Year 9 Battlefields Trip

My report on the Battlefields Trip for Year 9: 

On Friday morning, at 5:40 am, 79 students from Year 9 got on coaches to travel all the way to Belgium. During this, we went on the euro-tunnel, crossed through France and ate far too many sweets to wake us up; the coach ride back and forth was long and came in at 8 hours road time but we all had a good time with each other and got to know everyone better and even make friends with people we’ve never spoken to. 

Our itinerary for the trip set us up to go to three cemeteries and sights of the First World War on the first day through Belgium. Firstly, we visited Lijssenthoek CWGC Cemetery. Here is the burial site of Nurse Nellie Spindler (one of the only two female casualties that happened in the First World War) and has over 10,000 graves of soldiers from the Allied Forces. With that, we also visited the Essex Farm CWGC Advanced Dressing Station where soldiers who had been wounded in battle would come first for medical attention before field hospitals; this was also the site of 15 year old Valentine Strudwick’s grave, who the teachers gave us the task of finding . To see our last cemetery on the first day, we travelled to Brandhoek New Military Cemetery, where Nellie Spindler was mortally wounded on the 21st of August 1917. During the evening of the first day we all explored the city of Ypres, where we all brought souvenirs and ate delicious Belgian pancakes, waffles and ice cream. Afterwards, we went to the In Flanders Fields museum where we were taught more about the Front Lines of the war in different countries, demonstrated land borders and how the Schlieffen TackTick would’ve worked in the lays of the land, saw military uniforms that were worn at the time and so much more. 

Again after dinner at the Poppies Hostel, all of us walked out into the beautiful Ypres to go into the Leonidas Belgian Chocolate Shop where they gave us incredible chocolates and had the opportunity to buy with amazing discounts (whole bar of chocolate, box of 10 Belgian treats and 8 stroop waffles for 15 euros!). We all brought some delicious sweets. Following that, we walked to the Menin Gate to participate in the Last Post ceremony that is held every night at 8pm to pay respect to all deaths from the War but especially to remember those who are lost at war or have no grave. Two students Niamh Wynne and Lucia Lopez were chosen to lay a wreath from the whole of Presdales School in honor of the lives that were lost. Many people all gathered, whether being tourists, locals or military personnel we all were together in mourning and remembrance. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life. 

On the second day we had the journey back to do and still had an amazing schedule to do. Starting the day, we drove away from Ypres and travelled to Newfoundland Park, this is the site where the Battle of the Somme happened. In the site there were many memorials, cemeteries and almost perfectly preserved trenches. We had the opportunity to walk through the Allied forces trenches and just imagine how life could be down there just 109 years ago, also seeing the German trenches (which were visibly built better due to the fact they were deeper dug). Whilst walking we also saw the “Danger Tree”, this is a tree that during the battle, soldiers would seek shelter behind in hopes the Germans would not see and shoot them. This sadly did work as when the sun came up everyone was able to be seen. We now know this because Mrs Inwood explained it to us as we walked around the site as well as other facts. Secondly, we arrived at the Thiepval Memorial dedicated to giving graves to soldiers with no recognition and bring light to all lost at war. It has a 43 meter tall memorial with thousands of names wrapping around it of soldiers with no resting place, lost forever. Our last place we visited on this trip was Vimy Ridge, a site with preserved trenches and Canada memorial in Belgium for their soldiers; it is 30 meters high and is placed there because it is the place the Canadians made the most impact for their fighting and helped out the whole of the Allied forces. 

On our way back we took 9 hours, two passport controls and a lot of sleeping but made it back to school at 9:30, having done one of the best school trips of our lives. I’d like to thank all of the amazing staff that organised and chaperoned this trip, that was : Miss Workman, Miss Martin, Miss Mockett, Mrs Inwood, Mr Payne, Mr Baldwin, Mrs Yates and Mrs Dray. They were all incredible to us, helped us and taught us all more about WWI. A special thank you to Miss Workman though who organised this whole trip and put hours of effort into making it all work seamlessly. This trip was eye opening and fascinating to all of us. We all loved it. 

By Sophia Riley 

We left school for Berlin at 2pm on Wednesday and arrived at our hotel at midnight.

Our trip began with a tour around some of Berlin’s most famous sights, led by Mr Spurgeon. We visited the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, Night of the Long Knives Memorial, the Roma Sinti memorial, the Holocaust memorial, Hitler’s bunker and the Topography of Terror. These are all things that we learnt about during our history lessons and in Holocaust memorial assemblies, but visiting the memorials and the Topography of Terror really instilled it in me how the Nazis believed that they were a superior race and what they were doing was justified. Seeing the memorials and about how many different groups were persecuted reminded me how this happened in the not-so-distant past, and the risks of it happening again. Our day continued with a tour by TCBC guides, we visited more places including the Tiergarten to see the T4 and homosexual memorials, Gendarmenmarkt, Bebelplatz, Lustgarten, and the reconstructed palace. We had an amazing tour guide who taught about us lots of different aspects of Germany in the 20th Century e.g., the book burning that took place at Bebelplatz in 1933 where Nazi students burnt around 20,000 books by authors that the Nazis didn’t like. We finished the day with a trip to a lovely Italian restaurant and a round of bowling.

On Friday, we went to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Plötzensee Prison, and had a tour around the Jewish quarters of Berlin. These were all led by the TCBC guides, who were very highly knowledgeable about everything that we visited. At Sachsenhausen, we saw the rooms where prisoners would have to stay, learnt about the jobs they had to do and the different methods the Nazis had for killing people, not just the gas chambers. In our tour of the Jewish Quarters with visited the Hackeschen Höfe and saw the workshop owned by Otto Weidt, who mainly employed deaf and blind Jews and did everything he could to protect them against the anti-Jewish measures. One of my highlights from the tour were the Stumbling Stones, they are all around Europe and they are to remember people who were persecuted by the Nazis. The stones have the person’s name, birth year, what happened to them e.g., deportation to Theresienstadt, and when they died. I had heard of them before but never realised how many they were. Although there are lots of memorials to the groups persecuted, I like the Stumbling Stones as although they are little, they tell the stories of thousands of people. In the evening, we had time to go shopping and then went to see the new Spiderman film – Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse.

On Saturday, we finished our trip by visiting Hohenschönhausen which is a former Stasi-Prison so linked to our Cold War topic. We then went to Berlin Olympic Park and got a tour of the stadium. I found it interesting to see how they have removed the Nazi paraphernalia but still embrace the history of what happened in the 1936 Olympics. They have done this by having the Jesse Owens Lounge and the coloured stones that were Swastikas have been rotated to create different patterns; they are still shadows of what was there. After this we headed to deportation track 17, which has stone slabs to commemorate how many Jews were deported each day.

It was an amazing trip and will be very helpful as we continue our studies on Weimar and Nazi Germany and then move onto the Cold War. The thing I found most interesting was how they have embraced the history without making memorial sights neo-Nazi pilgrimages or completely ignoring the horrific events that happened in Germany during the 20th Century.

Isla Threlfall