Bath Daily Photo

061111.Bradford, Cemeteries and Armistice Day

Friday’s lecturer was a distinguished, and thoroughly British, structural engineer who had worked on all the great English Heritage listings. Out of all the case studies he projected, what struck me was his outfit. Accepting that it was a tad cold in the room, he wore a very formal heavy suit with a maroon vest and even had attached a gold pocket watch chain. His whole appearance was very colourful, which is how I came to notice that pinned to his label was a red and black poppy.

My grandfather’s occupation required him to frequently travel and these were two photos he took sometime in May of 1948. The first is the otherwise unremarkable skyline of Geneva, Switzerland but he had typed on the back of the photo that the League of Nations’ headquarters building (Palais des Nations) was located at the extreme right of the horizon line. (I believe the old League of Nations’ HQ building, Palais Wilson, is on the extreme left of the horizon line.) The second photo is of a then recent WWII cemetery in Arnheim, Holland, filled with wooden crosses marking the graves of fallen American soldiers whose bodies had not yet been sent home, or their grave markers made permanent with a stone cross.

Today in the US, Amistice Day is known as Veteran’s Day due to the events that occurred between the League of Nations building and this cemetery in Arnheim.

Please see my previous posted photo of a Hungarian WWI monument-like memorial, and here for the post explaining it.
The cemetery at Beckford’s Tower in Bradford, previously posted, struck my eye because of the incredible swirling clouds and its location on Lansdown Hill overlooking the city of Bath.

It reminded me of this last photo, which I grabbed off Wikipedia’s Photo of the Day a while back, and which features the cemetery in New York City that that grandfather is buried in.

It would appear Bath has fewer people to bury and fewer buildings to house them in than New York City.