Amid the stone grave markers and memorials which flank the cloister of Salisbury Cathedral are seven wooden crosses.
Towards the end of the First World War, The War Graves Commission began to replace the wooden markers, which soldiers had fashioned for the graves of their comrades, with permanent memorials of Portland stone. The original battlefield crosses were offered to the fallen soldiers’ next of kin. But since few people could afford the cost of collecting or shipping the crosses home the majority were burned and the ashes scattered over the burial grounds. The crosses in Salisbury Cathedral were amongst the 10,000 which were returned from the front.
Lt. JPM Carpenter,
Son of the Archdeacon of Sarum, was killed
Near Flers at the Battle of the Somme and
Was afterwards moved to his grave in
Bullecourt cemetery.
Captn. Charles Basil Mortimer Hodgson
3rd Queens Royal West Surrey Regt.
Died in hospital in Cairo April 1st. 1918
Of wounds received in Palestine.
Husband of Mary Alice Carpenter,
Daughter of the Archdeacon of Sarum
Marked the grave in Port Said cemetery of
Cap. Christopher Ken Merewether
Who died in hospital at Port Said Dec. 20th 1917
Of wounds received in action in Palestine
Aged 27
Only child of Canon Wyndham AS Merewether
Colonel Frank A Symons C.M.G
D.S.O: M-B: Army Medical Service
Who was killed in action at Athies April 30th 1917
Buried in Saint Nicholas cemetery, Arras, May 1st
In Belgium, of
No. 318 Gnr. GAK Buskin
1st. Field Artillery Brigade
Australian Imperial Force
Killed in action 3rd November 1917
Military cemetery, Caudry, France of
Capt. Guy Dodgson, Herts. Regt., who died
Of wounds in casualty station, Nov. 14th. 1918
Youngest son of the late Henley F Hodgson
And Mrs. Hamilton Fulton
This cross is a replica of the battlefield cross which marked the spot where Toby fell at
CONTALMAISON – BATTLE OF THE SOMME
10 July 1916
The original cross was stolen from these cloisters in 2015
Typically, the crosses were entrusted to Cathedrals and parish churches. There are collections at Melton Old Church in Suffolk* and at Saint Peter and Paul, Deddington in Oxfordshire**. In Cheltenham two hundred and thirty crosses were placed in Soldiers Corner in the Bouncers Lane cemetery, where, one hundred years on, 90% of them had disintegrated. The remaining twenty-three were rescued and a small museum opened to house them in a former gravediggers’ hut in 2024. ***
At Saint Andrews, Mells in Somerset, a very grand memorial to Edward Horner incorporates his cross into a plinth designed by Lutyens bearing a bronze sculpture conceived by Munnings.
With characteristic sensitivity, Fabian Ware, founder of the War Graves Commission, brought home a cross which had marked the grave of “an unknown British soldier” and gifted it to his parish church at Amberley in Gloucestershire.
At first, I mistook the wooden marker housed in St. Bartholomew’s church at Orford Ness in Suffolk for another of the battlefield crosses, but then I read the inscription,
in
Gott
P.O.W.
Josef Obert
Josef Obert was one of thirteen German Prisoners of War in Orford who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 less than three weeks after the Armistice. He was buried in the churchyard with the other POWs and in the 1960s they were re-interred when the Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery was established in Staffordshire.
In 2014 Obert’s original grave marker was found in the sexton’s shed and placed on the church wall. A biographical note records that he was born in 1891, the illegitimate child of Anna Obert, and was present at Verdun and the Somme before being listed as missing in combat. He was unmarried and had no children. The bleak little notice and Obert’s wooden cross record the same tragedy as the British crosses: the heartache of a life barely begun, curtailed by a too early death.
* https://meltonoldchurch.co.uk >world-war-1-crosses
** https://www.deddingtonhistory.uk >world wars
*** https://cheltenham-battlefield-crosses.org
See also https://thereturned.co.uk Returned from the Front is a project seeking to provide a definitive list of all extant World War I crosses and grave markers, their location and information about those whose graves they marked.