[2] Following consultations between the Engineer-in-Chief of the BEF, Brigadier George Fowke, and the mining specialist John Norton-Griffiths, the War Office formally approved the tunnelling company scheme on 19 February 1915.

[4] To make the tunnels safer and quicker to deploy, the British Army enlisted experienced coal miners, many outside their nominal recruitment policy.

These companies each comprised 5 officers and 269 sappers; they were aided by additional infantrymen who were temporarily attached to the tunnellers as required, which almost doubled their numbers.

[2] The success of the first tunnelling companies formed under Norton-Griffiths' command led to mining being made a separate branch of the Engineer-in-Chief's office under Major-General S.R.

The Germans exploded mines under the area known as The Mound just south-east of St Eloi in March 1915 and in the ensuing fighting the British suffered some 500 casualties.

[9] Between November 1915 and August 1917, the unit was stationed in the Railway Wood-Hooge-Armagh Wood area of the Ypres Salient,[1] where it was engaged in mining activities against the Germans on the Bellewaerde Ridge near Zillebeke.

The area at Hooge where the old Ypres-Roeselare railway crossed the Ypres-Menen road belonged to one of the easternmost sectors of the salient and was the site of intense and sustained fighting between German and Allied forces for much of the war.

Major S. H. Cowan, commanding officer of 175th Tunnelling Company, described the situation at Hooge in June 1915: "There is some urgent [mining] work to be done at once in a village on a main road east of Ypres.

It is a significant fact that all their recent attacks round Ypres have been directed on hill tops and have rested content on the same, without trying really hard to advance down the slopes towards us.

[10] Aerial photographs clearly show the proliferation of mine warfare in the Railway Wood sector during the unit's presence there, with craters lying almost exclusively in no man's land between the British and German trenches.

In June 1916 the Germans blew three charges close to 175th Tunnelling Company's crater of July 1915, planned as part of a surprise offensive which captured the ruins of Hooge village as well as the neighbouring Observatory Ridge and Sanctuary Wood - the only high ground on British hands in the whole of the Ypres Salient.

[16][17] The officer mentioned on the Cross of Sacrifice at RE Grave, Railway Wood was Second Lieutenant Charles Geoffrey Boothby (13 December 1894 – 28 April 1916), service number 147252, from near Birmingham.

They exchanged love letters over a period of 18 months until Boothby was reported missing in action in spring 1916, having been blown up by a German mine at Railway Wood on the Bellewaerde Ridge near Ypres.

The letter exchange between Boothby and Ainscow survived the war and was eventually published by Edith's son, University of Oxford professor Arthur Stockwin, in 2005.