Search This Blog

Showing posts with label Cartmel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cartmel. Show all posts

Tuesday, 14 July 2009

Beattie's flag

Spent today in Grange as I do every Tuesday & took a look around the charity shops - as one does. The top hospice shop always has quite a number of books so I bought a recent biography of Nelson for a few quid. I also bought a volume of little value that my father used to have - The Story of 25 Eventful Years in pictures -

It is a pictorial record of the first 25 years of the reign of George V and Queen Mary, from 1910 to 1935, & describes the vast changes wrought in Britain and the world in these years. Quite a few pages are dedicated to the armistice of 1918 & the peace celebrations of 1919. One of the pictures, a double page spread, shows a section of the Peace March of July 19, 1919. On this day thousands of troops marched past Lutyens' temporary Cenotaph in Whitehall led by many of the wartime leaders.

The Royal Navy were represented by David Beatty who as a Rear Admiral had famously led the First Battle Cruiser Squadron at Jutland and, after two of his ships blew up, uttered the immortal words,

'there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today'


In September 1919 Beatty was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet and elevated to the Peerage as 1st Earl Beatty, Viscount Borodale and Baron Beatty of the North Sea and Brooksby. Not bad!

Beatty can be seen on the pic below, he's the one in the centre leading the main body of matelots some paces behind the lad carrying the flag.

The lad with the flag was midshipman J B Somerset, reputedly related the the Cavendish family of Holker. The union flag he carries is now in the Parish church at Cark, near Cartmel.

Rather sadly relegated to a corner, above the bookstall, at the back of the nave.

A chap who was locking up the church as I arrived tells me that a few years ago one of the churchwardens decided the flag was a bit mucky after some eighty years of hanging there, so he took it home and put it in his washing machine! No damage seems to have done.

Tuesday, 17 March 2009

Cartmel Fell

There are some truly wonderful secrets in the English Lake District. A particularly magical spot is the isolated church of St Anthony on Cartmel Fell. I took a new found friend there on Saturday - she wanted to visit a 'special place'! Great to meet an enthusiast!



Standing in the woods above the Winster valley the church was built in 1504 as a chapel of ease within the greater parish of Cartmel Priory. It has some wonderful fragments of 15th century glass, taken from the priory at the time of the dissolution, and two private pews, the older probably constructed from a Rood Screen originally either here or at the Priory. The wooden panels retain traces of paint from what were probably paintings of saints, scraped off by iconoclasts around the time of the Commonwealth.

I am almost as fascinated by surviving pre-reformation church furniture and decoration as I am by war memorials!

At the entrance to the church the visitor passes through a lych gate into the churchyard. Just beyond this is a large standing stone on a base constructed of local slate. The base may be older, I'm not sure. Both lych gate and stone comprise the parish war memorial.

They were designed by Curwen, an architect of Kendal & Heversham.

The names on the memorial include those of Joseph Holt and William Higgin Birkett both of whose names appear on Winster's memorial and both of whom have imposing plaques in that delightful little church.


There are eleven names from the Great War, including three by the name of Willan, and two guys from the second war. Firstly Flt Lt (Pilot) Richard Arthur Branson, RAFVR, of Kents Bank; died August 31 1945, aged 27 and buried in Thorpe Cemetery, Melton Mowbray. Secondly Guardsman James Albert Brocklebank of Windermere; 6th Bn Grenadier Guards, KIA North Africa, May Day 1943 aged 22 and buried at Enfidaville, Tunisia.

Tuesday, 11 November 2008

Cartmel Valley Memorials

Just had an email from Howard Martin. His website on the War Memorials of the Cartmel Valley is up at running @ http://members.lycos.co.uk/aitch11/
Apart from anything else it has, or soon will have, some great pics of the valley