Recently arrived home from 6 days on the Somme. This year we cycled and it added a whole new dimension. It is, as ever, a timeless, moving environment. A page on the trip will follow at some point

Have just returned from a short but successful trip to Ypres. The main reason for the trip was to follow the last days of my cousin, Spencer Parkes. This worked well and I was happy to walk the area of his final three days pretty accurately. More on this in Spencer’s pages on this blog. Alongside that we took in some traditional areas, notably Hooge Crater and Messines Ridge (below), the latter was particularly appealing because it was rural, accessible and reminiscent of the area I am much more used to surveying, The Somme.

Significant page update on my maternal grandfather – Eric Walter Hare. https://thesomme.wordpress.com/eric-hare/

And if it’s getting confusing, here we have Sydney Percy, Son of Henry (who did not fight in WW1 as far as I am aware) and Emily, nephew of Sydney Ernest, Percy and Spencer.

More details here: https://thesomme.wordpress.com/parkes-family/sydney-percy-parkes/

Not sure how I missed him. So there were three of them, first cousins to me, twice removed, two of whom died and one survived. Research and a page for Sydney Ernest will follow.

I am indebted to Mark Thompson for sending me this photograph of officers of the Coates Mission taken with the Royal Family in 1942 outside York House, Sandringham.

Mark’s grandfather, Wilfred Thompson – known as “Bloody Jim” and if you’d met him you know why, according to Mark! – is the second from the left in the back row, and my grandfather, Malcolm Hancock is next to him, third from the left. Mark believes that at least 5 members of the photo were in the Coates Mission, so now that’s possibly four.

If anyone knows the identity of the others, or any other information, please leave a comment.

I visited Madresfield yesterday and  had a chance to wander the gardens and consider the defences in WW2, when the house was one of four earmarked for the Royal Family, should they have had to have left London in a hurry. Part of my grandfather’s work in the Coates Mission was to visit these houses periodically  to see that the defences were in order.

View across the outer moat.

The inner moat which goes all the way round the house.

The ha-ha.