§ 69. Sir Anthony Royleasked the Secretary of State for Defence if he will now publish in the Official Report the Substantive answer to the parliamentary Question tabled to him on the 23rd November by the hon. Member for Richmond, Surrey.
§ Mr. Robert C. Brown:No official casualty figures exist for the first battle of Y pres fought in late October 1914. Between 14th October and 30th November 1914, 614 officers and 6,794 British other ranks were killed in the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, but it is impossible to establish how many were killed on the Y pres battlefield. In the second and third battles of Y pres, a total of 6,210 officers and 609W 113,611 other ranks of the British Army lost their lives.
We are unable to establish how many of those killed in the Y pres battles are buried in Commonwealth cemeteries at Y pres since many bodies were brought in from other areas of the Western Front for burial in the 200 cemeteries in the Y pres area. In many cases it is impossible to say which bodies were removed from which battlefield.
Field Marshal Lord Plummer, Field Marshal Sir Claude Jacob, Lieutenant-General Sir W. Hastings Anderson, Major-General Hon. Sir G. de L'Ryrie and Brigadier-General Hughes attended the opening ceremony of the Menin Gate on 24th July 1927 as representatives of the British Army accompanied by three senior Army chaplains. At the wreath laying ceremony on the sixtieth anniversary of the Armistice at the Menin Gate on Saturday 11th November 1978, the official British representatives were Lieutenant-Colonel Roddick, commanding officer of the United Kingdom Support Unit attached to SHAPE and a senior non-commissioned officer on his staff, accompanied by a representative from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Whilst a special effort is made to secure fuller representation for 25th, 50th, 75th and 100th Anniversaries of national occasions, representation at the times is arranged locally from embassies or other military resources in the country. This year the Army was also represented at 20 other Armistice Day ceremonies at Y pres, in addition to full representation at the major ceremony in Brussels and this simply did not allow larger representations at each.