Graveside Ceremony In France On Anzac Day

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30736, 28 April 1965, Page 13

Graveside Ceremony In France On Anzac Day

(Special Crspdt. N.Z.PA.) LONDON, April 27. The 50th anniversary of Anzac Day was observed in France by a ceremony at the graveside of New Zealand’s famous World War I hero, Sergeant R. C. (Dick) Travis, V.C., D. M.M., Croix de Guerre (Belgian), (twice mentioned in despatches), who was killed in action in July, 1918. It was arranged at the request of some of Travis’s closest old comrades in New Zealand. Two neighbouring communes in Pas-de-Calais joined with representatives from the New Zealand Embassy in Paris, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the British Legion at the ceremony. Dick Travis’s grave is in the new British cemetery in the commune of Couin, near the commune of Hebuterne where Travis’s unit (2nd Otago Battalion) was in action when he was kill cd. The mayors of the two communes laid wreaths sent from New Zealand by veterans in Opotiki and Rotorua. A wreath on behalf of the Otago Infantry Battalion and the Otago Mounted Rifles was laid by Lieutenant-Colonel Gibson Bishop, who cbmmand-

ed the battalion at the time of Travis’s death.

A spray of flowers from New Zealand was laid on behalf of Travis’s family in Opotiki by a Hebuterne woman who knew him. A poignant touch was added by the New Zealand ensign which draped Travis’s coffin in 1918. It was taken to New Zealand by the Rev. D. C. Herron, M.C., who officiated at the funeral and who placed it in the care of the Pukerau School in Southland. A French tricolore was flown at the ceremony and handed to the New Zealand Ambassador to France, Mr R. L. Hutchens, by the Mayor of Hebuterne.

Before taking part in the Travis ceremony, Mr Hutchens. accompanied by Mr H. V. Roberts, counsellor at the New Zealand Embassy in Paris, attended a ceremony at the Australian War Memorial at Villers Bretonneux, near Amiens. Later they attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the New Zealand memorial near Longueval in the Somme.

Other ceremonies were held at the New Zealand memorials at Messines (in Belgium) and at Le Quesnoy, the fortress town liberated by the New Zealand Rifle Brigade in the last days of the war. At Le Quesnoy Mr Hutchens was made an honorary citizen.