THIS is one of the most shocking and most sad stories you will ever read. It is told by Dries Peeters in Belgium...
“CLEARING out the attic of my late grandmother’s house in Aarschot, on a forgotten shelf, I came across beautifully coloured portraits of two proud figures in their Sunday best. The man, his pointed moustache neatly curled; the woman with carefully styled hair, smiling gently.
Both portraits are signed by a Delhez, and dated the year 1914. The back of the frames is reinforced with yellowed Brussels newspapers from Février 1914, stock market listings, announcements from desperate men (Mr 49 yo, 5000 fr. desires wife, milliner or servant. Wal. Mature age to have 2000fr).
In the spring of 1914, the world was on the brink of a merciless conflict that would shake the lives of the two people in the frames with an intensity that not even the Richter scale could measure.
The man is my great-great-grandfather, Henri Cypers. “Heintje Stoffel” to his friends, a leatherworker. He made shoes and horse saddles.
The lady was his wife, Clementine Verhaert, my great-great-grandmother. At the moment of the photo, he was 42; she was 40, and carrying a new life: on May 17, 1914, she gave birth to her sixth child, a son. Joannes Franciscus Clementius.
Clementine and Henri had already endured a lot. Their first child, Eduard, had died at the age of three, and their daughter, Maria Clementina, had passed away aged 11 in 1912.
And yet their most heartbreaking loss was still to come...
Five months after the birth of their son, hell broke loose. Aarschot was hit mercilessly in the early days of the Great War. On August 19, 1914, a German officer was fatally wounded and the invaders' reprisal was ruthless. The city was set ablaze.
In Kortstraat, the Cypers hid in their cellar, but the flames came so close that they knew if they stayed they would burn alive.
They fled, through Zwanenstraatje to the Grote Markt, where a huge crowd had already gathered.
The Germans pulled the men from the crowd. 86 boys and men were led away and 75 of them were cold-bloodedly executed. In groups of three, holding each other’s hands, they were shot in the back. Heintje Stoffel was one of them.
Clementine was left with four children. The oldest was 14, the youngest just five months.
Somehow, Clementine made it out of Aarschot to the village of Tielt-Winge, where she sought sanctuary with the village priest.
He recorded in his diary: “The widow of a shot civilian from Aarschot came later days, full of grief and despair, sent to the rectory with four small children. We did our best to comfort her.
“Once, quietly, walking away in the back of the garden, she threw her youngest child into the water and wanted to jump in with her three others. But the oldest held her back.
“The little body was later found floating with some broken branches on it and buried that evening in the cemetery by the police.”
Clementine's state of mind is impossible to imagine. But life goes on. Relentlessly.
She and her three remaining children – including my great-grandmother Margrietje – were taken to Antwerp and then to England, where in early October 1914, they arrived in the Durham ironworking village of Witton Park, near Bishop Auckland, with a few other refugees from Aarschot.
A rare photo captures the family, along with another Aarschot family, looking sadly into the lens.
After four years in Witton Park, at the end of the war, Clementine returned to Aarschot and opened a café in her house at Kortstraat 18 – only now the street had been renamed Jozef Tielemansstraat, after the mayor who had been shot alongside Heintje Stoffel. The café was later run for many years by my grandparents.
Clementine's resilience was admirable, but she could never fully leave behind the tragic events of the First World War.
When the Second World War broke out, she fell into deep despair. She did not want to go through it again, not another time.
In early June 1940, just a month after the war began, she jumped into the River Demer, which runs through Aarschot, and ended her life.
It was an act of desperation and grief.
The resilience of a human being can be impressive, but it has its limits.”
THE “schrecklichkeit”, or horror, visited upon the Belgians forced two million of them – a quarter of the population – to flee in the early days of the First World War.
About 250,000 reached Britain, homeless, with no possessions beyond the clothes in which they stood, in desperate need of shelter.
The British – especially Catholics, who shared their faith with the refugees – rallied round. Throughout October 1914, trainloads of Belgians arrived at Darlington’s Bank Top station. They were greeted by cheering crowds of well-wishers who regarded them as the innocent victims of a war that would be over by Christmas.
Committees were set up to find several hundred places in spare rooms, holiday homes and church halls of south Durham and the Tees Valley, and fund-raising began to buy them clothes and food.
A leading figure was Father Johannes Krajicek, a Catholic priest from Newcastle but with a Belgian background. He was aware that Witton Park’s ironworks had closed in the 1890s so there were several empty terraces into which 170 refugees were moved – the biggest contingent in south Durham.
Elsewhere, about 20 refugees were housed in Albert Street, Windlestone, which the locals re-named Belgium Street. Several Belgian families were housed in the Town Head area of Middleton-in-Teesdale where the local people, who had had very little contact with foreigners, were pleasantly surprised at how educated and polite they were.
Wooden houses were built for refugees at Newfield, near Willington. People in Eldon and Ferryhill took in families, while Barton reading room housed 14.
In Darlington, the Summerson family took in 20 to Coatham Hall at Coatham Mundeville. In the West End, the empty villas of Oaklea, Woodlea and Thornfield were turned over to them, as was Coniscliffe Hall, while wealthy Darlingtonians allowed them to stay in their holiday homes in Redcar, Arkengarthdale, Cotherstone and Reeth. The Grange Road Baptists found two houses for the newcomers, the nuns at St Augustine's put up ten and the Friends Meeting House, in Skinnergate, had room for 30.
In the North East, the township of Elisabethville was built for 6,000 Belgians at Birtley, near Chester-le-Street, and they worked in a munitions factory throughout the war.
READ MORE: CHRIS LLOYD'S STORY OF THE BIRTLEY BELGIANS
Most of the Belgians went home at the end of the war, but not all – and there are still quite a few Belgian-sounding surnames in the North East.
For instance, we believe the descendants of Louis de Konnick still live in the Darlington area. Louis represented Belgium as a young gymnast at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, but in 1914, he was one of the refugees who found shelter in Cockerton.
When he turned 18, he joined the Belgian army, and won the Croix de Guerre fighting in the trenches of the Western Front.
At the end of the war, when his countrymen were going home, he went the other way and returned to Cockerton where he married his sweetheart, Katie Harrison. They, and their daughters, lived on Cockerton Green, with Louis working for builders Bussey and Armstrong and playing in the Cockerton Silver Band for 60 years.
When he died aged 83 in 1981 he was believed to be the last of the First World War Belgian refugees in south Durham.
Not all the stories of the refugees whose lives were torn apart by the horror had such positive endings as Louis. For instance, Fr Krajicek, who became their unofficial spokesman in south Durham, died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 and is buried in Escomb churchyard.
And none can have such a shockingly sad an ending as that of Clementine Cypers.
If you can tell us anymore about the Belgian refugees, or if you have them in your family tree, we’d love to hear from you. Dries Peeters is particularly keen on learning about their time in Witton Park. Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk
READ MORE: THE DAY A METEOR FELL OUT OF THE SKY ONTO A DARLINGTON VILLAGE
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