HMS Tyne honours Tynesiders at Tyne Cot in WW1 ceremonies

Crew of the Portsmouth-based patrol ship used the few days’ break from security patrols in Zeebrugge to pay their respects to Great War dead – especially those connected with her namesake region.

First up: the largest Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in the world by number of burials, Tyne Cot, 11,965 souls, of whom only 3,621 – three out of ten dead – have been identified.

So named because the German strongpoints peppering the muddy, shell-cratered Flanders terrain reminded Tommies (many of them from the North East of England) of workers’ cottages back home.

A small group from the warship held a short service of remembrance in front of the memorial panels bearing the names of members of the Northumberland Fusiliers with no known grave – one of four such memorials to Commonwealth WW1 dead across Belgian Flanders.

The sailors then walked up and down the seemingly endless lines of graves, including those of 15 sailors from the Royal Naval Division which fought in the closing battles for Passchendaele in November 1917, to grasp the scale of the sacrifice made by Commonwealth troops in the Ypres salient between 1914 and 1918.

Nowhere is the scale of that sacrifice more evident than the Menin Gate Memorial on the eastern edge of Ypres town centre.

Many of the dead marched through the original gate to the front. Since the late 1920s, a memorial arch has dominated the site, with the names of nearly 55,000 Commonwealth soldiers with no known graves listed on the walls.

Each night at 8pm traffic through the gate halts and hundreds of people gather for a Last Post ceremony with wreath layings and tributes by veterans groups, descendants, schoolchildren, historians and curious onlookers and tourists – drawn from around the world.

HMS Tyne was represented each night of her stay in Zeebrugge – and no sailor who attended was not moved by the occasion.