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Everyone who visits Ypres on a battlefield tour, or for any other reason for that matter, has to pay a visit to the world’s best known war memorial; the Menin Gate. There has always been a gate on this site and it has been called many things. Firstly, in the middle ages it was known as the Hangwaert Gate meaning the gate leading to the gallows field. When this was...

On Wednesday, 1 February 2017 we received the sad news that Antoon Verschoot had passed away in Ieper at the grand old age of 91 years. Antoon was a bugler of the Last Post Association from 1954 until December 2015 and, together with his fellow buglers, he had played the Last Post some 15,000 times under the Menin Gate to honour the memory of the soldiers who died...

On the weekend of 20th January we were kindly invited to attend the Discovery Tour 2017. Tour operators from all over the country were met by coaches in the UK and transported to the town of Ypres where we would be able to meet a number of hoteliers and companies who cater for the tourism market. It felt most odd but a welcome change for us to be the guests on a...

Recently on one of our battlefield tours, the group visited the In Flanders Fields Museum’. In the museum was a stuffed Jack Russell called Torpille who belonged to a Jules Van Neste, a Belgian Chaplain in World War One, and used as a rat catcher. Our photo shows Torpille in the museum not looking his best thanks to the taxidermist of the time! Many of the...

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission care for cemeteries and memorials at 23,000 locations, in 154 countries. In Belgium and Northern France, where many of our World War One battlefield tours take place, there are 959 CWGC cemeteries and memorials. Each one is meticulously maintained by the gardeners of the CWGC and are all fine resting places for our honoured...

When I am conducting a battlefield tour I often get asked how a visitor to the WW1 battlefield sites could find out more about a relative who has served in the Great War. So in this blog I have listed the methods that can be used to research an ancestor’s military career. Firstly the researcher has to establish whether the serviceman was killed in the war or if he...