Military History | Poperinge Town Hall — Four Cells and a Coal Store Wall

A basket-arched passage opens off the Guido Gezellestraat, beside the town hall Poperinge (Poperinghe, in the spelling the British Army used) finished shortly before the war, and runs through into a courtyard. The Flemish heritage register sets out what the army made of it. Four police cells held soldiers picked up for a fight or for public drunkenness, or waiting on extradition or trial, and from 1916 on execution. At the back of the yard stood a half-open coal store. Its wall was hung with sandbags to catch ricochets, and at least eight men were shot against it. At least is the register's own word: other accounts give five, other accounts give more, and they are not all counting the same thing. Courts martial sat while battalions were out of the line, and this was one of the largest rest areas on the front. Seventeen men executed in the sector lie in the New Military Cemetery a few streets away. The post now standing in the yard is said to have been used once, for a labourer of the Chinese Labour Corps convicted of murder and shot on 8 May 1919 — though the researchers Piet Chielens and Julian Putkowski record that the courtyard had gone back to civilian use by then. In 2006 an Act of Parliament pardoned the men executed for a listed set of offences under the Army Act 1881 and the Indian Army Act 1911, committed between 4 August 1914 and 11 November 1918, among them desertion, cowardice, sleeping on post, mutiny and striking a superior officer. The same section states that it does not affect any conviction or sentence. Murder is not on the list. Two of the four cells are kept, in the yard of a building that still does the town's municipal business. A plaque on the wall between their barred windows numbers this stop 21 on the town's walking route. 📸 Cover: L'Hôtel de ville de Poperinge, Toïlev, 2009, CC BY-SA 3.0 — area view of the Grote Markt front; the cells and the post are in the courtyard behind. Second image: Poperinge, le beffroi et l'hôtel de ville, Pierre André Leclercq, 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0.