Battle of Passchendaele

Lord Murphy of Torfaen Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always an enormous pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, who made a fascinating contribution, as have been all the speeches made so far in this Chamber.

For about three or four years now, a good friend of mine and councillor, Stuart Cameron, has been compiling a register of those in the eastern valley of Monmouthshire, my former constituency of Torfaen in South Wales, who perished during the Great War. In her very good contribution, my noble friend Lady Andrews referred to those who came from my home village of Abersychan in Monmouthshire. They, too, are commemorated by the register that Mr Cameron has been compiling.

I had a look at that register for the months of July to November 1917, covering, of course, the third Battle of Ypres. I discovered that at least 50 young men from my valley perished in that battle. That is 50 in a relatively small part of our country. Tragically, too, of those 50, seven of the men who died had brothers who had also died during the course of the war. Most of them were coal miners. Of course, the majority of coal miners were in a reserved occupation, as my grandparents were: they were finding the coal to fuel the ships to which my noble friend Lord West referred. Others, though, joined up. We have heard today of the poets and mathematicians, and the other tragic stories of people who died, but this is also the story of coal miners, steelworkers and other working-class boys who lost their lives at the same time. Most of those eastern valley men are buried in Tyne Cot, near the town of Ypres. They came from different regiments, but mostly from the South Wales Borderers or from Second Battalion, Monmouthshire Regiment.

The successor to those regiments is the Royal Regiment of Wales, and I have the great privilege of being the local president of the association of that regiment, led as it is by Captain Lewis Freeman and Mr David Thomas. They recently visited Passchendaele and Ypres, and this afternoon gives us an opportunity to pay tribute to those veterans’ organisations up and down the land—involving veterans who have fought in more recent battles than even the Second World War, to whom I think we should pay tribute on this occasion.

Almost exactly 50 years ago, I visited Menin Gate in Ypres for the first time and saw the ceremony of the Last Post. The veterans I saw lined up then to pay tribute to their comrades who had died were themselves veterans of the First World War. It is interesting to note now that when we return to the Menin Gate, year after year, there are literally hundreds of young people from our country and the Commonwealth who commemorate those who, a century ago, lost their lives. I wonder whether, if the same thing had happened at the beginning of the 20th century, people would, 100 years later, have commemorated Waterloo or Trafalgar. I doubt it. The reason is, of course, that those who fought and lost their lives in the Great War came from a much wider section of society, and hardly a family was unaffected by death or misery as a consequence of that war. Indeed, at the 90th commemoration of the Somme battle, the Last Post Association in Ypres visited Cwmbran, my home town, and played their part in the commemoration.

In some parts, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said, the third Battle of Ypres was even worse than the Battle of the Somme. The divisional historian of the Monmouthshire Regiment, just a few years after the Battle of Passchendaele, wrote this:

“By universal consent, the Third Battle of Ypres represents the utmost that war has so far achieved in the way of horrors … the cramped theatre with its slimy canals, becks, bogs and inundations; its shelled duck-boards; its isolated outposts; its incessant shelling and incessant rain; its mists and fogs; its corpses and its pestilential miasmic odours outdid anything that the Somme or Arras could boast”.


That moved me when I read it last week in a very old history of the Monmouthshire Regiment, which endured five months under those circumstances. Rightly so, its battle honours included the title “Ypres, 1917”. That was richly deserved.

Our debate today plays its small part in our country’s tribute and remembrance of those brave men who fell on the fields of Flanders a century ago.