Poppies planted at Edith Cavell memorial

Mark Simmonds said: “We should take this opportunity to remember the historic friendship of our two countries and the sacrifices that we shared together one hundred years ago. Edith Cavell was an extraordinarily brave woman and gave the ultimate sacrifice trying to protect injured servicemen in Brussels during the First World War.  

It is absolutely essential that we commemorate the sacrifice both of Belgian people and of British people a hundred years on, and that we inform young people to ensure that there can be no repeat of the terrible trauma that was caused in that time.”

Belgian Federal Commissioner-General for the Centenary of the First World War, Paul Breyne, said: “Poppies are flowers that grew in devastated fields during the years of the First World War. They then became a symbol for the British.”The minister and schoolchildren were joined by members of the Royal British Legion, the Edith Cavell Commemoration Group, the deputy mayor of Uccle, and the Director of the Edith Cavell hospital. Centenary commemorations will start in Belgium on August 4, in Liège and Mons.

The 1920 memorial commemorates both British nurse Edith Cavell who was executed in 1915 and her nursing colleague Marie Depage, who died when the Lusitania ocean liner was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the Irish coast in May 1915. The memorial at the corner of Rue Edith Cavell and Rue Marie Depage is in front of the Edith Cavell Hospital. Many Brussels streets were renamed after world war heroes.

Cavell trained as a nurse at the London Hospital and was recruited by Dr Antoine Depage (the husband of Marie Depage) in 1907 to establish a modern nursing school in Belgium. After the outbreak of the war, Cavell assisted the Belgian resistance movement in helping wounded British and French soldiers escape across the border to the Netherlands. Arrested in August 1915 and imprisoned in Saint-Gilles, she was executed on grounds of treason on October 12, 1915 in Schaerbeek, following a short trial.