The Battle of Passchendaele Private John Smith- Grandfather I knew

It is such a shame that my busy life took me away from this blog for a while, because most of my summer has been taken up with editing  my visit to Ypres, of the commemorations of Passchendaele as a descendant of a soldier who was at the battle. He was my mother's father John Smith and the grandfather I knew and who was present when I was a child.

                                                      Wife Tabitha and baby Tabitha with Private John Smith

Despite being at the battle, he lived to be 76, and he was present at my home, when I had just started school. I fondly remember him helping me and my mother peel potatoes as well as  showing me the childhood pastime of making paper chains. He died of Esophageal cancer in 1965 arguably from the effects of living through World War One.

While at the battle of Passchendaele he received mustard gas poisoning and in the last days of the carnage he was invalided out of it in the middle of November 1917. He told the story of being unconscious for some time and remembered waking up in hospital hearing Christmas Carol singers. He said he thought he had died and gone to Heaven. After being sent from the Western Front to one hospital and another, he finally ended up at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh where it seems he was treated for shell shock, now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

There he met the famous war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. It was while learning to combat the effects of shell shock, at Craiglockhart, where writing was considered a helpful cure, that he began to pen war poetry in the same style as his mentor Wilfred Owen.

Through his life he continued to write poetry both about the War and other subjects. His poems were published in the East Fife Newspapers, in Scotland, under the nom de plume Sartor,which is Latin for tailor, after his civilian day job. His poetry extends to 2 volumes of notebooks.

The commemorations were a wonderful experience, not just for remembering the fallen, in such a dignified way, but because they were an opportunity to revisit the past and preserve the items belonging to John Smith, a task that continues today with a documentary I am making about his life.

The commemorations gave hundreds of descendants a chance to treasure the memory and impact of the achievements of their relatives by launching a unique social history project managed by the UK Department of Culture, the Museum of Passchendaele in Flanders and the website Ancestry.co.uk It continues to be on going project allowing thousands of descendants to build on what they found out then add to the new profiles they have discovered about the participants of Passchendaele.

The battle was distinguished from any other in World War 1 for having the most casualties of 500,000 in total in Allied, British and German casualties combined.  It was the first and arguably the last battle to use Mustard gas, and it will go down in history as ending it's use as an a weapon of war. By World War 2 Mustard gas was banned under the Geneva Convention of the United Nations Charter.  The voices of the War poets contributed to the end of Mustard gas in 20th Century warfare. It is therefore tragic that it seems to have reappeared in the 21st Century.

(This blog will re visit the subject of Private John Smith with photographs, poems and further descriptions over the coming months.)