Tag Archives: ww1

Built during a time of war

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FROM THE OUTSIDE, the church of St Barnabas in Pitshanger Lane (Ealing) is not particularly attractive. Even though we visited it on a Sunday, it was locked up. However, we were fortunate to meet a lady, who had been in the church hall and happened to have the key to the church with her. Kindly, she unlocked the edifice, and we were able to enter. The church’s interior, unlike its exterior, is wonderful.

The church stands close to Brentham Garden Suburb, which was built largely between 1901 and 1915. I will write about the Suburb at a later date, but now I will concentrate on the church. Although the Suburb was built with a magnificent club house, there had been no plans to include a church. In 1907, a temporary church made from corrugated iron sheets, and dedicated to St Barnabas was constructed at the junction of Pitshanger Lane and Castlebar Park. Eventually, it was too small to accommodate its congregation in an area where plenty of housing was being constructed. For legal reasons, it was not possible to build a larger church on the site. So, in 1911 a larger plot was acquired at the corner of Pitshanger Lane and Denison Road (one of the streets within the Garden Suburb).

Ernest Shearman (1859-1939) was the architect chosen to build the larger St Barnabas Church, which can be seen today. After working in Buenos Aires and later at Sandringham, he moved to Winchester in 1907. From that year onwards, his work was mainly concerned with designing churches. According to a book by Hugh Mather about the centenary of the church of St Barnabas, all of Shearman’s churches:

“…are tall imposing buildings without spires, and their austere, simple architecture was designed so that elaborate furnishings and other adornments could be added subsequently …”

His churches represent “… almost the final flowering of the last phase of the Gothic Revival.”

All except one of his churches demonstrate Shearman’s fascination with rose windows and elaborate tracery. St Barnabas is a fine example of this.

The construction of the church began just before the start of WW1, in June 1914. It was completed in the middle of the war by June 1916, when it was consecrated.

The church has a spacious nave, which has a lovely timber ceiling. Although it was designed to reflect the heritage of the gothic era, the inside of the church feels almost contemporary. There is an enormous organ at the west end of the church. Made in 1851, it was made by the company of William Hill and  originally housed in St Jude’s Church in Southsea. It was moved to St Barnabas in 2011. Some of the pipes on the south side of the central tall organ pipes do not make sounds. They were added to the organ for purely aesthetic reasons. The current organ replaced an older, less reliable instrument, which was removed in 2010.

The apse is adorned by a large painting by James Clark (1857-1943), who was living in Bedford Park not far from the church when he created it. He was one of many artists residing in Bedford Park, which was an ancestor of the Garden Suburb movement. His painting in the apse depicts the three hierarchies of angels praising and adoring the Holy Trinity. It is a magnificent addition to the church.

As we did not want to delay the lady who opened the church for us, we did not have sufficient time to examine its interior in great detail, but it did demonstrate how wrong it was to, to rephrase a well-known saying, to judge a church by its cover.

Buried in Madeira

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IN CENTRAL SARAJEVO, there used to be a pair of footprints carved on the corner of a pavement where two roads met. I do not know whether these impressions, which I saw in the 1980s, still exist. They marked the spot where a young sharpshooter, Gavrilo Princip, took aim and assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in 1914. Had his aim not been so accurate, the last Emperor of Austria might not have been buried in a church high above the city of Funchal in Madeira.

Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary

Had Princip’s aim not been so good,  his victim, Franz Ferdinand, would have been successor to the imperial throne. With the Archduke eliminated, his nephew, Karl (1887-1922), succeeded Emperor Franz Joseph when he died in 1916.

Following the end of WW1 in 1918, Austria’s last Emperor, Karl, fled to Switzerland. After a couple of attempts to regain his throne,  the British exiled him and his wife to Madeira in 1921.

In 1922, Karl died of pneumonia.  He was interred in a chapel on the north side of the nave in the Igreja Nossa Senhora in the Monte district high above Funchal.

Plenty of tourist gawp at Karl’s simple tomb in the lovely church, which overlooks the city and the Atlantic Ocean far below.  I wonder whether Madeira would have been the final home of the Archduke had he not been so unlucky in Sarajevo.

Curiously, Karl was beatified in 2004. Equally strange was the British choice of a Portuguese island for Karl’s exile. After all, Napoleon Bonaparte was eventually exiled to a British possession: St Helena.

Honey for tea and death in Greece

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THE SHORT-LIVED POET Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) lived outside Cambridge in the nearby village of Grantchester, where he rented a room in The Old Vicarage between 1909 and 1912. In May of 1912, Brooke was sitting in the Café des Westens in Berlin and feeling nostalgic about his life in Grantchester. He put pen to paper and composed his poem “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.” Clearly fed up with Berlin, the poet begins the final verse of his poem with:

“God! I will pack, and take a train,        

And get me to England once again!       

For England’s the one land, I know,      

Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;                

And Cambridgeshire, of all England,     

The shire for Men who Understand;      

And of that district I prefer        

The lovely hamlet Grantchester…”

The final verse ends with the famous lines:

“The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet          

Stands the Church clock at ten to three?     

And is there honey still for tea?”

Inside the old pavilion at the Orchard in Grantchester

Having recently visited Grantchester, I can sympathise with Brooke’s desire to return to this charming village whose meadows run along the bank of the winding River Cam. The parish church of St Mary and St Andrew contains structures created as early as the 12th century, but most of the building dates from the 14th and 15th centuries. The west tower is mainly early 15th century. The clock on it no longer stands at ten to three, but it was stuck at that hour during the era when Brooke was in Grantchester.

The Orchard, which lies across the High Street from the church and between it and the meadows by the river, was planted in 1868. Before moving into the Old Vicarage, Brooke had lodged in a house in The Orchard. In 1897, a group of Cambridge University students asked Mrs Stevenson of Orchard House if they could enjoy tea under the blossoming trees. Thus began The Orchard Tea Gardens, now a popular haunt of students and tourists. Because of the unreliability of the English weather, a wooden pavilion was built at the end of the 19th century. In case of rain, tea drinkers could sit in the pavilion and enjoy their tea without getting soaked. Rupert Brooke was one of those, who used this place often. The Orchard’s website (www.theorchardteagarden.co.uk/history-new/) noted:

“In taking tea at the Orchard, you are joining an impressive group of luminaries including Rupert Brooke (poet), Virginia Woolf (author), Maynard Keynes (economist), Bertrand Russell (philosopher), Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosopher), Alan Turing (inventor of the computer), Ernest Rutherford (split the atom), Crick and Watson (discovered DNA), Stephen Hawking (theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author), Jocelyn Bell (discovered the first pulsar) and HRH Prince Charles (future King of England). There is a list of some of the famous people who have visited in a separate page on our web site, and there are photographs of many of them on the walls of the Rupert Brooke Room.”

The Rupert Brooke Room was constructed later than the pavilion. The famous visitors included several noteworthy Indians including Jawaharlal Nehru, Salman Rushdie, and Manmohan Singh. There is a whole host of other well-known personalities who have taken tea at The Orchard including a group of Cambridge students, who achieved notoriety for their involvement in espionage for the Soviet Union: Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby.

As for Brooke’s question “And is there honey still for tea?”, I forgot to ask during our far too brief visit to The Orchard.  Brooke was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve force at the outbreak of WWI. In early 1915, he set sail with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. In late February, he developed a serious infection following an insect bite and despite the efforts of surgeons on a French hospital ship moored near the Greek island of Skyros, he died. He was buried in an olive grove on the island. In the churchyard of St Mary and St Andrew, Brooke’s name in carved on the church’s simple war memorial.

A gothic church for the poor next to a canal

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SPIRAL RAMPS LEAD up to the Ha’penny Bridge, which allows pedestrians to cross the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal, where it runs between Delamere Terrace on one bank and Blomfield Road on the opposite one. A few yards west of the bridge and south of the waterway, there is a Victorian gothic church with a tall tower decorated with layers of red brickwork separated by layers of white masonry and topped with a white spire. It is St Mary Magdalene’s church.

The church was designed by George Edmund Street (1824-1881) and completed in 1878. It was built in what was then an area with poor quality housing, where several hard-up families lived crowded together under one roof. The parish in which it is located began life as an offshoot of All Saints in Margaret Street (near Oxford Circus). Like All Saints, St Mary Magdalene’s was established as an Anglo-Catholic church. Its website, grandjunction.org.uk, revealed that Anglo-Catholicism:

“… emphasises the Catholic heritage and identity of the Church of England. In the mid-nineteenth century Anglo-Catholicism was very controversial and provoked riots. Anglo-Catholic churches were often built in very poor areas, and their clergy believed that their services, full of light, colour, music and ritual, were likely to appeal to the poor.”

Like All Saints Margaret Street, the interior of St Mary Magdalene’s is a masterpiece of Victorian gothic extravaganza, a riot of colour. The nave has a magnificent painted ceiling which includes faces of various saints. This was painted by Daniel Bell, a Victorian artist. Sculptures of saints carved by Thomas Earp (1823-1893) look down on the nave. The floor of the vast nave is decoratively tiled. Street did not believe in fixed pews such as are found in many other Victorian churches and were rented out to parishioners to raise money. He believed in ‘free seating’, especially in a church like St Mary Magdelene’s that was built to serve the poor. The apse is unusual in that it is polygonal, reminiscent of apses that the widely travelled Street had seen in French and Flemish churches.

An unusual feature of this out of the ordinary church is that although the nave is flanked by a south and a north aisle, the latter is barely wide enough to accommodate one person, whereas the south one is almost as wide as the nave. The reason for the narrow north aisle was related to building regulations in force when the church was being constructed.

If it is open, and it was when I visited the church, it is worth entering the undercroft. This area beneath the church is flanked on its south side by a chapel that was undergoing restoration in February 2022. This is the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre created to commemorate the church’s founder and first vicar Fr Richard Temple West (1827-1893). Containing much decorative artwork and resembling a mediaeval chantry chapel, it was created by the architect Ninian Comper (1864-1960).

Outside the church, there is a WW1 memorial, added by Martin Travers in 1929. It is a gold-coloured crucifixion with a stone base on which are inscribed the Latin words “Infinitum est”, which is neither classical nor biblical; it means ‘It is not finished’, which are ominous words on a war memorial and are most portentous on a memorial to the first of (so far) two world wars.

Added on to the west end of the church, there is a modern extension, which houses a pleasant refreshment outlet called the Grand Junction Café. This is a good place to rest for a while after the excitement of seeing inside the spectacular church.

Two historic hotels by the sea

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MOST OF SOUTHEND in Essex was built after the Victorian era. The town on the estuary of the River Thames was and still is the nearest seaside resort to London. According to “Encyclopaedia Britannica”, Southend:

“…became fashionable as a seaside resort when visited by Princess Charlotte of Wales in 1801 and by her mother, Princess Caroline (wife of George IV), in 1803.”

Originally, Prittlewell, once a village north of Southend but now one of its suburbs, was the only settlement in the area now occupied by the modern town of Southend. South east of it on the coast was a tiny village called Leigh, which is now the much larger Leigh-on-Sea. The resort now known as Southend-on-Sea was developed at the end of the 18th century in Prittlewell’s  southern district of South End. Today, more than seven miles of buildings extend from Leigh-on-Sea through Southend to Shoeburyness.

The High Street, part of a road heading south from Prittlewell, runs from near Southend Victoria Station towards the sea, ending at the edge of a steep slope that falls to the seashore below. Various roads and a lift can be used to descend this incline. At the top of the slope, the High Street meets the eastern end of Royal Terrace. At the corner where these two streets meet, stands the Royal Hotel. Next to the hotel and lining Royal terrace, numbers 1 to 15 were built in the 1790s at the same time as the hotel. These were backed by the Royal Mews, a road still in existence. These constructions were part of a then new phase of development of the town, which was known as ‘New Town’.

The hotel, a fine Georgian edifice, opened with a grand ball in 1793.  Princess Caroline House that adjoins the hotel. number 1 the High Street, is a listed building, which looks as if it is contemporary with the hotel. The gardens on the slope in front of the hotel and the Terrace are known as The Shrubbery and were originally for the exclusive use of residents in the Terrace, but now they are open to the public. According to www.southend.gov.uk/historic-southend/history-southend/2:

“The Terrace was named “Royal” following visits by Princess Caroline, wife of the Prince Regent, in 1803 and for a short time attracted fashionable society. But difficult access from London by road and river discouraged further development until the construction of the railway in 1856. Royal Terrace is the only surviving Georgian terrace in Southend.”

Just east of the High Street and dominating the shoreline is the massive Park Inn Palace hotel, formerly the The Metropole. Built in 1901, this hotel that looks like an oversized liner had 200 rooms, a billiard room, and a splendid ballroom. During WW1, it was temporarily used as a Royal Naval Hospital. An online article (http://beyondthepoint.co.uk/first-world-war-southend-the-palace-hotel/) related:

“The Palace Hotel was built in 1901 and served great use in the war effort. Messrs Tolhurst; the owners of the hotel, were generous enough to offer the building up for free as a naval hospital for the rest of the war. Its glorious five star interior would’ve been quite bizarre with hospital beds placed amongst its lounges and ballrooms. It held possibly the world’s first purpose-made x-ray department. It recently underwent refurbishment by Park Inn to bring it back to its former glory.”

Both hotels overlook both the sea and Southend Pier. The older, Royal Hotel, is less of a blot on the landscape than the Palace hotel.

Young Poland

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WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896) was amongst other things a textile designer, printer, writer, and a Socialist. He was closely associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement which lasted from the late 19th century into the early 20th. This movement can be considered part of the wider Art Nouveau/Jugendstil movements on the mainland of Europe. Morris’s Socialist leanings were embodied in his desire to make beautiful objects available to people of all social classes. His creations were not purely aesthetic but also politically motivated.

As a child, Morris lived in a grand Georgian house in northeast London’s Walthamstow district between 1848 and 1856. This became the home of the publisher Edward Lloyd (1815-1890) between 1857 and 1885. Today, this building is the home of the William Morris Gallery, which has several rooms dedicated to exhibits illustrating the achievements of Morris and his movement. It also hosts temporary exhibitions. One of these, which we visited today on its final day, the 30th of January 2022, was aptly housed in a building dedicated to such an important person in the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Between 1795 and soon after WW1, Poland did not exist as an independent country; its territories were divided amongst the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian empires. Polish language and nationalistic aspirations were suppressed. Between about 1890 and 1918, the Young Poland movement flourished. It was a wide-ranging artistic development with many similarities to what was happening in the Arts and Crafts Movement that was initiated by John Ruskin and William Morris. Just as Morris was concerned that industrialisation and mass-production might lead to the loss of beauty associated with the works of traditional craftsmen; this was also the worry expressed by members of the Young Poland movement. Like Morris and his collaborators, Young Poland was also hoping to expose all social groups to objects of beauty. As a placard in the exhibition explains:

“Like William Morris, Young Poland makers believed in cultural democracy: that everyone had a right to beauty in daily life; the spiritual benefits of handiwork; and the equal value of all the arts irrespective of materials or techniques used.”

The Young Poland movement had another motive in addition to making beauty available for all. Many of their creations illustrated and celebrated aspects of Polish tradition and national pride. It was not only an artistic movement but a fairly subtle way of expressing the desire for independence of the Polish people and Roman Catholicism during a time when more overt nationalistic expressiveness would have attracted adverse reactions from the invaders, who were then dominating the Poles.

The exhibition was large enough to be spread over several rooms. The exhibits, most of which came from collections in Poland,  are stylistically similar to what was produced in the British Arts and Crafts Movement are beautiful as well as being typically Polish in subject matter. The artists and the various subdivisions of the Young Poland movement are summarised in the gallery’s website (https://youngpolandartsandcrafts.org.uk/exhibition/).  One of the many works, which I liked and that illustrates the nationalist sentiments of Young Poland, was a painting, “Dawn at the Foot of Wawel Hill”, by Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907). He was, like Morris, a polymath. The picture depicts Wawel Hill in Krakow during the time when this area of the city was being used as a barracks by the Austrian occupiers. The picture is in muted drab colours except for one bright light on a lamppost. The glowing lamp represents the Poles’ eternal hope for independence, which was only achieved in 1918, 24 years after the painting was completed.

One room in the exhibition is dedicated to drawings and paintings by the playwright Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska (1891-1945), who died in Manchester (UK) having come to England from Poland in 1939. Although she would have been too young to have been a member of Young Poland, her rarely seen artworks were included, according to the gallery’s website, because:

“These bold and intimate watercolours feature fantastical and macabre elements inspired by Polish folk traditions.”

It was these traditions that also are reflected in the works by the Young Poland creators.

The exhibition was both fascinating and uplifting. I am glad we managed to see it and hope that it will be held again somewhere so that all of you reading this will not have to miss out on what was a wonderful experience.

Look, no hands

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WE VISITED TWO churches in Suffolk, and inside them we spotted three things that particularly interested us. The first church is in Cavendish, The Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin. Standing on a hill above the village, its construction dates from 1300 and was largely completed by 1485. Some restoration work was carried out in the 19th century. One of the two things that fascinated us in this church is affixed to the inside of the north wall. It is a bas-relief depicting the Crucifixion. It is a reredos of Flemmish make, created in the 16th century. It is framed in a Victorian surround designed by Ninian Comper (1864-1960) in 1895. The sculpted reredos was brought to the church from the private chapel of the hymn writer Athelstan Riley (1858-1945) in London, following his death.

Cavendish church

The other curiosity in this church, which has memorials to the philanthropists and local parishioners Baroness Sue Ryder and Baron Leonard Cheshire, is on a wall just behind the 19th century wooden pulpit within arm’s reach of the preacher. It is an hourglass, looking like a large egg-timer, which the priest could use to time his sermon. I had never seen such a thing in a church. Less curious but also fairly unusual are the 13 wooden crucifixes on the interior walls of the bell tower. These were made from wood salvaged from the Western Front during WW1 and each one commemorates one of the men from Cavendish who were killed in the conflict.

The other church we visited on our recent trip to Suffolk was St Mary in Stoke by Nayland, which was sometimes painted by John Constable (1776-1837), who was born nearby in East Bergholt. Built in Perpendicular Gothic style between 1300 and 1481 it is very majestic, like a small cathedral. The church is full of interesting monuments including many fine brasses. It was one of the funerary monuments that particularly intrigued us: the Lady Anne Windsor monument. Anne lived from about 1568 until 1615. A stone carving depicts her lying with her head on a pillow. At her feet, there is a carving of a kneeling man, Anne’s son. By her head, two carvings depict a pair of kneeling women, Anne’s daughters. Look closely at this pair and you will notice that their hands have been broken off. Their arms are merely amputated stumps. What is going on here?

Stoke by Nayland church

The answer is that in 1643, Parliamentary Commissioners visited the church in Stoke by Nayland and destroyed 100 religious images and 7 funerary items. Part of this over-zealous iconoclastic behaviour was the removal of the four hands of the two women on Lady Anne’s monument, as well as those of the recumbent figure of the deceased. All the hands of females on the monument were removed but those of the kneeling male figure were left untouched. Apparently, the female hands were removed because the Commissioners considered them to have been in “a superstitious attitude of prayer”, whatever that meant during the Reformation.

The three items I have described are but a few of the things worth seeing in the two churches. I have chosen to describe them because I have not seen such things in the many other parish churches I have visited in England.

In the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi

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RECENTLY, I WALKED in Mahatma Gandhi’s footsteps, neither in India nor in South Africa nor in London, but in southeast England.

I am sure that many years ago, at least once, I travelled by ferry across the English Channel from Folkestone in Kent to a port in France. Whether I was travelling by car or by train I cannot recall. Had I been travelling by rail I feel sure that I would have remembered the pier at Folkestone, but I cannot now recall it. If I reached the ferry by train, it would have had to have been before 2001, when the last ferry sailed from Folkestone.

The first ferry service from Folkestone to Boulogne began in 1843 (https://folkestoneharbourarm.co.uk/history/the-harbour-in-the-19th-century/). Passengers reached the boat from the mainline railway station by local transport. In 1847, a long viaduct was constructed to take a steeply inclined mile long branch line from the main line, which was 111 feet above sea level, to the shoreline. This track crossed the viaduct and a swing bridge, which still exist and separate the Inner harbour from the Outer Harbour. At the seashore, the track ran onto a newly constructed pier, The Harbour Arm, from which passengers and freight could be embarked and disembarked. The pier, which was only fully completed in 1904, had a station, a customs house, and warehousing facilities.

During WW1, the Harbour Arm played an important role in the conveyance of military personnel and materials between war-torn Europe and the UK. In December 1915, the famous spy Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (‘Mata Hari’; 1876-1917) was prevented from boarding a vessel at Folestone bound for France by Captain S Dillon of the Secret Intelligence Service. Another famous person, of far greater historical significance than Mata Hari, stepped of a vessel, the SS Biarritz, onto the Harbour Arm on the 12th of September 1931. This passenger was a Gujarati, the only member of the Indian National Congress, Mohandas K Gandhi (1869-1948), going to London to attend the Round Table Conference. A picture taken at the time (www.alamy.com/mahatma-gandhi-alighting-at-folkestone-kent-england-united-kingdom-uk-12-september-1931-old-vintage-1900s-picture-image346793736.html) shows him, dressed in white robes and a dhoti, stepping along a gangplank. The curved platform of the station on the pier, which still exists, is clearly visible in the picture. He is shown walking towards a group of policemen and reporters, some of whom are holding unfurled umbrellas. His arrival at Folkestone on a rainy day is also recorded in a short but amusingly commentated newsreel film (https://youtu.be/P6njRwz_dMw), which also illustrates the rapturous reception he received in the streets of London.

Far more recently, another arrival at Folkestone has hit the headlines. On the 19th of October 2021, a large puppet called Little Amal (‘amal’ meaning ‘hope’ in Arabic), over ten feet in height, first made its appearance in the UK in Folkestone. Little Amal has been carried on foot all the way across Europe from Turkey (www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/the-walk-one-little-girl-one-big-hope/) as part of an exercise to raise the public awareness of the plights of refugee children fleeing their native lands. On British soil, she plans to tour the country for a while. Little Amal did not arrive, as Gandhi did, on a cross-channel ferry bound for Folkestone, but she did make her first an appearance on the Harbour Arm (www.kentonline.co.uk/folkestone/news/little-amal-coming-to-town-255932/). She was greeted by the actor Jude Law.

Folkestone harbour was heavily bombed during WW2 and then the pier was repaired after the war ended. Passenger services to France resumed in 1946, but limitations of the harbour’s depth, which prevented the docking of larger ferries, and the development of roll, on roll-off ports elsewhere, led to Folkestone’s gradual decline as a port. These factors and the completion of the nearby Channel Tunnel resulted in the ending of Folkestone’s life as a passenger port by 2000. After this date, the Harbour Arm and its buildings fell into decline and became dilapidated.

In 2014, the Department of Transport closed the railway line ad the facilities on the Harbour Arm. The following year, it was acquired by the Folkestone Harbour & Seafront Development Company (www.folkestoneseafront.com/). This organisation has tastefully restored the Harbour Arm and its buildings as well as the viaduct leading to it across the water. The rails on the viaduct have been preserved but submerged in the walkway in such a way that their top surfaces can be seen. The sinuous platforms and their canopies have been repaired, as have the signal box (now a café) and the old Customs House. Beyond the station, the pier runs out to sea towards a lighthouse. All along the pier, there are several eateries. Also, there is an artwork by Antony Gormley.  What was once a busy transport hub has now become a delightful leisure facility, which along with Folkestone’s transformation as an artistic ‘creative hub’ has turned the town into a place well worth visiting, a far cry from what it was when Gandhi set foot on its pier. My wife and I wondered whether Little Amal, who is quite tall, will have as much influence on the future of the world as did the short man from India, who arrived in his dhoti at Folkestone in 1931.

I am pleased to have walked where Gandhi once stepped in Folkestone because I have also followed in his footsteps in various places in India including his birthplace Porbandar in Gujarat, Rajkot, Bhavnagar, Bombay, Madras, and Bangalore. In London, I have often walked by Friends House on Euston Road, passing the very door through which he left the building to greet his admirers back in 1931. In all these places, there are ample monuments and other reminders of the Great Soul (the Mahatma), but, as far as I know, Folkestone is yet to materially commemorate his brief presence there.

From Brussels to Norwich

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LIKE FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, Edith Cavell (1865-1915) was a heroine of the nursing profession. In fact, Edith, who was born in the county of Norfolk, was martyred because of her compassion and goodwill.

Recently, we spent four nights at an excellent bed and breakfast place in Norfolk. It is located in the village of Swardeston, which is only 4.7 miles southeast of Norwich Cathedral. After leaving our accommodation in Swardeston, we spent several hours in central Norwich. At least one hour of our visit to the city was taken up by exploring the interior and exterior of the cathedral. We attended part of a Sunday service, which was held in the part of the church east of the nave. The cathedral’s choir sounded magnificent. The reason the congregation was not in the nave is that part of the cathedral is currently being used to display ‘Dippy the Dinosaur’ from London’s Natural History Museum. On Sundays, Dippy is allowed a day’s rest from being gawped at by crowds of visitors, so we did not get to see this prehistoric skeletal attraction, apart from a short section of its backbone, which could be glimpsed through the window of a locked door leading from the magnificent cloisters to the nave. You might be beginning to wonder why I began this piece by telling you a little about Edith Cavell. Well, now I will tell you more.

Grave of Edith Cavell next to Norwich Cathedral

After the service and a wander around the cloisters and the east half of the cathedral, we walked around to the outside of the southeast corner of the building, where we were told that we would find the burial place of Edith Cavell. The original gravestone surmounted by a cross stands close to a newer monument, which does not bear a cross, but resembles the kind of gravestones often found in Commonwealth war cemeteries but has a circular inscription that reads: “ECOLE BELGE D’INFIRMIERES DIPLOMEES”. While we were looking at these two memorials, we chatted with a lady who was passing by. When we asked her why Edith Cavell was buried in Norwich, she told us that the nurse had been born in the village where we had been staying, Swardeston. When she was born, her father was the vicar of the village’s church, which we would have visited had we known about its connection to the famous nurse.

Close to the cathedral, next to the western wall of the Cathedral Close, there is yet another monument to Cavell. A bronze bust of Cavell tops a rectangular based column with a bas-relief showing a soldier attaching a wreath to the monument. Erected in 1918, the bust’s sculptor was Henry Pegram (www.racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=289), who lived from 1862 to 1937. The monument was commissioned by the physician John Gordon Gordon-Munn (1863-1949), who was Mayor of Norwich between 1914 and 1915.

After finishing school, Edith Cavell first became a governess, including for a family in Brussels. Then, after caring for her ailing father, she trained to become a nurse. She worked in various English hospitals until 1907 when she was recruited by Antoine Depage to become the matron of a recently opened nursing school in Brussels, L’École Belge d’Infirmières Diplômées. This helps explain the inscription on the newer of the two memorials next to the cathedral.

When WW1 broke out, Edith was visiting her widowed mother in Norfolk. The Red Cross took over her clinic and the nursing school, to which she returned after seeing her mother. It was in Brussels, after it had been occupied by the Germans, that she began helping British soldiers to escape from German-occupied Belgium to then neutral Holland. Harbouring and helping soldiers who were in armies fighting the Germans was against German military law. In August 1915, after being betrayed by a collaborator, she was arrested by the Germans, tried at a court-marshal, and found guilty of aiding a hostile power. She was executed by firing squad at Schaerbeek, a district of Brussels.

Cavell was first buried next to St Gilles prison in Brussels. Then in 1919, her body was shipped to England. At first, it lay in state on Dover pier for one night before it was transferred by train to London, where there was a state funeral in Westminster Abbey.  On the 19th of May 1919, Edith was buried at the spot next to Norwich Cathedral, where she ‘rests’ now.

Next time that we are in Norfolk, we will try to visit the church in Swardeston, where Edith’s father officiated. As the bed and breakfast accommodation was so excellent in Swardeston and we fell in love with Norwich, I hope it will not be long before we return to Norwich and its environs.

PS: there is a large memorial to Edith Cavell in London, near the south end of St Martins Lane and just north of St Martin-in-the-Fields church.

A viaduct in Cornwall and a man who died for his country

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THE SMALL CORNISH village of Luxulyan has a fine old parish church, which is dedicated to Saints Ciricius and Julitta, both of whom are new to me. This edifice was built in the 15th century and restored in the 19th (https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1158407). The northern aisle of the church was filled with used books for sale when we visited it.  A weathered Cornish cross stands close to the west end of the church. During the 19th century, this was brought to its present location from Three Stiles (near Consence). The church and its churchyard, along with the tiny village are charming, but what caught my eye and raised my curiosity was a building bearing the name ‘Captain TC Agar-Robartes Memorial.’

Treffry Viaduct near Luxulyan in Cornwall

The name Agar-Robartes intrigued me. My interest in it increased when I saw a small stone memorial near the River Fowey in Lostwithiel. It bore the words:

“Royal British Legion, Lostwithiel Branch, 1932-1997. Opened by Lady Robartes.”

Things became clearer after visiting the magnificent Lanhydrock House, originally constructed in the 17th century, and reconstructed quite faithfully after a huge fire in 1881. The house was created by John Robartes (1606-1685), 2nd Baron Robartes of Truro, 1st Viscount of Bodmin, and 1st Earl of Radnor. One of his many descendants, Anna Maria Hunt (1771-1861) married Charles Bagenal-Agar (1769-1811). One of their three sons, Thomas James Agar-Robartes (1808-1882), assumed the surname ‘Robartes’ in 1822 and tacked it on to his Agar surname. One of his ten grandchildren was Thomas Charles Reginald Agar-Robartes (1880-1915), the ‘TCR Agar-Robartes’, whose name is on the building in Luxulyan.

Thomas was educated at Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford. He was elected to represent the South-East Cornwall constituency as its MP in 1906. However, he was unseated a month after the election because of infringing some electoral regulations. He had been found guilty of bribery and other offences. Nevertheless, he was re-elected in 1908. His election campaign was based on support of free trade and reform of temperance laws. In August 1914, Thomas signed up as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Bucks Hussars, and then in 1915, wanting to see action on the battlefront, he left for France as an officer in the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards. In June 1915, he was promoted to become a captain. During the Battle of Loos in September 1915, he was shot in no-mans-land and never recovered.

The building, a working man’s institute and reading room in Luxulyan, which bears Thomas’s name, was first conceived in 1913, but only began to be used as such in 1924, when the edifice was completed. Naming it after Thomas is explained on a website page about the building (www.luxulyanpc.co.uk/Luxulyan_Memorial_Institute_32056.aspx):
“ Tragically, as we know, young Tommy Robartes of Lanhydrock died after receiving wounds rescuing a comrade from one of those fields of battle. He had been well known and liked in the village, often coming to visit, accompanying the land agent dealing with tenants. The village picked up its interrupted thoughts on the Institute and Reading Room idea; whether the idea of a Memorial to Tommy, or just asking the Lanhydrock estate for a piece of land came first, is not clear, but it was agreed that a piece of land from the estate for a Memorial Institute was acceptable to all.”

Having already offered £50 towards building the Memorial institute, Dr Nathaniel T Coulson then offered a further £100 on condition that Thomas Agar-Robartes’s name was on the hall. Dr Coulson, who is described in the website, interested me because of his profession:

“He was born in Penzance in April 1853, abandoned by his drunken father at the age of 10 years and bound over to the farmer at Penquite Farm, Lostwithiel. He then spent some years in the British Navy and first arrived in San Francisco in 1875. For a while he worked for a stock-broking firm and wrote for several daily newspapers. In 1884 at the age of 30, he became a student at the dental department of the University of California, where he graduated after two years, receiving his degree as a Doctor of Dental Surgery. He was a member of several fraternal organisations, and generous with donations to many worthy causes. Among others in England, he helped finance the establishment of Coulson Park, Lostwithiel, in 1907. He travelled back here on several occasions, also visiting India after his retirement…”

So, that explains the hall that we saw in Luxulyan. I am not at all sure which ‘Lady Robartes’ is the one whose name appears on the British Legion monument in Lostwithiel, which bears the words “Opened by Lady Robartes”. If a Lady Robartes opened the branch in 1932, who was she? Only one of Thomas’s brothers married, Arthur (1887-1974). His wife, Patience Mary Basset, whom he married in 1920 might have been the ‘Lady Robartes’. Alternatively, she might have been one of Thomas’s sisters: Mary Vere (1879-1946) or Julia (1880-1969) or Edith (1888-1965) or Constance (1890-1936). If on the other hand the words refer to the inauguration of the monument in 1997, then I cannot offer any suggestions.

Luxulyan is worth visiting not only to see the things I have already mentioned, but also the impressive, massive, granite combined aqueduct and viaduct near to the village. It carries water and a railway track over the River Par. Known as the Treffry Viaduct, it was completed in 1844 and designed by the engineer and mining entrepreneur Joseph Treffry (1782-1850).

Until we visited Luxulyan, I had never heard of the Agar-Robartes family. Once again, visiting Cornwall has resulted in finding places and persons of great interest. The more I see, the more I want to know.