Private Arnold Owen – 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards. Regimental Service Number 15063. Died 29 June 1916 Buried Essex Farm Cemetery, Ypres (Ieper), Arrondissement Ieper, West Flanders (West-Vlaanderen), Belgium. Grave Reference II.M.27
The inscription says “BLESSED IS HE WHO GAVE HIS LIFE FOR OTHERS”
Essex Farm Cemetery is located near a village called Boezinge in Belgium, where more than 1,000 servicemen of the First World War are buried or commemorated. One hundred and three (103) of the burials are unidentified but special memorials to commemorate 19 casualties known or believed to be buried are among them.
The cemetery was designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield.
The burials were made without a definite plan and some of the divisions which occupied this sector may be traced in almost every part of the cemetery. Essex Farm Cemetery was not far from the Yser Canal, which formed the front line in this part of the Salient between April 1915 to August 1917.
In the North West corner of the cemetery is a Cross of Sacrifice, designed by Blomfield and recognisable throughout the world. Blomfield also designed Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, located near Essex Farm Cemetery.
It was at Essex Farm Cemetery that Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae of the Canadian Army Medical Corps wrote the poem In Flanders Fields in May 1915.
