Waterloo veteran perhaps?

If the recording of 'war memorials' is interpreted quite loosely, as appears to be the policy of the UKNIWM, then some interesting stories emerge.

On the south wall of the chancel at Urswick parish church, facing the graveyard, is an old and rather weathered neo-classical funereal monument. The inscription on the central panel, inscribed in fine copper-plate, reads;

The non-commissioned Officers and Privates of the Furness Cuirassiers erected this monument in the memory of THOMAS GARDNER their Drill Sergeant formerly of the first Regiment of Life Guards who was killed by a fall from his Horse on the 21st Day of April 1821 in the 32nd Year of his Age

After the French Revolutionary wars and the defeat of Napoleon the armed forces were disbanded. Many of the veterans, particularly officers, subsequently raised units of volunteers. One such was the Furness Troop of Yeomanry known as The Furness Cuirassiers. They were raised at Ulverston on 22nd September 1819 under the command of Captain Thomas Richard G. Braddyll, formerly Captain and Lieut. Colonel in the Coldstream Guards. On 15th May 1828 the troop amalgamated with other local volunteer units to become the Lancashire Yeomanry Cavalry.

Given his age and the date of his death it is reasonable to assume that he may have fought in the Peninsula or at Waterloo. However, various early nineteenth century rolls, available online, do not include a Thomas Gardner serving with the Life Guards during the Napoleonic wars so any certainty about his service history must reamain unresolved.

'Once we were young...'

As I dig around, researching these Lakeland memorials I am sometimes confronted with their purpose in a very immediate way.

Before Christmas I was privileged to receive a couple of communications from the late Canon Gervaise Markham of Morland, near Penrith. During the last war he was a padre with the Eighth Army in North Africa, Italy and Northwest Europe. It was good to receive his encouragement with my endeavours, but comments he made about burying many friends was a salutory reminder of why memorials exist. They are about real people - sons and brothers, fathers & husbands, sisters and daughters.

A couple of years ago I came across this battered postcard tucked away in a box, long forgotten in a damp cellar. It shows a group of Furness & Cartmel Territorials of the 1/4th Bn, Kings Own Royal Lancasters at Denbigh camp in August 1913, just a year before the outbreak of war. Most of these these guys are so young and yet, within a few years, some would be dead, others maimed in body & mind.


The same box produced the photo below. An associated bit of writing describes them as the Furness 'Old' Contemptables at Ulverston Drill Hall on Wednesday September 27, 1978 for a Diamond Jubilee celebration of the events of 1918. A bit of doggerel accompanies it,

No thought of Glory to be won
There was this duty to be done
And they did it
'Bless them All'

The youngest of these men would be about 78. Many wear the '14-15 star, so were probably 1/4 Kings Own men, some wear WW2 medals showing a life of service. One or two may well be on the earlier picture. Such is the stuff of history.

I have no name for any of these old soldiers. Do you?

New Hutton - a lost memorial

After reading obituaries of fallen soldiers and press reports of unveilings from 1914 through into the 1920s it becomes clear that appreciable numbers of rolls of honour and sometimes even more substantial memorials have disappeared over the years. Indeed, they continue to be lost. This leaves a gap in our understanding of styles and purpose. But occasionally a stroke of luck allows the gap to be filled.

New Hutton's principal Great War memorial is the lych gate that stands on the main road at the bottom of the path leading to the churchyard. Stone panels built into the structure bear the dedication and the names of the village dead.

Within the church there is also a small wooden cross with three name brasses which was almost certainly served as the community's memorial prior to the erection of the lych gate.

However, much more interesting to me is a small dedication brass on a small and quite modern organ indicating that a predecessor was gifted ..in grateful memory of those who fought in the Great War.. by John & Helen Rankin of 'Hill Top' in June 1920. I was intrigued by this but resigned to the probability that it would not prove possible to find an image of this earlier instrument. Then a couple of weeks ago I discovered an old postcard showing the interior of the church decorated for a harvest festival and by the altar an imposing organ.

Is this the one presented to the church by the Rankins or an even earlier one? Local knowledge is required!

I believe that there is also a roll in the village hall which I have not yet seen, so again, local knowledge please!

Clifton - The last battle on English soil

Check out this posting for more pics.

War has been endemic in the history of Cumbria; the blood of many people has flowed into its soil not least as a consequence of its being the borderlands between two sovereign nations.

A reminder of the turbulent politics of the 17th & 18th centuries that followed the Union of the two Crowns is to be found in St Cuthbert's churchyard, Clifton, south of Penrith where a memorial commemorates the dead of Bland's Regiment who were killed here on the occasion of the skirmish at Clifton, fought on the afternoon and evening of December 18, 1745. The stone resembling a standard CWGC headstone was placed here in 2004 by The Queen's Royal Hussars, the lineal regimental descendants of Bland's Regiment.

The skirmish at Clifton, which is commonly celebrated as the last battle fought on English soil, took place between a rearguard of Prince Charles Edward Stewart's Jacobite army as they retreated from Derby and elements of the Duke of Cumberland's Hanoverian forces that were in pursuit. During the action about a hundred government soldiers were wounded and killed, ten of whom lie beneath this memorial. Twelve Jacobites, Scots Clansmen, were also killed and a Captain Hamilton captured 'much wounded'. The dead are buried beneath The Rebel Tree on the southern edge of the village.

At the foot of the tree a brass plate mounted on a stone reads,

Here lie buried the men of the army of
Prince Charles who fell at Clifton Moor 18 December 1745

A footnote makes clear that the plaque and presumably the stone were placed here by Georgina & Wilbert Goodchild in 1936. But who were they? A Wilbert Goodchild was a celebrated mineralogist in the mid years of the 20th century - was he a closet Jacobite?

The tree remains as a site of pilgrimage for Scots, there are always posies of flowers & heather at the foot of the memorial. In 2006 a group of patriots cleared up the site, rebuilt the fence & dedicated another memorial plaque - see this link for the full story.

Googling 'Battle of Clifton' will throw up numerous links describing events. A particularly interesting eyewitness account written by the Quaker,Thomas Savage of Clifton End Farm, can be found here. One of the better published accounts was that of the Chevalier Johnstone of c1820. This wonderful book contains a map of the battle.

It is rather confusing. In the book south is at the top so I have rotated it 180 degrees. In addition the distance between Penrith, Eamont Bridge and Clifton has been truncated. However, if you download the map and compare it to Google Earth the events can be traced on the modern landscape.

By coincidence the Rev. Robert Patten a former curate in Penrith & chaplain to General Forster in the rebellion of 1715 was buried in Clifton church in 1733. Forster commanded the Jacobite forces under the Earl of Derwentwater.

There are few reminders of the Jacobite wars in Cumbria apart from a variety of blue plaques commemorating lodging places of the Bonnie Prince or Butcher Cumberland. The mediaeval choir stalls in Carlisle Cathedral are quite heavily disfigured by crude carvings of symbols and initials. When I was a schoolboy in the town the verger at the time seemed undecided as to whether these were done by 16th century Reivers, Jacobite prisoners or by captured Royalist soldiers during the civil war. I don't know what present thinking is. In Lancaster Castle there are a number of long wooden staves that were apparently left in the town by retreating Highlanders some days before Clifton skirmish; poignant reminders of a forgotten war.

The transactions of the CWAAS for 2003 (Third Series, Vol III) includes a paper on the siege of Carlisle in the days following Clifton skirmish and the 2006 edition describes the events of the '15 in the county. Copies may still be available through the website. The Centre for North West Regional Studies @ Lancaster University have also produced an account of the Jacobites in the North West available thro' their website.

More Beattie Memorials

Just to be awkward and to make up a posting, here are three more memorials by Beattie of Carlisle. The top one is at Bewcastle Congregational Chapel, the central one at Crosscanonby and the lower one at Raughton Head.

As can be seen, my statement that martial emblems, of swords, rifles and helmets are a trademark of Beatties' work holds good for the first two but collapses on the third where the design reverts to a sort of composite funereal monument Celtic Crossness!

I think the first two are signed, certainly that at Raughton Head is. What these do show is the difficulty of ascribing a designer to a memorial simply on the grounds of style. Communities were pretty fussy in their requirements and the surviving committee minutes held in the various record offices in the county illustrate how pedantic some were in details of design, naming and placing and how matters of finance and local sensitivity set limits on ambition.

WG Collingwood made repeated visits to Ulverston with drawings that he was constantly required to revise on grounds of both cost and taste and there were months of argument about where the memorial should be placed.

At Haverthwaite and Lindal in Furness long and heartfelt discussions were held as to which names should be included or rejected, while at Kendal tremendous effort was put into making the list of names to be inscribed on the memorial's plaques as accurate as possible through the following up of every suggestion by the personal visit of an officer of the town council to friends and relatives.

I think it is self evident that monumental memorials such as those shown here are effectively funereal monuments. Designs very similar if not identical to these and simply lacking the iconography of war, are to be found in cemeteries the length and breadth of the county. Obvious really. Masons such as Beattie simply adapted stock designs and they were happily adopted as memorials because of their comforting familiarity as statements of remembrance.

Turner window, Armathwaite

What does and does not constitute a war memorial can be contentious. Some may also provide a mystery.

An example of both is this window in the parish church at Armathwaite created by A L Moore of London from a painting by Rubens.

It is dedicated to the memory of Lieutenant Charles Rushton Turner, 3rd Reserve Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. The CWGC register shows that he died on October 30, 1915, aged 40 (and incidentally described as 2nd Lt), at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley, Southampton from a Potts fracture sustained by falling off his horse while on parade. A Potts fracture is, in extreme cases, a compound fracture of the ankle, hardly fatal in itself. Is it thus probable that he actually died of septicaemia? A doctors opinion would be appreciated.

Given the accidental nature of the guy's death, can this still be considered a war memorial simply because he died in 1915? Many memorials contain names of men and women who died during or even after conflict from both accidental and natural causes. Those that were erected in the early 1920s commonly include victims of the post war influenza epidemic and there are other, later memorials commemorating people who died through all sorts of accidents, in many instances as civilians. It would thus seem churlish to discount Turner's memorial through a cruel accident of fate.

The mystery arises by the fact of Turner's name appearing on one of the panels of the Hollybrook Memorial, Southampton. These panels are reserved for the names of those primarily lost at sea in home waters who have no known grave. Earl Kitchener is among them. Why is Turner's name included when he died in hospital? Where was he buried? At Armathwaite? At sea? A mystery indeed.

And now for something completely different!

Every community in Russia has a memorial but they are are almost exclusively a creation of the Great Patriotic War, 1941 - 45, during which the Soviet empire suffered a loss beyond parallel. The war museum in Moscow displays books of remembrance listing in excess of 26 million names of those known to have died and that is considered by many to be an underestimate, the figure might be 32 million.
Although more millions died during the Great War they have not, until recently, been commemorated. The only memorials from that era are those such as the one shown here which lists the names of four men from the village that preceded the industrial sprawl of Elektrostal who died fighting in the Red Army during the civil war.

The small park surrounding this obelisk commemorates the dead of 1941/45 and is pretty much representative of small town memorials. It is dominated by a female figure representative perhaps of a universal mother, or Mother Russia. Close by is a plinth upon which, I believe, are inscribed the names of men and women from the town who became Heroes of the Soviet Union. In front of these are six stainless steel artillery shells that contain soil from the six major battlefields of the second world war; Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kursk, the Dnieper and Berlin. It is a convention to list the names of these and other sites of memory, such as Sebastopol, Vitebsk, Smolensk as part of a standard iconography.

The large letters above the steps read Pomnitye o nas - Remember Us -the universal sentiment of remembrance. The Red Star is also evident and since the collapse of the Soviet Union memorials such as this have had a small orthodox chapel added to one side. All memorials of any size have an eternal flame.

The vast numbers of dead preclude listing outside of the smallest villages. At Naginsk a community some miles from Elektrostal, numbers on the memorial describe a casualty rate of near to 50% from its total pre war populace. A staggering loss.

This vast conflict is still a major part of Russian consciousness. Kids go to summer school with the intent of disintering war dead from anonymous battlefield graves for re-burial. While there I visited a saturday market. Walking around I noticed a frail old man with a stick and a row of medals on his jacket. He was a veteran and it was rather moving to see the reverence with which people treated him, holding the crowds aside to facilitate his passage, softly greeting him and offering him tea.

Thanks for the translation Em x