Liverpool Scottish Museum Archive

Chavasse's Dinner

The Dinner at Chateau Elverdinghe

The Menu of a Dinner given to Captain N G. Chavasse RAMC VC MC by the Officers of The Liverpool Scottish at the Chateu Elverdinghe, Near Ieper (Ypres) in Belgium to Celebrate the Award of his First Victoria Cross.

The menu was drawn by Chas. H. Clark, a soldier in The Liverpool Scottish and an artist by profession. He worked after the War producing etchings and in particular he drew a large series of pictures featuring public schools. The menu comes from the wartime diary of Sergeant W.G. Bromley MSM which is in the possession of his daughter.The drawing is dated 28.10.16. The Liverpool Scottish Officers' Association (President: Captain E.F.J. Chavasse and with Lieutenant Commander Ian Fraser VC DSC RD as the principal guest) held a commemorative dinner at Forbes House on 4th October 1996 to mark the 80th anniversary of the award and the Chateau Elverdinghe dinner. Those who sat down to dinner ate the same food that their predecessors enjoyed eighty years previously. The menu that night carried a facsimile of Clarke's original menu. link to the pipe tune 'Captain Noel Chavasse VC'(written in 1979 by Pipe Sergeant Glyn Pritchard is found at the foot of the is page). The menu shows the badge of the 10th (Scottish) Battalion, The King's (Liverpool) Regiment and on the left is a sketch of the shell-damaged spire of the church at Albert (showing the famous statue of the Virgin and Child pitched forward at a desperately precarious angle) and below is the word 'Guillemont' and a sketch of the VC. Anautographed copy of this menu is held by the Army Medical Services Museum.

Albert is about 8 miles West of Guillemont where Chavasse won his first VC; the church spire was a landmark that could be seen for miles around. To the right of the menu is a pinnacle on a ruined building, the word 'Hooge' where Chavasse had won the Military Cross in 1915 which is represented below. Close comparison of the pinnacle shown with modern photographs suggests that it is part of the Cloth Hall at Ypres (Ieper) and is a (perhaps the only) surviving pinnacle from the tower. This would be logical since Ieper is just a few miles West of Hooge and the Cloth Hall also dominates the local landscape.

In 1997 the Flambertus History Society of Vlamertinge (near Ieper) dedicated a memorial to Noel Chavasse in the garden of the village church at Brandhoek to mark his death in 1917 and his humanitarian contribution. The members of the Society and the Liverpool Scottish party (and a TV crew) amounting to a total of almost 120 people visited the chateau during a brief battlefield tour which included a short ceremony at the Chavasse grave at Brandhoek.

Pipe Sergeant Glyn Pritchard wrote the tune 'Captain Noel Chavasse VC' in 1979 to mark the unveiling of the Chavasse Memorial at Forbes House, the HQ of V (The Liverpool Scottish) Company. (The Copyright of this tune belongs to the estate of Glyn Pritchard.)

The photograph to the left shows the Cloth Hall at Ypres (Ieper), ruined during the Great war but faithfully reconstructed over the following fifty years.

(Copyright. The photograph above may not be reproduced without permission)

 

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