Anzac services in Europe

Press, 21 April 1979, Page 22

Anzac services in Europe

NZPA London New Zealand’s contribution to two European wars will again be recognised at Anzac Day services in Europe, Westminster Abbey will again be host to the biggest Anzac service outside New Zealand or Australia. On a smaller scale on April 25, and on succeeding Sundays, the New Zealand and Commonwealth war dead will be honoured in small towns in Britain, France and Belgium and on “enemy” territory in West Germany. The American. European and Japanese tourists who cram Whitehall and Westminster Abbey from now' until the end of the summer are again expected to swell the attendance at the w’reath-laying at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, even though few of them have probably heard of Anzac Day or know w'hat the initials stand for. The Anzac Day sermon will be given by the Rev. Selwyn Fry, "a former Royal Navy padre who is a "great-grandson of the New' Zealand Anglican missionary, Bishop George Augustus Selwyn, and a descendant of the English prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry. The Auckland composer, Douglas Mews, has written special organ music for the service. Services on Anzac Day will also be held at Edinburgh castle, and at the Sud Friedhof Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery near the West German

city of Cologne, where 35 New Zealanders, mainly airmen, are buried. Services will also be held at the sites of bloody trench battles in Belgium and France. The New Zealand Ambassador to Brussels (Mr G. Ansell) will lay wreaths at the Belgian battleground of Messines. and at the Menin gate at Ypres, which bears the name of more than 54.000 Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies were never recovered. In France, the continuing gratitude of the tiny town of Le Quesnoy, which was liberated by New Zealand troops in the last week of World War I, will be marked again by the annual laying of wreaths at the town’s New Zealand memorial. A New Zealand diplomat, Mr D. Caffin, will later lay another wreath on the memorial in Caterpillar Valley at Longueval, which bears the names of about 1500 New Zealanders who died in the battle of the Somme. In Britain, the commemoration of Anzac Day will continue for some time. Services will be held on Sunday, April 29, in the Staffordshire town of Cannock Chase, where New Zealanders were in hospital in World War I and where the local military historical society now holds a big parade of military vehicles each year to mark Anzac Day. Other World War I “hospital towns” with New Zealand links in which services will be

held are Brockenhurst in the New Forest, and Wal-ton-on-Thames, in Surrey, which has a “Kiwi Hotel.” The final “Anzac Day” service will be held on

May 6 at the Gloucestershire town of Leiahterton whose links with New Zealand were also forged through caring for the ' World War I wounded.