Commonwealth War Graves Commission

So if you buy property and you buy land and your sole purpose is to excavate that site to see what you can find, you're going to run into problems because you can't legally remove or keep any of the items that you find.

You may well find yourself uncovering human remains and then the mayor and the police and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission or the German Volksbund or whoever it is, they're all going to have to be involved and questions may then be asked as to why you are excavating this site in this way.

And you have an organization called DRAC, which is essentially the Regional Archaeological Authorities, and they are the ones who decide whether any kind of archaeology can happen within a region of France, every département, every region.

county has a different drac the Somme have one Paddy Calais Nord Paddy Calais and so on and if you want to carry out any kind of archaeological work you have to submit papers to them to ask permission and they don't always say yes so for example some years ago I was working on a documentary on with my friend John Hayes Fisher, and they wanted to excavate an aircraft that was shot down in that area in 1940.

Before that, she was a councillor in Plymouth.

She also worked for the council's homelessness team and for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in the South West.

Ben Maguire is the Liberal Democrat MP for North Cornwall and the party's shadow attorney general.

He also sits on the Commons Home Affairs Committee.

Um, but in theory, if you read the war diaries, all the evidence should have pointed to it being Private Wilson.

And I said to my line manager, "Well, there's this one other guy who... he's not even mentioned in the war diaries, but he's in CWGC records.

So maybe just to rule him out, we need to DNA test for him as well." Of course, he came back as a match.

So [laughs] so the cautionary tale- [laughs]

And so we have a, we, we have a DNA contractor, so we don't do the actual science-y part.

Mm-hmm.

So they go over to, uh, Beaune, where CWGC have their headquarters, and they have their mortuary there.

They'll take a sample of the remains, bring that back to their lab in Aberdeen to process it, get the DNA profile.

It's quite a big area that was put aside in the 20th century for the burial of the dead there.

We begin to see amongst it the white splash of stone, typical War Graves Commission headstones, and we will see these in almost every cemetery and churchyard across Britain.

There's more than 12,000 locations in the UK where you can find at least one war grave from either the First or the Second World War.

They're always a thing to head to first.

But many soldiers who are buried in churchyards like this do not necessarily have a Commonwealth, formerly Imperial War Graves Commission headstone.

The family had the option of putting up their own headstone, and a commission stone is not added to that unless that has deteriorated.

For many years, that wasn't done at all, but in recent years, the commission have addressed this.

But on the walk up to sit on that little wooden bench and sit there and pause and think for a while, I'd passed the grave of Fanny Amelia Kennard of the Women's Royal Air Force, who died on the 29th of March 1919, aged 21.

Yes.

It wasn't until the First World War and Lutyens, and all the War Graves Commission and whatever, that they started to bury them, even if they didn't know who they were, and put up a tombstone.

That's a brilliant answer.

Thank you so much.

He's since held senior roles with Standard Chartered Bank, IMF and Chatham House in Singapore, London and Washington.

Right now, among other things, he's a trustee at the Institute for Human Rights and Business and on the advisory panel for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Vasuki is the first guest we're having back to stir the pot with us.

And it's a timely return because Vasuki has just published his latest book, Emerged Markets, Global Economies, Better Half.

They had to fit certain criteria.

So this is Office of Australian War Grave Criteria, extended criteria beyond Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

And that may involve, you know, multiple amputees, prisoner of wars.

Now, Katrina and I, when we started our research at Lubb, which straight up we found, I don't know, 10 or 12 prisoners of war that were in unmarked graves.