton Memorial School, its cost borne almost entirely by the parents and comrades of Eton College men killed in the war; the Flemish heritage inventory puts their number at 342. Its first pupils arrived on 9 April 1929, and it later took the plainer name of the British Memorial School.

It closed in May 1940 when the German army entered Belgium and the British families left. Too few came back for it to reopen, and the building became a clubhouse for the town's British community, mostly Commonwealth War Graves Commission staff.

The church is open daily, and nearly every object inside was given by someone with a reason to remember Ypres: windows, kneelers, chairs, regimental banners, brass. The oak notice board by the door still spells the town Ypres, in English, and lists the Sunday services.

📸 Cover: the church from the street, with the lower school range at right — LimoWreck, CC BY 2.5; the oak notice board — R/DV/RS, CC BY 2.0; both via Wikimedia Commons