Zillebeke Churchyard Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery - Foundation

Foundation

In the early days of the war, whilst the front line was still mobile, specific cemeteries for soldiers were comparatively rare and the dead were often buried in local churchyards or municipal burial grounds near where they were killed. Zillebeke was on the front line for much of the war and its churchyard was used for the war dead. These 1914 burials reflect the mobility of the front line as they are largely of officers, and reflect the officer class of that point in the war as they were nobility or the sons of the wealthy and the well-connected. As such, the cemetery deviates from almost every other Commission burial ground by having two private memorials, breaking the "equality in death" principle the Commission was founded under and not complying with Sir Frederic Kenyon's report, still otherwise followed to this day, that Commission cemeteries "were designed to avoid class distinctions that would conflict with the feeling of 'brotherhood' which had developed between all ranks serving at the Front". The private memorials are a headstone dedicated to Lieutenant John Henry Gordon Lee-Steere and the tomb of Second Lieutenant Baron Alexis George de Gunzburg.

Amongst the nobility or well-connected buried in the cemetery are Lieutenant Henry Parnell, 5th Baron Congleton, Major Lord Bernard Charles Gordon-Lennox, son of Charles Gordon-Lennox, 7th Duke of Richmond and the Hon William Reginald Wyndham, son of Henry Wyndham, 2nd Baron Leconfield.

The Commission part of the cemetery was designed by W H Cowlishaw.