After spending a very pleasant Saturday at Colours 2026 in Newbury, link below, the next day Carolyn and I were off to Folkestone, Kent to stay overnight ready to catch the Channel Tunnel train to Calais the next morning, and a short drive to our new home for the the following week, staying near the coast at Le Touquet Paris Plage, a very famous French Channel resort, handily placed for exploring this very interesting and historic part of France.
 |
| JJ's Wargames: Colours 2026 - Newbury & Reading Wargames Society. |
The first time I visited Le Touquet was just over two years ago, when we had a family 'booze cruise' that include Carolyn, myself, Tom and Will and their respective other halves, Beth and Ollie, to fill our respective cars and vans with wines and beers in preparation for Tom's, my eldest son's, marriage to my beautiful daughter-in-law, Beth, since joined by my other beautiful daughter-in-law, Ollie. However we were only in town for three days, not really long enough to explore the area properly, but enough time to make notes for a return visit with some other sites in mind, and this year turned out to be the year to fulfil that plan.
 |
| Our base for the week was at Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, with some key sites at Montreuil-sur-Mer, Crecy and Agincourt included in our list of places to visit during our break. |
The drive from home to Folkestone was relatively uneventful, and easy going with very pleasant accommodation and and evening meal in Hythe, which reacquainted us with the Royal Military Canal that I featured during another expedition to France back in 2014, link below.
 |
| JJ's Wargames: Mr Pitt's Ditch - The Royal Military Canal, Hythe |
Unfortunately out journey over to France via the shuttle was not so uneventful as our drive up the previous day, with a three hour delay catching our train that rearranged our plans for the day as a whole, but as we all know the plan always changes on first contact with the enemy and so we made other plans once we had crossed.
 |
| The very long sea front in Le Touquet. |
 |
| The beach goes on and on for miles, and when the tide is out, you probably have a mile and a half of sand to cross before you get to the waters edge, definitely a sand yachting paradise. |
 |
| As if to emphasise the point, large parking areas have been created for all the sand yachts to be safely parked. |
The seaside resort is home to 4,224 residents and welcomes up to 250,000 people in the summer, no doubt attracted by the long beach, bordered by very large sand dunes, which is more than seven and a half miles, consisting of very fine sand, that has facilitated the development of water sports, in particular sand yachting and kitesurfing.
 |
| Some of the older historic buildings dating from Le Touquet's glory days in the 1920's are still to be seen amid the more modern developments alongside, this the former Scampolo Hotel, dating from 1926, now converted to apartments. |
 |
| The Hotel Scampolo was built by Louis Quetelart in 1926, the name taken from an Italian comedy of the 1920's. |
In the early twentieth century, following investment by the English entrepreneur John Whitley, Le Touquet gained a reputation of a posh resort due to, among other things, several luxury hotels and an abundance of sports activities associated with the upper class, particularly those catering to the tastes of British guests.
The town's first golf course was inaugurated by Lord Balfour, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, with the peak of Le Touquet's prosperity coming during the Roaring Twenties, as British elites dominated the life of the resort; with the town having the largest casino by revenue in France just before the Great Depression, with many buildings built in the 1920s and 1930s being a testament of the city's riches.
 |
| The Vauban fortress at Montreuil-sur-Mer. |
 |
| Montreuil-sur-Mer, 1830-1861. Drawing by Émile Biette. |
For much of its life, Montreuil was on the edge of France, which explains why it was fortified from the end of the ninth century, when the count of Ponthieu built the first wooden fort. The town passed into royal hands a century later under the first Capetian king and a separate royal castle was founded, one tower of which still exists.
In June 1537, the troops of Charles V and Henry VIII laid siege to Montreuil, forcing it to surrender, with the city largely destroyed, and then nearly sixty years later the city was struck by the Black Death in 1596.
 |
| Les Hauts de Montreuil, the supposed home of Jean Valjean. |
Following the peace treaty of 1559 between France and the Empire, Charles IX ordered the construction of a citadel on the site of the old thirteenth-century castle in 1567, and later, around 1670, Vauban perfected the work of his predecessors by redesigning the citadel and adding a powder magazine and an arsenal, with the town remaining garrisoned throughout the eighteenth century to protect it against seaward incursions by the British.
 |
| View of the citadel, 1634, drawing by Christophe Tassin. |
Mirroring my post covering the building of the Royal Military Canal in Hythe, see above, Montreuil played a key roll in the events that caused the building of that defensive structure.
 |
| Napoleon distributing the Légion d'honneur at the Boulogne camps, August 16, 1804 - Victor Adam. |
In 1803, with Napoleon mustering his Grande Armée in the the Camp of Boulogne to prepare for an invasion of England, the left flank of the camp was based between Montreuil and Étaples, and commanded by Marshal Michel Ney, with the 1st Division (Dupont), the 2nd Division (Loison), the 3rd Division (Partouneaux and then Malher) and a cavalry brigade commanded by Colonels Colbert and Lebrun, a total of 20,500 men.
 |
| Marshal Ney's HQ, 1804-05 in Montreuil, now a hotel. |
The soldiers trained on land and on barges and set up their quarters in semi-underground barracks, until with the failure of Vice Admiral Villeneuve to lead the Combined Fleet into the Channel, they broke camp on the 1st September 1805, to leave for the Austerlitz campaign.
In Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables (1862), and by chance one of my favourite musicals, Montreuil-sur-Mer is the setting for much of volume I, "Fantine," being the hometown of the eponymous heroine. Every year, the townsfolk stage an outdoor son et lumière performance of the book (not the musical) in the citadel at the end of July and the beginning of August, with all 600 parts played by local people.
From March 1916, with the planning of the British led Somme offensive under way, Montreuil-sur-Mer became the headquarters of the British Army and Field Marshal Douglas Haig, in France during the First World War chosen as GHQ for a wide variety of reasons.
 |
| Haig attending a service on the fourth anniversary of the declaration of war at Montreuil, France, 4th August 1918. Stood to his left is Lieutenant General Fowke, the BEF's adjutant general, while his CGS, Lieutenant General Lawrence, is on his right. |
It was on a main road from London to Paris in a very central situation to serve the needs of a Force which was based on Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne, Dieppe, and Le Havre, and with its front stretching from the River Somme to beyond the Belgian frontier.
 |
| Map of the Western Front in 1914, and illustrating Montreuil's position in relation to the front lines. |
King George V, accompanied by Haig, made a triumphant passage through Montreuil-sur-Mer on his way to Paris on 27th November 1918.
During the Second World War, Montreuil fell to the German Second Panzer Division on 22nd March 1940, and was occupied by German troops until it was re-taken by the Canadians on 13th-14th September 1944.
On entry into the main square at Montreuil the casual visitor is greeted with an unusual monument for a French town, where normally you would expect to see the ubiquitous war memorial to the First and Second World Wars, here it is an unmistakably British style equestrian statue that would not look out of place in Westminster.
 |
| The statue of Field Marshall Haig, outside the town hall in Montreuil in the Place du Général de Gaulle. |
Not being that interested in the First World War, I was at first quite surprised to see Field Marshal Haig commemorated until I realised that this was the British GHQ, with my interest in the town more directed towards its defences and links to Marshal Ney and the Boulogne Camp in 1805.
Anybody with a knowledge of Britain's involvement in the 'Great War' and certainly British themselves will be familiar with the controversy that surrounds Douglas Haig and his contribution or lack thereof to Allied victory, and the cost in British lives suffered in the conflict on the Western Front that contribution cost.
 |
| King George V, French President Raymond Poincaré and Haig at GHQ at Montreuil, 7th August 1918. |
I suppose my evaluation of Haig as a military commander has mellowed with the years, and I take the view that it is very easy to judge with hindsight, which as we know is always one-hundred percent correct, and so I allow for the fact that Haig probably was the best talent available at the time, but I have a feeling that the bar on that qualification wasn't that high.
 |
| The northern gate, the Porte de Boulogne, is wide enough for one car to pass through at a time. |
After parking the car, we decided to walk part of the city wall, and then explore the streets before making our way to the Vauban citadel, and the nerve centre of Haig's GHQ.
The views out over Picardy from the battlements were exquisite, made even better by the weather we enjoyed on the day we visited.
As we walked the Vauban city wall, a casual glace back into the town outskirts revealed sections of the likely renaissance wall behind it, constructed after the destruction of the town by troops of Habsburg emperor Charles V in June 1537, now consumed as part of the boundary wall for the odd town chateau.
The citadel is in a remarkably good state of preservation and his home to several displays, illustrating the history of Montreuil-sur-Mer over the centuries and the role it played in the First World War.
The entrance to the citadel itself is via a bridge over the main ditch and leads to an impressive main gate.
 |
| The bridge over the main ditch leads to the main gate into the citadel. |
Inside the citadel you can see the remains of the medieval Royal Castle, on which the defences of Montreuil were constructed, the oldest surviving being Queen Bertha’s tower, where Bertha of Holland, the estranged wife of Philip I, ended her days in the late eleventh century.
 |
| Queen Bertha’s Tower. |
The site includes the casemates underneath the ramparts, accessed by steep stairs, built by Louis Philippe in the mid-nineteenth century in fear of Prussian attack.
 |
| The Royal Dungeon. |
Between 1916 and 1919 the casements housed the British Army Communications Centre and today they contain an exhibition of Montreuil during the First World War.
As always more anon.
JJ
