The Low Countries. Jaargang 6

Talbot House in Pops

For the men who fought in the muddy blood-soaked trenches of the Ypres Salient, a visit to Poperinghe, the first town behind the lines, was often a last hurrah. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers marched through its streets. ‘Pops’ became a kind of garrison town, catering for and providing entertainment to the British army.

This was one of the reasons why two energetic Chaplains, Neville S. Talbot and Philip T. Byard Clayton in December 1915 contracted with the fleeing Coevoet-Camerlynck family to rent their large house for 150.00 bf a month - a sizable sum at the time. It took the name Talbot House to commemorate the death of Lieutenant Gilbert Talbot (Neville's brother) who was killed on 30 July that year at Hooge (near Ypres). Gilbert Talbot's death came to symbolise the sacrifice made by his generation. The house was opened on 11 December 1915 and the Rev. Philip Clayton was put in charge. The soldiers of the day knew Talbot House as ‘Toc H’, formed from the house's initials in signallers' phonetic alphabet; and this also became the name of the Christian welfare society, originally for ex-servicemen, founded by Talbot and Clayton after the war.

It would be hard to imagine anyone less militarylooking than Philip Clayton. He was short and round - and, therefore, was known universally as ‘Tubby’. Captain Leonard Browne describes Tubby as: ‘...A living embodiment of Mr Chesterton's famous Father Brown. Clothing was always a trial - buttons would persist in coming off, breeches would gape at the knees, shirt cuffs would wear out...’

Rev. Tubby Clayton was a figure of serious devotion - and serious fun. In no time he created a ‘Home from Home’, a place where soldiers could step out of war's madness into a friendly world, with a good cup of tea, pictures on the wall, flowers in the well-kept garden and voices booming in song around a piano.

Because the house was getting immensely popular with the troops, Tubby introduced some ‘rules’ to maintain order and tidiness. Many notices were hung throughout the building. They were mostly contradictory or euphemistically meant and struck home immediately, appealing to the soldier's sense of humour. The following instructions became famous:

-	‘All Rank Abandon Ye Who Enter Here’: In Talbot House the rigid hierarchy of the army was forgotten, and the class divisions of civilian society seemed irrelevant.
-	‘To Pessimists' Way Out’
-	‘If you Are In The Habit Of Spitting On The Carpet At Home, Please Spit Here’
-	‘Come Into The Garden And Forget About The War’
-	‘Come Upstairs And Risk Meeting The Chaplain’
-	‘The Waste Paper Baskets Are Purely Ornamental - By Order’

There was even a library in Talbot House. In a little room on the first floor were a considerable number of

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The chapel in the loft of Talbot House (Photo by B. de Grendel).

books. In order to keep the books in the house Tubby came up with the brilliant idea of asking for the soldier's hat or cap as a deposit when a book was borrowed. This prevented the then ‘improperly dressed’ soldier from disappearing with the book.

Tubby wanted to be ‘nearer to heaven’ and made his chapel in the loft of the house. An old much-used carpenter's bench became the altar and the posts of a large four-poster bed were used as candlesticks. Thousands of men attended Tubby's services in that ‘Upper Room’. At least 10,000 soldiers received the sacrament and 50 soldiers were baptised there. According to Tubby, at times the chapel ‘rocked like a cradle’ under the sheer weight of the congregation.

A ‘Concert Hall’ was contrived out of the loft of an old hop-store adjacent to the garden of Talbot House. It was used by the soldiers as a kind of socio-cultural centre. Officers as well as ‘other ranks’ gave lectures on Health Care, Education and Housing, etc. Professors from Oxford and Cambridge dealt with such subjects as Politics, Architecture and Ethics. Talbot House had a drama group of its own. The moving spirit was Charles Willmott, in civilian life Manager of the Brixton Theatre of Varieties. The stage was set with old sheets of canvas, soldier artists painted the settings. General Plumer was to be found in the front row regularly.

In 1929, Lord Wakefield of Hythe purchased the house and donated it to the Anglo-Belgian Talbot House Association. Today it still exudes the atmosphere of the war years, since the interior has been carefully preserved. On the other hand, Talbot House aims to develop further as a ‘living museum’ and an international centre of peace and reconciliation, and offers accommodation on a self-catering basis.

jacques ryckebosch

Address

Talbot House / Gasthuistraat 43 / 8970 Poperinge / Belgium tel. [phone]