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The following are the texts from the Official Programme
prepared for the Opening Ceremony
27th September 2004
A copy of HRH's
speech at the Opening Ceremony is at the bottom of this
page.
A message from
HRH The Duke of Kent KG
Patron of The Thiepval Project
I strongly support the creation of an educational centre
at Thiepval.
During the course of my many visits to Thiepval, the
scale of the sacrifice made by so many of our countrymen has
been doubly impressed upon me by the grandeur of Lutyens's
architecture. The task of designing a monument to contain
the names of over 73,000 men would have daunted most
architects, but Lutyens rose to the challenge magnificently
and it is not surprising that the Imperial War Graves
Commission chose his design to crown the great hill of
Thiepval.
This centre will help to ensure that the many thousands
of visitors to Thiepval will have a clearer understanding of
the Somme battles and of the background to them. I
most heartily congratulate all those responsible, from the
Conseil Général of the
Somme in France and from the Thiepval Project Charitable
Fund in the United Kingdom. Above all our thanks have to go
to all the generous Donors, without whom none of this would
have been possible.
The Missing of Thiepval and the casualties of the Great
War will not be forgotten.
HRH The Duke of Kent
Patron The Thiepval Project
A draft of the speech made
by HRH at the opening ceremony is attached to the bottom of
this page.
A message from Daniel Dubois
President of the Conseil Général
de la Somme
The Conseil Général de la Somme is proud to have contributed
to the building of the Thiepval Educational Visitor Centre
which we inaugurate this year, a highly symbolic year for
Franco-British Friendship. Having attended the 1st of July
celebrations, I know for a fact that, for all our British
friends, the Memorial to the Missing is a special place for
recollection. Many who visit have lost one of their
forefathers who had come to defend the values of freedom.
From the onset, the promoters of this project were well
received by both our community and the State. The objective
was to erect a building which would blend harmoniously into
the landscape and would answer a two-fold purpose: first to
offer better facilities to the 180,000 visitors each year
who come to reflect and meditate at the Memorial, and second
to highlight in an educational way, the fierce fighting at
Thiepval and the Battle of the Somme so that remembrance
will never wane.
This is the year we celebrate the Centenary of the Entente
Cordiale and the 60th Anniversary of D-Day. This is the year
when the Household Division paraded on the Champs Elysées on
Bastille Day. It is hence most fitting for the Conseil
Général de la Somme to make available this Visitor Centre,
to be worthy of the Memorial to the Missing and of all that
it symbolizes for the British.
Daniel DUBOIS
Président of the Conseil Général de la Somme
The Somme
The territory of the Somme, the great river flowing through
the vast, open spaces of Picardy has a particular resonance
in British
and French history.
William the Conqueror embarked on
27 September 1066 from St. Valéry-sur-Somme at its mouth.
During the Hundred Years War, it was the scene of momentous
battles between France and England, whose Henry V camped at
Thiepval in 1415.
At Thiepval in the Great War, the French halted the Germans
in 1914 but apart from a sharp diversionary attack in June
1915 near Serre, it was a backwater of the Western Front
until 1916, in the meantime being turned into a fortress by
the Germans. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1
July 1916, over 19,000 officers and men were killed, 38,000
were wounded, the biggest loss in one day in the history of
the British Army. Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing at
Thiepval is a powerful reminder of this tragic combat and a
moving homage to the 73,757 Fallen who have no known grave.
The massive German onslaught on the Somme in Spring 1918,
intended to win the war, was shattered by British, Dominion
and French forces. The tide turned with the French victory
on the Marne (18 July). The British offensive on 8 August
was the ‘black day for the German Army’. The German High
Command concluded that the war must end.
Sir Edwin Lutyens OM KCIE (1869-1944)
England’s greatest and most prolific architect since Sir
Christopher Wren, his career lasted over 50 years from the
reign of Queen Victoria until the Second World War when,
before his death on New Year’s Day 1944, he drew up plans
for a National Theatre and the post-war reconstruction of
London.
Born in London, the son of a retired soldier and animal
artist, with little formal education or architectural
training he precociously established his own practice at the
age of nineteen. In the same year he met Gertrude Jekyll,
artist and celebrated garden designer, who became his mentor
and with whom he had a fertile collaboration. This lasted
several decades, creating sophisticated vernacular country
houses and beautifully planned, imaginatively landscaped
gardens, mainly in Surrey, including Munstead Wood in 1893.
His work, while romantic in inspiration, became classical in
discipline yet complex and often abstract in design, always
executed with excellent craftsmanship using fine materials.
From his British pavilion for the Universal Exhibition in
Paris in 1900, Lutyens went on to dominate the Edwardian era
as the builder of new country houses often for new fortunes
and developed a personal ‘Georgian’ and ‘Queen Anne’
vernacular. With Heathcote in Yorkshire built in 1906, he
revealed himself as a great Mannerist architect.
With the decision in 1911 of the new King Emperor, George V,
to transfer the capital of the British Empire in India from
Calcutta to Delhi, Lutyens became an Imperial architect.
With his Viceroy’s House at New Delhi, he created the
greatest palace of modern times. Larger than Versailles, it
preoccupied him until its inauguration in 1931.
After the Great War, the genius of Lutyens to express
mourning on behalf of the nation became apparent to the
general public with the Cenotaph in Whitehall whose abstract
symbolism captured their imagination and made him more
widely known. It was the first of his many war memorials,
monuments and military cemeteries in Britain, France and
further tributes to the Fallen. In 1918, the Imperial War
Graves Commission, which came into being largely through the
energies of Fabian Ware, appointed the leading architects of
the day, Lutyens, Herbert Baker, Reginald Blomfield and
later Charles Holden, with their team of assistant
architects, for the vast undertaking of creating permanent
memorials and burial grounds of the Great War - the ‘Silent
Cities’ as Kipling called them. With its tremendous
presence, the towering Thiepval Memorial to the Missing,
brooding over the killing fields of some of the bloodiest
conflicts in British military history - the Battles of the
Somme - is his greatest achievement in this domain, which,
with his others in France - Arras, Etaples and
Villers-Bretonneux for the Australians, came at the height
of his powers of imagination. The Stone of Remembrance, a
monolith by Lutyens, and Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice were
placed in almost all the cemeteries. One important feature
was that no distinction was made between officers and men;
all headstones were of the same form.
After 1914-18, orders for country houses were replaced by
commissions in the City of London (eg Barclays Bank) and the
West End (eg Grosvenor House). His greatest project, the
Roman Catholic Liverpool Cathedral, was curtailed by the
Second War. Even so, his output of some 600 commissions
throughout the world is astonishing. Knighted in 1918,
President of the Royal Academy from 1938-44, Lutyens was the
first architect to be awarded the Order of Merit.
The Thiepval
Project
In 1998, Sir Frank Sanderson and Colonel Piers Storie-Pugh
concluded that a centre was needed to explain the history of
the Battles of the Somme and the Great War to the increasing
number of visitors to the battlefields in Picardy. This
culminated in the creation of a Franco-British project,
jointly administered by the Department of the Somme and a
team of British volunteers.
Monsieur Alain Petitjean, Deputy Chief Executive of the
Conseil-Général of the Somme, sought public funding while
Frank Sanderson, leading the British side, launched an
appeal for donations, a great deal of which came from the
magnificent support of Charitable Trusts, Regiments, Corps
and Local Authorities. Important initial grants from BP
Amoco and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office led to generous
support from many other sources including, among 1500
individual donations, a gift of £72,000. This matched the
number of soldiers whose names are inscribed on the Thiepval
Memorial. The EU Interreg III Fund also contributed
generously.
Madame Potié, Mayor of Thiepval, and her husband made
possible the acquisition of the land upon which the new
centre has been built, in the very shadow of Lutyens’s
Thiepval Memorial, and have both been constant and
enthusiastic supporters of the project.
The Visitor
Centre
The French volunteered to match the British contribution,
with a target of £1.85 million to build the Centre, jointly
achieved with substantial EU funding.
A competition was
launched amongst French and British architects. At Amiens,
in 2002, a Franco-British jury awarded the commission to a
young French architect Nicolas Ziesel, leading a team of
specialist associates. His design is a modernist glass
pavilion with exhibition space, a lecture room, public areas
for reception and shop, offices and services.
Ideas flowed from both sides of the Channel. The evolving
design has produced a building which has become a long, low
construction,
sunk into the landscape, with enclosing earthworks,
reminiscent of the trenches of the Great War.
A major feature of the Centre is the educational display,
the province of the British side in consultation with the
French, represented by the Historial de la Grande Guerre.
Graham Simpson of Cube3 and his associates M2 were
commissioned to design this display, consisting of several
sections: The Great War tells the story of the Battles of
the Somme and their context within
the Great War. Other sections are devoted to its aftermath:
Military Remembrance shows how the Fallen were honoured.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission describes the role of
this authority (and its French and German equivalents);
Reconstruction shows how the huge task of rebuilding
devastated areas was achieved.
Edwin Lutyens reveals the
life and works of the creator
of the Thiepval Memorial.
A notable feature of the display, is an imposing model by
Andrew Ingham Associates which shows the complexity and
subtlety of his masterpiece.
THE THIEPVAL CENTRE
PROJECT WAS FINANCED BY :
The Donors to the Thiepval Project Charitable Fund:
Le Conseil Général de la Somme
FEDER / ERDF European funds Interreg IIIA
European funds
Réseau de transport d’électricité (RTE)
WITH ASSISTANCE FROM:
Charities Aid Foundation
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Imperial War Museum
The Lutyens Trust
Members of the Fundraising Committee
Royal British Legion
Préfecture de la région Picardie
Préfecture de la Somme
CAUE de la Somme
CDT de la Somme
Historial de la Grande Guerre
Centre de recherches de l’Historial
Mairie de Thiepval
BUILDING
Developers: Conseil Général de la Somme
The
CAF
Thiepval Project
Architects: Plan01architectes
Mâitrise d'oeuvres bâtiment et VRD: RFR ingénieurs
structure, Delta Fluides ingénieurs fluides, P&L
paysagiste,
Bureaux de contrôle Veritas et Socotec
.tec
Entreprises bâtiment et VRD: Léon Grosse,
Appia Somme, Picardie Soudure,
CDP, Christian Sagez, EGBM, Fourny,
Les Plaquistes Picard, SCMS, Jacques Cocqueman, Caty
Peinture,
Christian Yvon, Accart, Hublart
EXHIBITION
Exhibition designers: Graham Simpson Design Consultants,
Cube3, London
Graphics audio visual: M2 Graphic Design and Communications,
Cube3, London
Model maker Andrew Ingham & Associates Ltd., London
Honorary project advisors Architecture: Michael Barker (The
Lutyens Trust).
Landscaping: Philip Russell Vick (Enplan)
Military archaeology: Phillip Robinson, Mike Hibberd and the
Durand Group
Honorary historians: Nigel Cave IC Professor Peter Simkins
MBE FRHistS Michael Stedman
Honorary researchers: Jack
Sheldon Norbert Krüger Ken and
Pam Linge Caroline Fontaine Jean-Pierre Thierry
Great Northern Publishing Eurostar Eurotunnel Remembrance
Travel
Ideal Standard
RIBA Drawings Collection
Draft of the speech made
by HRH The Duke of Kent at the opening of the Thiepval
visitor centre on 27th September 2004.
It is
now three years since I came here on a very wet afternoon
and met you M. le Sénateur, Madame le maire and Sir Frank
Sanderson at the birth of a plan to create this
Franco-British educational visitor centre. Since that time
an enormous amount of work has gone into the funding and
construction of this most impressive building. The French
architects and British designers and the historians are to
be congratulated, but it is the people of the Somme and the
Donors of the Thiepval Project who have made it possible.
The number of Donors here today shows the depth of feeling
that the events of eighty years ago still stir in the hearts
of the British nation.
This
centenary year of the Entente Cordiale is being celebrated
in grand style in our capital cities, but perhaps the true
and natural testing of the entente is best seen at local
level. Here we have a project where the Conseil général has
not only found half of the funding for the building, but has
also managed all the construction. On the British side even
more money has been raised and an educational exhibition has
been designed, constructed and installed. There has been a
complete and natural blending of talents and complete
co-operation. It is the natural and seemingly automatic way
in which this co-operation has flowered in this locality
that our nations should now celebrate.
The exhibition explains the events of that terrible war and
of the battle of the Somme, it
does not try to draw conclusions – that task is left to the
visitor. However the substantial EU funding for this
Project and the presence here today of HRH the Herzog of
Württemberg gives us proof that the peaceful Europe which
was so hoped for by all who fought here, is now a reality.
However the events of the past are an essential guide to the
future and if we ever forget them we will be doing so at our
own peril.
Today we remember all those who fell in this battle;
and at the cutting of the ribbon in a few minutes time we
will be symbolically assisted by the direct descendants of
just two of those who fell. Emelie’s great uncle was
Jean-Baptiste Pasquier a 35 year old reservist in the 137°
Regiment d’Infantrie, who was Killed in Action on the slopes
below this village in 1914 and
is buried in the large French national cemetery in Albert.
Jonty’s great uncle was Charles Skey, a volunteer Royal
Fusilier who rose through the ranks and was a Captain in the
Black Watch when he was Killed in Action near High Wood in
August 1916. He was 24 years old and his name is on the
memorial to the Missing.
These
young children represent the future of our nations and of
Europe and we have a duty to help them create that new
peaceful and free world that all these soldiers fought and
died for.
Let us
hope that the education available in this centre helps to
make it certain that no such a war ever happens again in
these lands of ours.
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