As a guide I knew the story of several attempts by locals to exhume bodies on behalf of family members. I wondered if German family would have tried the same. I started reading a newspaper clipping dated 1931 the Sunday express of May the 3.
The article alleged that during the past 10 years bodies of British soldiers had been taken from the commissions cemeteries in Belgium and had been smuggled into England. Families had paid large sums for each body being transported. It was believed that the headquarters of the Belgian gang smuggling was in Antwerpen. The transport of the bodies was carried out by British yachtsmen from the coast of Kent.
That story was an old one even so it caused a lot of questions being asked in parliament and was at first seen as being untrue, even Fabian Ware stated to these kind of exhumation were impossible. An investigation was held.
Within minutes I knew the CWGC archives might be the answer to the many questions I had. I knew that what the commission said in that second article was untrue some bodies had been removed successful ( major sudcliffe Charles, captain William Durie, Burgess James, Major McCleod Adam, Lieutenant Guthrie) and yes a few were unsuccessful and caught in Westouter( gunner Baron Frank) and in Antwerpen( Grenville Hopkins a soldier once buried at Tyne cot had now it’s eternal resting place).
After hours of digging in the CWGC archives I found one account :
There is the statement of Mrs. Murphy ( the French wife of Mr. Leo Norbury Murphy the curator of the Ypres war museum in the boterstraat. ( street is wrong the museum was ‘ het vleeshuis’ what is neermarkt 3) She has family members living around St. Quentin, there is a military cemetery with all nations buried there. One of them was a German whose parents wanted to take back the remains of their son to Germany. They visited the cemetery and engaged a local person to dig the body up and then take it home. Only the police heard about the matter and stopped the exhumation. The people involved in this exhumation were fined. Only latter they got caught again on two different occasions, eventually the family left but when the grave was opened later, the grave was found empty.
Nothing was done with this case since the commission was not responsible for foreign graves.
Now finding a cemetery around St. Quentin and the name of Mrs. Murphy was the next step. I found Leo was living in Villers le sec in 1919 but that is nowhere near St. Quentin. Pitty I do not have acces to the foreign residence file , it is looked for 120 years.
The amount of cemeteries around there made me decides not to put time in a search that would end with no result, if the body was removed would the authorities have kept the grave? And Mrs. Murphy spoke about a cemetery with all nationalities that could have been St. Quentin French cemetery but that the German graves were removed later.
In Chapelle British cemetery Holnon ?
Savy British cemetery?(1 German grave still there)
But I also wanted to know had they found the ones digging up bodies
A mister Seabrook , journalist had come forward and spoke to the commission : his information came from yachtsmen, the bodies only come from cemeteries in Belgium, the French gendarmerie was to vigilant. They came from Belgium ports, mainly Zeebrugge; The way it was done, was not quite how the Sunday express had described it in that article. The bodies were not crated as the article said but concealed as small tolls of cloth. They generally landed on various point on the Essex coast. He thought that the man running this business now lived in Roeselare, at one time he had an estaminet in Poperinge. ( I know where but need more research to be sure this information is correct.) He had been an interpreter for the British army and spoke English like an Englishman, early 40’s. Mr. Seabrook was not sure if the man now living in Roeselare was the same man as the one living in Antwerpen.
Some Belgian papers from the justice department reveal a name Jean Baptiste R all his personal details match with what Mr. Seabrook said but the Belgian authorities did not find any prove he was involved in removing bodies but when they wanted to interrogate him on this matter( June 1931), they couldn’t find him anymore.
By end of September 1931 Jean Baptiste R was found and interrogated , he denies to be involved with clandestine exhumations and there was no prove.
Source : CWGC/1/1/7/B/54 plus 44
De Britse kolonie in het interbellum by Bert Heyvaert