At haven’s door

Winterton Hospital, a typical Victorian asylum, was demolished in the late 1990s

THE headstone is one of the few still standing in the former Winterton asylum graveyard on the road to Fishburn. It’s an eerie place in its isolation, largely forgotten and increasingly overgrown, but at least the grass is trimmed to ankleheight.

Beneath the proud stone lies Pieter L Vermote. The greening metalwork says that he was a soldier with the 7th Regiment of the Line of the Belgian Army, that he was born in Lo on September 25, 1884, and that he died in Durham on January 19, 1918.

No more than that. No more answers to the obvious questions: how and why?

For the past decade, this headstone has intrigued Echo Memories. Now, at last, we can begin to tell Pieter’s story.

ON August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. On August 2, Germany demanded right of way across Belgium so it could attack France, Russia’s ally. The demand was rejected, but on August 4, the Germans marched in anyway, reaching Liege. Under the terms of an 1839 treaty, Britain was obliged to protect Belgium’s borders, so Britain declared war on the invading Germans.

The Germans marched on, capturing Brussels and Mons before entering France. They came within 20 miles of Paris before being forced back to the Belgian border where they became bogged down in the mud of the River Somme.

So on September 27, they opened a second line of attack through Belgium, sweeping north through Antwerp and along the coast.

But by October 27, they’d become bogged down in the mud surrounding the border town of Ypres.

And so within two months of the war starting, the battlelines were shaped: for the next four years the Allies would be slogging it out with the Germans in the hope of gaining a few yards of blasted Belgian mud.

The Belgians had tried to resist the German advances, but as their army was a tenth of the size of the invaders’, and poorly equipped – they had only 102 machine guns between them – they didn’t stand much chance. However, their guerrilla tactics infuriated the Germans who inflicted “schrecklichkeit” – “the horror” – upon them.

The British called it “the rape of Belgium”.

Pieter Vermote

Two million Belgians – a quarter of the country’s population – were driven from their homes. Many of them scrambled over the Channel to the safety of Britain.

Somewhere in the middle of the destruction of his country was Private Pieter Louis Vermote, a humble baker’s boy from a small town just to the north of Ypres. He appears to have joined the Belgian infantry in 1904.

On November 3, 1914, he was wounded at Lombardsijde, near the coastal town of Nieuwpoort, trying to stem the Germans’ second wave of attacks. He was transferred to Calais, evacuated to England and awoke on November 6 to find himself in Netley Victoria Hospital, near Portsmouth. He then went into the care of the Salvation Army before, on January 9, 1915, he was taken into one of the four hospitals in London hurriedly set up by King Albert of Belgium to treat his wounded soldiers.

PIETER must have been quite badly injured. It could have been a physical injury sustained in the fighting; it could have been a mental injury – “shellshock”, we might say today – caused by the horrors he had been through.

Perhaps this would explain why his military file in the Royal Museum, in Brussels says that on January 1, 1915, he was transferred to Sedgefield County Lunatic Asylum, although it is possible that with hospital beds at a premium, he was sent to the first one that became available.

The asylum operated from 1856 to 1991. It had a variety of tough-sounding names, including the Durham County Mental Hospital, although in its later years it was known as the more-friendly Winterton.

Since its demolition in the late 1990s, its site has been covered by expensive executive homes.

When Pieter arrived to recuperate there in early 1915, the Great Shell Scandal was exploding in Britain. Newspapers got wind of the shortage of artillery shells that was hampering our brave soldiers fighting in places such as Belgium, on the Western Front – some guns were told to fire only ten shells a day to eke out supplies. The scandal contributed to the downfall of Prime Minister HH Asquith, and David Lloyd-George was appointed Munitions Minister to solve it. He opened National Projectile Factories – but, because so many menfolk were away at war, he was hampered by a lack of bodies to staff them.

The Belgian authorities offered their injured soldiers who were unfit for military action. In the North-East, a factory opened at Birtley, near Chester-le-Street, and 4,000 wounded men were sent to work there. Many brought their families, and a temporary town called Elisabethville (named after the Belgian queen) sprung up.

CONDITIONS were tough. Elisabethville was surrounded by a fence and subject to military rule. No one was allowed out without a pass. On December 21, 1916, there was a riot after a factory worker was imprisoned by the gendarmes for wearing civilian clothes.

The Winterton cemetery chapel, built in 1891, looked over the few remaining headstones until its recent demolition

But the Birtley Belgians did make two million shells for the British Army.

At some point, Pieter recuperated enough to be considered “reformed” – not fit enough for frontline soldiering but strong enough for shell work. He joined his countrymen at Birtley.

It is not clear if he lived in Elisabethville or whether he, like many other Belgian refugees, had lodgings elsewhere in the county.

He seems to have divided his time between Durham and his new family in London: in late 1915, he married Marie C Vitse in central London, and the following year they had a daughter, Marcella, born in Marylebone. Late in 1917, a second daughter, Neve, was born in Lambeth, but she died within weeks in Wandsworth.

And then there is another sad date in our story: on January 19, 1918, in the Sedgefield County Lunatic Asylum, Pieter died of “General Paralysis of the insane”. Because he had suffered from this condition for nine months or more, a postmortem examination was not required. He was 34.

We can only speculate about the nature of his illness, but he’d seen his country over-run and brutally suppressed, he’d been seriously injured in the fighting, he’d sought sanctuary in a foreign land, he’d worked in the harshest conditions, he’d endured separation from his wife and he’d witnessed his daughter die a baby, so we can only sympathise with his plight.

After the war, Marie, his widow, returned to Belgium with young Marcella. They set up home in Poperinge – a small, much-fought-over town to the west of Ypres – and on April 18, 1921, they applied to the Strijdersfonds – the Warriors’ Fund – for government financial assistance.

In the mid-1920s, the Belgian government offered its families the chance to have their loved ones’ bodies repatriated.

Quite a few were exhumed from Birtley and taken home, although 13 remain.

Marie must have decided it was best that Pieter stayed in Durham and so to this day there remains a corner of Sedgefield that is forever Belgium.

It is a corner, tended by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, that deserves our thoughts this Remembrance weekend as it contains the remains of man who, over-run by the horrors of war, died in the service of his country.

MEMORIES is hugely indebted to, among others, Francis Hendriks, in Veurne, Belgium, and Bill Lawrence, in Whitley Bay, for their help in finally telling Pieter Vermote’s story.

Francis is a retired Belgian army officer and a military history enthusiast, and Bill has done great research into the Birtley Belgians.

The Birtley Heritage Group is holding a Remembrance Day Coffee Morning on Monday, from 10am until noon, in Birtley library. It will include a short talk on the Birtley Belgians plus observation, of course, of the two-minute silence at 11am. All are welcome.

Pieter Vermotte’s headstone

Anyone who thinks they may have a connection with the Birtley Belgians – and there are plenty of Belgianlooking names still in the Durham telephone books – can email birtleybelgiansWW1@ yahoo.co.uk

• Many thanks to everyone who has been in touch with Memories in the last few weeks. There has been loads of fascinating correspondence and we will feature of much of it as we can in forthcoming weeks.