Thiepval Memorial Arch to the Missing of the Battle of the Somme of the Great War France
The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme is a major war memorial to 72,195 missing British and South African men who died in the Battles of the Somme of the First World War between 1915 and 1918 with no known grave. It is near the village of Thiepval, Picardy in France. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the memorial was built between 1928 and 1932 and is the largest British battle memorial in the world. It was inaugurated by the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) in the presence of Albert Lebrun, President of France, on 1 August 1932. The memorial, which dominates the rural scene surrounding it, has 16 brick piers, faced with Portland stone. It was originally built using French bricks from Lille but was refaced in 1973 with Accrington brick. It is a complex form of memorial arch, comprising interlocking arches of four different sizes. Each side of the main arch is pierced by a smaller arch, oriented at a right angle to the main arch. Each side of each of these smaller arches is then pierced by a still smaller arch, and so on. The keystone of each smaller arch is at the level of the spring of the larger arch that it pierces; each of these levels is marked by a stone design results in 16 piers, having 64 stone-panelled sides. Only 48 of these are inscribed, as the panels around the outside of the memorial are blank. The main arch is surmounted by a tower. In the central space of the memorial a Stone of Remembrance rests on a three-stepped platform. On the Portland stone piers are engraved the names of over 72,000 men who were lost in the Somme battles between July 1915 and March 1918. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission states that over 90% of these soldiers died in the first Battle of the Somme between 1 July and 18 November 1916
Size: 3626px × 5576px
Location: Thiepval, Somme, France
Photo credit: © Niall Ferguson / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: arch, battle, cemetery, france, graves, great, lutyens, memorial, missing, remembrance, somme, stone, thiepval, war
