Military History | Tyne Cot — Where the Names After 16 August 1917 Went

Reginald Blomfield's arch at Ieper (Ypres) was meant to carry every name of the missing in the Ypres Salient. Partway through the work the Imperial War Graves Commission ran the arithmetic and found the building too small, so it drew a line in mid-August 1917 — 15 August in some accounts, 16 August in others — and sent everything after it eight kilometres north-east, up the ridge to a cemetery named after the German blockhouses on the slope, which the Northumberland Fusiliers are said to have thought looked like Tyneside cottages.

The blockhouses belonged to the Flandern I Stellung. One of them still stands inside the cemetery, under the Cross of Sacrifice. Herbert Baker raised a stepped stone pyramid over it and left a square of the original concrete exposed inside a bronze wreath; the stone beneath reads THIS WAS THE TYNE COT BLOCKHOUSE CAPTURED BY THE 3RD AUSTRALIAN DIVISION 4TH OCTOBER 1917. Baker's memoir credits the wording to Rudyard Kipling, and the decision to keep the blockhouse at all to George V, who walked this ground in 1922.

Baker's memorial is the curved flint-and-stone wall at the back, unveiled on 20 June 1927 by Sir Gilbert Dyett, with the New Zealand apse at its centre. How many names it carries depends on who counts: 34,888, 34,948, 34,959, or simply almost 35,000. The New Zealand panels are given as 1,165, 1,176 or 1,178. The graves in front number 11,956 or 11,968; of roughly 12,000 bodies gathered off the surrounding fields, the Passchendaele Museum says only some 3,800 could be identified. The totals move because names are added on correction and struck off when a grave is found.

The visitor centre opened in 2007 and is free. From the top of the wall you look down the rows to the entrance, and past it to farmland.

📸 Cover: view from the Tyne Cot memorial wall over the cemetery, by Ahubling, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the bronze wreath and inscription on the preserved blockhouse in the Cross of Sacrifice, by ViennaUK, CC BY-SA 4.0.