Page 65 - Who Was Sapper Brown

Directions

The cemetery is sited on a steep rocky hillside on the left side of the B8 Troodos to Nicosia

road, about two kilometres north of Troodos Square. Its location can be visualised through
Google Earth via a direct link from The War Graves Photographic Project website.

A CWGC road sign on the opposite side of the road indicates the start of the track leading from the road

up to the cemetery. Cars should not be driven up the track. The cemetery entrance is 150 metres along
this track over an uneven surface followed by a short climb. There is a second access point to another

track further down the road beyond the cemetery. From December to April access to this cemetery is
often impossible, owing to heavy snowfall and the steep incline.
1

The Cemetery

Troodos Military Cemetery, the most isolated of all British military cemeteries in Cyprus, contains 74

graves, almost all of British servicemen and their dependants.2 The great majority of burials occurred in
the 20 years between 1879 and 1898, with a few thereafter up to 1951. The list further on in this chapter

shows 72 of the 74 names. There are three War Graves from the First World War and one from the Second
World War.

Troodos in Context

The first British soldiers to set foot on Cypriot soil, the men of the 42nd Royal Highland Regiment (the

Black Watch), had waded ashore in Larnaca Bay on Sunday 22 July 1878, ill-prepared in their red tunics
and English pattern woollen trousers for the sweltering heat. They sustained their first casualty that

same day, losing Sergeant Samuel McGaw VC to ‘heat apoplexy’ on the line of march to Chiflik Pasha,
the camp prepared for them by Madras and Bombay Engineers some three miles outside the town,

near Larnaca Salt Lake.3 Pretty soon, and throughout that hot summer of 1878, a quarter of Lieutenant

General Wolseley’s force was to be incapacitated at any one time through heat illness, brucellosis, malaria
or typhoid in particular, with many more soldiers succumbing (see the Rolls of Honour).

The susceptibility of the troops to heat and illness made the establishment of healthier summer quarters

in a cooler hill station location a matter of urgency. This was standard practice throughout the Empire,
especially in India. The uninhabited tree-clad summit of Mount Troodos, 6,000 feet above sea level, was

surveyed and selected for this purpose.

1 Location information quoted from Commonwealth War Graves Commission website www.cwgc.org
2 The attached cemetery plan and list of names is reproduced with the kind permission of Wing Commander Ken Pudney
RAF (retired), Commandant Troodos Garrison, from the original kept in the Garrison files. Original plan catalogued as R.E.

File 8/19/Plan M/8, compiled by P Phylactou and drawn by M Josephides, Drawing Number TRO 62, for AWO Episkopi. The
plan is dated as April 1940, but there are four dates listed after that. There were two more burials after this list was compiled,
the last (and 74th) burial being of Reverend John Caldwell Black, a Methodist minister who had been a missionary to Egypt

for 25 years, and who died in Troodos on 4 June 1951.
3 Morgan, Tabitha (2010), Sweet and Bitter Island: A History of the British in Cyprus, (London: I B Tauris), p. 4.

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