The rows of headstones at the British Military Cemetery in Dhekelia tells a story of heartache for young parents in the 1960s
I find few places more serenely poignant than graveyards, and Dhekelia Military Cemetery was no exception.
From the outside it looked like any other forces’ burial ground – rows of immaculately kept graves, tended gardens and high walls, but when I stepped inside and started looking at the headstones, poignancy rapidly became a totally inadequate word to describe what I saw.
Expectedly, the graveyard is the resting place of servicemen who lost their lives during the troubles in the 1950s, in Cyprus, Suez and other regional conflicts, but that’s not what shocked me.
No, that came when I saw the babies’ graves – row upon desperately sad row of them. In one small section of the cemetery are buried over 56 babies, aged between one day and one month who died during 1964, some on the same date.
Most of these simple stone crosses are adorned with only the names and dates, but a few have the decaying remnants of teddy bears strung to the headstones, watching over the babies for decades.
Further on and I noticed another row of babies’ graves from 1963, at least ten of them who died in November that year alone.
Then, to my horror, just across the path I stumbled upon even more child graves, dozens of these marked deaths from 1965. In September that year at least eight babies died aged between just one and three days.
‘Our Baby Girl’ read one inscription while the clusters of well-withered flowers were equally emotion wrenching.
Few of these graves have been visited recently, but after 45 years or more, one wonders how many of the parents of these children, who left Cyprus decades ago, are even still alive.
“Everybody asks about those,” remarks one lady, who visits most days to tend her husband’s grave. “I think there was an outbreak of cholera or something like that.”
The lady then points me to another section of the cemetery, “there are more kiddies over there,” she says.
More? Surely not…a few paces up the path and I discovered there are dozens more, and it becomes clear that to make an inventory of baby graves here would take a long time.
What could have happened in Cyprus between 1963 and 1965 to cause so many infant deaths in such a small community?
It was a mystery anyone would ache to solve, but I soon discovered there were to be no satisfactory answers.
“It was the first thing I noticed when I visited that cemetery,” said the Anglican priest of South-East Cyprus, Reverend Michael Crawford.
“It’s a really intriguing place and very sad to see so many lines of child graves.”
He’s been here for five years and has never been able to find an explanation as to why so many children are buried there.
Everybody is foxed by my phone calls, the Chaplain at Dhekelia can offer no explanation, and frequent visits back to the cemetery to talk with those visiting loved ones provides speculation that maybe outbreaks of cholera, meningitis, even typhoid were to blame, but no one knows for sure.
If something did happen here, I thought, it must be archived. But newspapers – including the Cyprus Mail – medical records and even local historians can provide no explanation.
Stuart Bardsley, the media spokesman at the British Bases, did his best to solve the mystery, including making phone-calls to the British Ministry of Defence.
But there were no answers to be found, other than to accept that high infant mortality was a fact of life in Cyprus in the early 1960s.
At the time 40,000 British forces personnel and their families were based on the island, with camps in Famagusta, Dhekelia, Troodos, Akrotiri and Agios Nikolaos.
Former history teacher and serviceman David Hardacre, who has spent much of his working life on the island, did recall a conversation he had many years ago with a former bases pastor about the child graves.
“He said what you see in that cemetery is a distorted segment of society, it’s distorted by the youth of those concerned – the young married couples who were posted here at the time.
“Years later the medical officer was questioned about the graves but he insisted that there was nothing unusual about the graves given the ages of those concerned,” he added
The forces’ population was so large that the British MOD, started construction of hospital at Akrotiri at cost of £1,000,000, and a workforce of 600. On its opening in 1963, there were eight wards with 155 beds.
“The child mortality rate was much higher then, and this was a big theatre,” said Bardsley.
“Dhekelia was the only cemetery, and it is important to remember that bodies would not have been repatriated in those days.”
He could find nothing in the limited archives to point to any other conclusion, though he acknowledged that medical records have only been kept since 1966.
The theory is sound enough. Between 1960 and 1990, the global child mortality rate was reduced by half, from 191 to 95 per 1,000.
So could it be as simple as that our world has changed so much since the sixties?
If you compare the bases’ population of the time to a small town, with only a tiny cemetery to bury the dead of an ever-changing military community which does not grow old and die here, perhaps it is reasonable that the proportion of graves look unusually distorted towards the young.
We all know that cemeteries are a tool for thinking about mortality, but even so nothing can prepare you for those babies’ graves in Dhekelia Military Cemetery.
Someone, somewhere, must know what caused heart-broken young British parents to lose their children in such dreadful numbers nearly half a century ago. Perhaps a nurse who treated the infants at a hospital is retired on the island and can solve the mystery. Or perhaps other retired British servicemen who lived through the episodes that must have so traumatised their community can answer the riddle.
If you are one of those living on the island and reading this story today – or in Britain browsing our online edition – please get in touch and let us know. It would be good to be able to solve the abiding mystery of the babies who were born into a world they were never given the chance to know.
