Retired Edinburgh teacher still moved to tears after 200 trips to First World War battlefields
The former history teacher says pupils are forever changed after walking through the trenches
A retired Edinburgh history teacher who first took pupils to the Western Front nearly 50 years ago says he still gets a lump in his throat after more than 200 trips to Ypres and the Somme.
Des Brogan, 75, was in his late 20s when he took his fourth-year Holyrood High School class to Flanders. “Completely captivated” by the vast and magnificent cemeteries and the well-preserved trenches, he vowed to return with a new group of pupils every two years.
He said: “It was almost as if you could touch the past. I would take my youngsters there and there was nothing better to teach them about the horrors of war and the reality of the trenches than actually to walk through them.”
Mr Brogan eventually left teaching in 1996 to devote all his time to Mercat Tours, a guided tour company he started a decade earlier with three history teacher friends “just for a bit of fun”.
The business was named after the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh’s Parliament Square, where visitors to the Old Town would typically gather to seek out local guides to show them around. By reviving this tradition during their summer holidays, the group of friends launched what Mr Brogan believes was the Capital’s first guided tour company.
After taking over the company full-time, Mr Brogan found he missed his trips to the battlefields. He decided to set up Mercat Tours International, drawing on his years of experience to take other history teachers and their pupils around the First World War sites.
Mr Brogan said: “When we take the kids away, we promise to change them. With the adults we promise to move them – and that happens.
“The kids identify with the soldiers when they hear the stories about what happened to them and realise, but for the grace of God, they could have been born 150 years ago and would have ended up being in the trenches themselves.
“I defy anyone to go around the places that we go around with the youngsters and not have a lump in their throat or a tear in their eye.”
Having since passed the company down to his daughter Kat, Mr Brogan will return to Ypres for a seven-day tour on September 27 next year to mark 100 years of the Belgian town’s Menin Gate war memorial. Officially the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing, the 100ft arch commemorates more than 54,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen who have no known grave.
The tour, which will depart Edinburgh by coach and travel overnight to Amsterdam by ferry, will explore how nations have chosen to remember the First World War through memorial architecture.
When Mr Brogan first started taking pupils to Ypres, only a handful of Scottish schools made the trip each year. Now, he says around 70 schools send pupils to the battlefields.
He added: “It’s amazing because it seems that the further away we get from the war the more people want to remember.”
MTI makes annual donations to charities supporting remembrance and the Armed Forces community, with 10p for every pupil going to a charity.
More information including ticket prices for the Always Remembered tour can be found on the MTI website.