“Of all the First World War sites I’ve visited, Talbot House is the most evocative, yet most folk I know have never heard of it,” said William Cook in The Telegraph.
Located in Poperinge, a market town in rural Flanders, it was the unique creation of two British army chaplains, Neville Talbot and Philip “Tubby” Clayton, who wanted to offer soldiers “a more wholesome form of rest and recuperation” than visits to bars and brothels. In 1915, they rented a townhouse from a Belgian family, and turned it into an “Every Man’s Club – a cross between a gentleman’s club and a traditional vicarage”. Here, soldiers could play chess, billiards or ping-pong, borrow a book, or enjoy a song at the piano, escaping for a while from “the horrors of the Western Front”.
The house was named in memory of Neville’s brother, Gilbert Talbot, who had died in action earlier in 1915. It was “quaint and cosy” and “quintessentially British”, a “home from home” for the Tommies who visited. There was a parrot that spoke fluent Welsh, and a walled garden with a sign that read “Come into the garden, and forget about the war”. Another sign, at the front door, read “All rank abandon ye who enter here” – a “revolutionary” instruction in an era when officers and men were “strictly segregated”. And there was a rudimentary chapel in the attic, with a carpenter’s bench for an altar, where many men attended services, though this wasn’t compulsory “or even actively encouraged”.
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The house has been “a happy place of pilgrimage and sanctuary” since it was opened to the public in 1931 – it’s fascinating and “moving”, well-maintained, and full of mementoes from the Great War. Guests can even stay overnight – an experience I found “supremely peaceful – like staying in the family home of an old, familiar friend”. And there are many other wartime sites nearby, including the battlefield of Ypres, and Ypres itself, a “handsome” city where big crowds attend the Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate every night.