JFAN Year 8 Battlefields Trip

Last month Year 8 pupils spent two days on the WW1 battlefields, developing their understanding of the experience and sacrifice of The Great War. Taking part in a regular series of trips undertaken by the school, pupils participated in the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate in Ypres, laying a wreath of remembrance. The ceremony has taken place every day at 8pm since the Menin Gate was opened in the 1920s, and although the school has done eight battlefields trips since 2014 this was the first recent occasion that JFAN have laid a wreath.

Sites visited by the group in Belgium included the Cloth Hall Museum, Langemark and Tyne Cot, the largest Commonwealth War Cemetery in the world. On the second day the party travelled to France, visiting the underground Musee Somme in Albert, the Somme memorial at Thiepval, the Beaumont-Hamel battlefield site and the Lochnagar Crater. At the Crater site, the school’s former headmaster Major Frank Wyeth MC and former pupils who served in the war are commemorated on a plaque placed by the Old Newportonians.

Before leaving the Somme, 64 students and seven staff gathered in front of the Basilica in Albert, which has a golden Madonna and Child figure on top deeply associated with WW1 troops’ memories of the Great War.