IT was a poignant moment.
Raymond Steel lovingly placed flowers on the grave of the grandfather he never knew.
He rested one hand on the white headstone which records that Private L. Steel, a member of the Prince of Wales’s Own West Yorkshire Regiment, died on July 20th, 1918.
Around him in perfect symmetry are rows upon rows of splendidly maintained graves and headstones marking the final resting place of hundreds of other soldiers who were killed in battles in and around Ypres, Belgium.
Raymond, a member of the tenor section of the Honley Male Voice Choir, was born 21 years after the death at the age of 36 of his grandfather Luther, who lived in Cable Street, Huddersfield, with his wife Lillian and three children and drove a horse-drawn delivery van for the Huddersfield Industrial Society.
Raymond, of The Cottage, Nab Farm, Holmfirth, always promised himself that one day he would visit Luther’s grave.
His chance came when nearly 30 members of the choir went on a four-day social trip by coach to Bruges which included a visit to Ypres.
He made inquiries and discovered that his grandfather’s grave was in the Hagle Dump cemetery, apparently the site of a former ammunition dump – one of many cemeteries dotted around the countryside and immaculately kept by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. In a moving ceremony around Luther’s grave, the choir, conducted by Eric Cooper and guest Malcolm Fairless, sang Abide With Me, Deep Harmony – the hymn which closes every choir rehearsal – and the Holmfirth anthem, Pratty Flowers, with its appropriate passage, “No more to yon green banks will I take thee…”
Choir member Brian Shaw, a church warden at Holmfirth Parish Church, led prayers for Luther and for Raymond and his family before the ceremony ended with the Lords Prayer.
Earlier in the day the choir also paid tribute to the 12,000 men buried at the nearby Tyne Cot Cemetery, singing Abide With Me and Deep Harmony.
Tyne Cot is the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world and is a reminder of the bloody battle of Passchendaele where in 1917 tens of thousands of soldiers died in a 100-day period to gain barely eight kilometres of territory.
Raymond said: “It was a lovely ceremony which I will never forget.
“I’ve been told that my granddad and another soldier who were in a dugout were killed outright when it was hit by shell.
“His wife never got over his death and died 18 months later, and his three children, one of them my dad, were brought up by aunts and uncles.
“Seeing his grave and the thousands of others in the area brought home to me the utter futility of war.”
