St Woolos Cemetery - The Haunted Holy Ground
From the book "The Haunted Holy Ground" by Mike Buckingham and Richard Frame published in 1988.
Fighting Men Of All Services
By Mike Buckingham and Richard Frame
First published 1988
© Mike Buckingham and Richard Frame 2012
Fighting men of all three services fallen in campaigns from Rourke’s Drift to the Normandy beaches are buried at St Woolos and in one place the gravestones form orderly ranks and files, just as the men would have paraded in life.
All three services are represented in the orderly ranks and files of headstones
Location: CON D25
Soldiers from every regiment and corps are there together with sailors, and flyers from the earliest days of military aviation, when biplanes wheeled in deadly combat over the shell-pocked fields of Flanders.
There are far, far too many of the men who fought in the mud and stench of that conflict. There are those who died through shells and mortars, those cut down by machine gun fire as they struggled on the barbed wire and those for whom death came in the creeping, insidious form of gas.
These graves in which lie generations of fighting men tell us something about the nature of war. The older ones from Victorian campaigns nestle in among townspeople from other walks of life. They are imposing, signifying even in death the rank held by the occupant in life.
The older service graves from Victorian campaigns nestle in among townspeople from other walks of life. William George Leach, quarter-master sergeant of depot battery... Welsh division Royal Artillery, was buried in 1886.
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But after 1914 the gravestones are mass-produced. Modern, total war was experienced for the first time in the war between the United States of America and the Confederacy but never before or since was it fought on the scale of the Great War which began in 1914.
This headstone marks the burial place of three servicemen - D Bowen, MJ Collins and J. Power - lance corporal Welch Regiment, private of the Middlesex Regiment and guardsman Irish Guards respectively. They all died in 1916.
Location: RC D24
From the outset machineguns and submarines took their grim tithe, soon to be joined by gas and the tank. On several stones the implements of war, artillery pieces and rifles are carved. Some of the stones are begining to fade, just as the living who participated in that awful struggle are slowly fading away. But most of the stones dating from the Second World War are as clear as the day they were put in place, reminding us perhaps, that the war to end all wars led inexorably to yet more horror. There is nothing to guarantee that the process is yet complete.
John David Dummer, rear airgunner on Wellington Bombers 1939 - 1945, survived the war despite the risk he ran on each of his missions.
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The names of many members of the Merchant Navy are remembered at St Woolos although their graves are far away. Many of these men were on the Russian convoys which left from Newport and on ships which battled their way across from Canada and the United States.
It was a grim period and it is sobering to think that Newport supplied more men to the merchant service than any other town in Britain bar one Northern town.
Neither are all the graves British. There are three obviously military crosses but which do not appear to be British. Part the long grass which all but shrouds them in the summer and you will see the names of French sailors, their names cast in bronze plaques, who died ‘Pour La France.’ Elsewhere Canadians and South Africans lay beside their British allies and in one place - just for a short time - three members of the German Luftwaffe were interred very near to the Allied dead, as we have already mentioned.
French serviceman's grave
Louis Droal Matelot <IRMA> Mort pour la France 28 2 1915
Location: RC D23
Belgian serviceman's grave
Location:RC 24