Military History | Talbot House, Poperinge — The Club That Left Rank at the Door

Poperinge — Poperinghe in the spelling the British Army used — lies about twelve kilometres west of the Menenpoort at Ieper, and it was where that army rested. The house's own account puts it at ten thousand inhabitants handling a quarter of a million English-speaking soldiers. A merchant's house on Gasthuisstraat came into the war that way. Its own account says a bomb damaged it in 1915 and that the owner, Maurice Coevoet, let it to the 6th Division at 150 francs a month. On 11 December 1915 an army chaplain, Philip Clayton, opened a soldiers' club in it. Neville Talbot, a senior chaplain, had sent him there; the house was named for Neville's younger brother Gilbert, killed at Hooge in July 1915. In the army's signalling alphabet the initials came out as Toc H, and that stuck. The Western Front Association records that the clubs of the town were otherwise divided by rank. This one was not, and the notice at the chaplain's door said so: all rank abandon, ye who enter here. The chapel was in the hop loft at the top of the house, its altar a carpenter's bench. The stair up to it is closer to a ladder, and the museum has lettered the climb along the risers in English and Dutch: PERHAPS 100,000 HAVE CLIMBED THESE STAIRS — BEFORE YOU, AND BEFORE GOING UP THE LINE. HERE YOU ARE ON HOLIER GROUND THAN ANY. The English account records that the chapel's fittings went to London in 1918 and stood in the crypt of All Hallows-by-the-Tower until 1929. In that year the house was bought for Toc H by Lord Wakefield of Hythe, who gave it to the Talbot House association; the Western Front Association puts the price at £9,200. A dark plaque beside the front door carries the house's name and LORD WAKEFIELD OF HYTHE, and the lines between them resolve in no photograph examined here. It is a museum now, with a garden behind it and the old hop store next door as its concert hall. The house's own account calls the building mid-eighteenth-century; the Flemish register dates it to the third quarter of the nineteenth, over an older core. The wrought-iron sign over the pavement reads TALBOT HOUSE and EVERY MAN'S CLUB, with 1915 and a second figure that resolves only as a 9. Last entry is at half past four, and Mondays are for groups. 📸 Cover: the front of Talbot House at Gasthuisstraat 43. Pierre André Leclercq, 16 June 2016, GFDL and CC BY-SA. Also shown: the stair to the loft chapel with the museum's bilingual lettering, Jan Lambrecht, 10 November 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0; and the street front with the hanging sign, SanneCouttouw, 23 January 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0. All via Wikimedia Commons.