According to local tradition, the first cuckoo to return from Africa will sing from the Celtic Cross in Saint Brynach’s churchyard at Nevern in Pembrokeshire every 7 April. Its song, on the feast day of Saint Brynach, heralds the arrival of Spring.
Brynach was an evangelist from Ireland who, in the sixth century, made the Peregrinatio Pro Amore Christi, travelling the coasts of England and Wales establishing small Celtic monasteries. By the time the Celtic Cross was erected in the tenth century thousands of pilgrims were visiting Nevern on the Pilgrim Way to St. David’s, and numbers increased when in the twelfth century Pope Calixtus II declared three pilgrimages to St. David’s the equivalent of one to Jerusalem. But a fallow period was to follow at the Reformation when the monastery and its church fell into disrepair. The church was restored during the Methodist Revival of the 1730s.
The Celtic Cross, Saint Brynach’s Church, Nevern
But while my friends were examining the knotwork and ringwork carvings on the cross, I was more interested in the seven-hundred-year-old yew trees which line the path to the church, and especially in the bleeding yew. For one of the trees produces a blood-red sticky resin. Thin legends have grown up around this phenomenon: the tree will bleed until Nevern Castle, abandoned in 1179, is again occupied by a Welshman; a monk, hanged from the tree for a crime he did not commit, vowed that it would bleed for eternity. More prosaically the release of sap is normal if a yew has been damaged and usually it will heal itself. But this sap is a very red and blood like sap, and the tree shows no sign of healing.
Many explanations have been offered for the common occurrence of ancient yews in the churchyards of England and Wales. My favourite comes from the seventeenth century astrologer, botanist and translator of mystic texts, Robert Turner, who claimed they were planted to protect and purify the dead, absorbing the gases from decomposing corpses. Their branches
draw and imbibe… the gross and oleaginous vapours exhaled out of the grave by the setting sun.
and their roots
suck nourishment from the dead. *
From this it is only a step to imagine vampire-yews sucking blood as well.
The Bleeding Yew… definitely a vampire
As I wandered the graveyard embroidering this ghoulish fantasy, I was distracted by an old gravestone now fixed high on the wall of the churchyard and overhung with ivy. The stone records the deaths in infancy of Anna Letitia and George, the children of David Griffith, vicar of Nevern between 1782 and 1834. Infant mortality was high in those years, and while the deaths did not surprise me, I was taken aback by the strangely jaunty verse which commemorated them:
They tasted of life’s bitter cup.
Refused to drink the potion up
But turned their little heads aside
Disgusted with the taste – and died.
Old gravestone, now affixed high on the wall of the churchyard
ANNA LETITIA and GEORGE, children of Rev. DAVID GRIFFITH,VICAR of this parish, who died in their infancy,A.D.1794
Strangely jaunty verse
It sounded horribly callous and cold-hearted. Could anyone record the death of their children in such insensitive terms? Was it meant to be humorous?
But the jocularity was not entirely unfamiliar: a commemorative brass in Southwark Cathedral begins conventionally enough:
Susanna Barford departed this life the 20th of
August 1652 aged 10 yeares 13 weekes, the non-
-Such of the world for piety and virtue
In soe tender years.
And death and envye both must say twas fitt
Her memory should thus in brasse bee writ.
Here lyes interr’d within this bed of dust
A virgin pure not stained by carnal lust;
Such grace the king of kings bestowed upon her
That now she lives with him a maid of honour.
Her stage was short, her thread was quickly spun
Drawne out and cut, gott heaven, her worke was done.
But the final couplet has a chirpy insouciance like that on the Griffith grave:
This world to her was but a traged play
Shee came and sawt dislikt and passed away.
Brass commemorating a child death in Southwark cathedral
The origin of this and similar couplets may lie in a poem written by Henry Wotton in 1626;recalling the death of his nephew’s widow shortly after that of her husband, it ends:
Hee first deceased; Shee for a little Tryd
To live without him, likd it not, and dyd.
The lines were certainly adapted on the stone of Margaret and John Whiting, found in Saint Bartholomew the Great, when John died a year after his wife in 1681,
Shee first deceased; Hee for a little Tryd
To live without her, likd it not and dyd.
On an adult grave, and where the epitaph also records that the couple had,
“lived lovingly together … 40 yeares and upward…having had issue 12 children”.
the humour sounds gentle and not out of place. But on the child graves the seeming emotional detachment is disturbingly unfeeling and unsympathetic.
Lawrence Stone** has advanced the chilling suggestion that the high infant mortality rate in earlier centuries led parents to make only a limited emotional investment in their children, but I think it is more credible that an age of greater faith may have rendered even child death less traumatic than it is today.
Pat Jalland*** reasons that the evangelical movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century engendered a view of death as an escape from an unhappy world of pain and suffering. As angels in heaven the children would watch over those left below, who should anticipate a joyful reunion, certain of a future life in a happier world. She warns against judging the emotions of an earlier age from our own standpoint where there is reduced prevalence of religious belief.
Certainly, Reverend David Griffith was both a product and a part of the Methodist Revival which espoused these evangelical views. Nonetheless I find the epitaph he chose for the grave of his young children, with its apparent bland and untroubled acceptance, deeply disquieting.
*Quoted in Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica, (1996) p.29.
**Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, (1977) pp651-2.
***Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, (1996) chapters 1 and 6.
At the end of my street stands Church Farm House. There is no farm today, but in the late nineteenth century John William Bissie Matthews was the third generation of his family to grow crops and keep livestock on the surrounding fields. John and his wife Emily Etta Matthews lived with their eight children in the four bedroomed house. Attached to the house was a cottage to accommodate farm labourers, and behind, surrounding the yard, were byres, stables, a coach house, a three storey malthouse, wash house and woodshed. Beyond lay kitchen and flower gardens.
Church Farm House and the attached cottage, today a separate residence
Two of the Matthews children, Ida (b.1891) and Gwen (b. 1901), recorded their memories of their childhood and early adulthood on the farm and in the village of Norton Saint Philip.
They attended the village school, which children left at fourteen, or more commonly at twelve when their labour was needed. Their play area was beneath a tree on a small green between the school and the church. Ida remembered the school closing in 1900 to celebrate the Relief of Mafeking. Gwen recalled her misery at being set to knit kettle holders and socks, and to sew aprons which were sold once a year around the village. When their brothers, who had to take the cows to the fields before school, arrived late they were caned. Children coming from the hamlet of Hassage walked two miles each way across fields and along a sunken lane bringing their lunch with them.
The same school building is still in use today for infants and juniors. It has its own playing fields, its gates are firmly locked, and the green where Gwen and Ida played is eroded by the twice daily assault of a crush of cars as parents convey their children between home and school.
The village school, built in 1827. In front is the green, where the Matthews children played under the tree, recovering a little during the summer holidays from the term time assault by cars.
The sunken lane along which the Hassage children walked to school
Monday at Church Farm was washday, when the wife of one of the labourers would light the boiler to heat water from the rainwater tank if it were clean enough or from the well outside the backdoor. She would boil the whites and scrub other washing on a board. After rinsing the laundry by hand in a tin bath she rung the wet clothes through the mangle before hanging them out to dry in the garden. It was a full day’s work.
According to their age the children had their own weekly tasks: milking cows, scouring milk pails, straining the milk through muslin cloth, scrubbing tables, cleaning knives, polishing brass, peeling potatoes.
“On the milestone near our house was “London 108 miles” and I wondered if I would ever get there,” wrote Gwen. It must have seemed a world away to most of the villagers, when even trips into Bath, a mere seven miles away, were rare. John Matthews drove a horse and cart into Bath every Friday taking produce – eggs, cheese, bacon – from the village farms to sell in town. While there he would shop for his neighbours’ needs, including the weekly delivery of newspapers for the rectory. Gwen was charged with delivering the latter and describes a household where the cook, boots, or one of the housemaids would take her to the kitchen for milk and cake.
The milestone which Gwen knew is still in place but either London has come a little closer or she misremembered the exact distance.
When the first motor bus arrived in the village, a double decker with no roof, the children were taken from school to see it. Ida and her friends rode it to the neighbouring village of Hinton Charterhouse…then walked back again. The bus plied between Frome and Bath but lacked the horsepower to convey its passengers up Midford Hill where they had to get out and walk. When they left school, Ida and another sister, Dora (b.1896), were apprentice milliners in department stores in Bath but the bus service was not frequent enough for them to use it, and they lived at the YWCA in Bath during the week, cycling home on Saturday afternoons and returning on Sunday evenings.
That first open top bus in Norton High Street
Yet if there was little contact with the wider world, the village itself throbbed with activity. Though most of the population worked on the land, there was also a corn mill and two sawmills, and Gwen enumerates two cobblers, three bakers, a policeman, a blacksmith, a wagon builder, an undertaker, a butcher, cheese and cider makers, a post office and two grocery shops. Today we count ourselves fortunate to have a Co-op store incorporating a post office counter.
The doctor, who lived in the neighbouring village of Beckington covered five villages on horseback until he acquired the first motor car seen in the area. On call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he held his Norton surgery in Mrs. Millet’s coffee house and shop on the Plain, made house calls, and dispensed his own medicines.
When I first came to the village in 1998, the last vestige of this service survived with a partner from the Beckington practice holding a surgery one morning a week behind the stage in the village hall. There was little question of any confidentiality, but since ailments were discussed freely and loudly in the waiting area this was immaterial. Now there are eleven doctors and a wealth of other staff in Beckington… and requests for telephone consultations may be submitted online.
Most of the village buildings which the sisters describe are still in existence albeit modified to suit new uses. On Sundays the Matthews family would fill their pew in the church, the girls peering round to compare their outfits with those of their neighbours. Externally the church is unchanged but the pews which held the Matthews and other large families are gone, replaced by a flexible, central space to accommodate meetings, concerts, playgroups.
The Old Rectory is now a private residence, with a new extension, “The West Wing.” Today’s rector is housed in a modern bungalow. There is no policeman in the Police House nor any sign of teachers in the Old School House. Manor Farm, once the grandest in the village, boasting a large staff, carriages and shire horses, has been converted into holiday lets, its barns and other outbuildings into private housing.
The Plain. Somewhere here Mrs. Millet had her coffee house and shop, and the doctor held his surgery. Today it is an annex of The George Hotel.
In the church the pews which served the Matthews and other large families have disappeared
The Old Rectory with modern extension
The Old Police House, today a private house
The Old School House, today a private house
Manor Farm, now holiday lets
Outbuildings of Manor Farm, now private housing
The Matthews knew the two pubs which still serve the village. Ida describes how “when sent on an errand we used to hold hands, hold our breath, avert our eyes, and hurry past the Fleur de Lys, an ale house on one side of the road, and the George on the other – in case we saw a drunken man because the casual labourers drank strong cider.”
More attractive to the Matthews children was Tom, the last of the heavy horses kept at the George to haul weighty loads up Bell Hill. A rope ran from the foot of the hill to a bell in the courtyard of the George. When it rang Tom would make his way unaccompanied down the hill, draw up the heavy load and return unescorted to his stable. Those using the service placed the payment of 3d in his pouch.
Recently refurbished the George now offers boutique rooms, fine dining, and a much reduced bar area, but not too many drunken men.
The Fleur de Lys
The George Inn, boutique rooms rather than drunken labourers
From the back terrace of the George the view across a field towards the church remains almost unchanged. Until well into the twentieth century cows grazed in the field, but nonetheless Gwen reports the presence of a cricket square. Today the Mead it is used purely for recreation: the cricket square is still there in summer, the bonfire in November, children play on the swings, and dogs chase balls.
View from the terrace of The George across the Mead to the church
Ida recalls gathering Bath asparagus in Wellow Lane and listening to nightingales there in May. There is still Bath asparagus, but even during the Covid lockdown when the village became again a place undisturbed by either cars on the roads or planes in the sky, and when I regularly met hares and deer strolling, almost tame, down the lane, and when the spring birdsong burst from the trees with no competition, I never heard a nightingale. Though I once met an old lady who told me that during her courting days she and her future husband would take blankets and lie in the fields listening to them.
At one of the periodic re-enactments of the Battle of Norton Saint Philip, the last victory for Monmouth’s rebel forces against the king in 1685, Ida was terrified by the noise and the sight of soldiers on horseback with steel helmets, waving their swords as they advanced down Chevers, locally known as Bloody, Lane. Having witnessed a similar re-enactment I can vouch for the irrational fear which even a playacting army can engender as the sound of drums and marching draws closer, and the first troops appear over the hill.
Chevers, aka Bloody, Lane, peaceful on a summer evening, but once the site of a violent battle.
But in 1914 there was no playacting, and the Matthews time at Church Farm was ending. The two oldest brothers, Bertram (b. 1892) and Sydney (b. 1890), had emigrated to Canada but both signed up with the Canadians to fight in the First World War. They were killed within three days of each at Vimy Ridge in 1917. The younger brothers, Cyril (b. 1894) and Leslie (b. 1899) also signed up. Cyril was taken prisoner and Leslie was injured. There were no celebrations at Church Farm when the war ended.
Cyril found his way home: Gwen wrote, “Now when I look back, I think how casual we all were. Cyril came home, just walked in the back door…mother asked how he had got on to which the answer was “Alright”. Years later we learned that he had walked miles across Germany before being picked up.” Leslie was discharged from a hospital in the north with shrapnel in his foot.
Ida had married and moved to Wales before the war began. Dora married and went to live at Row Farm in Laverton in 1920. Cyril became a farm manager in Portishead. Ethel (b.1888), the eldest sibling, who had trained as a teacher, died at home of tuberculosis in 1924. Gwen, only thirteen years old when the war broke out, had driven a lorry with two horses throughout the war years, carrying twenty churns of milk every day from Norton Dairy to Trowbridge for the London train. After the war there was no job for her.
In 1927 John Matthews retired to Wellow with his wife and Gwen. Leslie, the youngest son took over the farm for a few years before moving to another in Woolverton. Gwen married and left Wellow for Oxford in 1936.
There are no farms in the heart of the village now, cars not cows move along the High Street and Church Street. Though as summer turns to autumn the combine harvesters from the outlying farms briefly dominate the roads, processing through the village with a stately, proprietary air. And the Matthews still have a presence in the village. In the churchyard Bertram and Sidney are remembered on the war memorial, while Ethel, her parents, and Dora are buried together. Viewed from where they lie, beside the church and looking across the Mead towards The George, their village is not so much changed.
The war memorial…
…remembers Bertram and Sidney Matthews who had emigrated to Canada, together with others from the villlage who fell in the Great War
The Matthews Family Grave
Ethel, the eldest sister, died of tuberculosis in 1924
John William Bissey Matthews and Emily Etta Matthews
Dora Matthews buried with her parents and sister under her married name
Looking from the Matthews family grave towards the Mead and High Street
See Gwen Harries – Memories of Norton Saint Philip 1902-1930
Ida Matthews – Memories of my early childhood until the age of 15
Lying at the end of Horseshoe Lane, a private road winding out of the town between Widcombe Hill and Bathwick Hill, Smallcombe Garden Cemetery appears surprisingly rural and far from the bustle of Bath. Surrounded by gentle slopes and the oak, ash, and lime trees of Smallcombe Woods, the only signs of human habitation are a farm and cemetery cottage.
Opened in 1855 the cemetery closed to burials in 1988 and was left to decline until The Friends of Smallcombe undertook its care in 2014. Since then, they have restored walls and paths, with a new footway linking the cemetery to National Trust land and the Bath Skyline Walk, and carried out research, recording the histories of some of the occupants with whom they have a personal connection or interest. smallcombegardencemetery@gmail.com
The care The Friends have offered is discreet, and Smallcombe remains seemingly undisturbed save for the birdsong and the whispered passage of foxes and deer. The animals are almost tame, hardly startled when they observe infrequent visitors, mildly inquisitive, moving away cautiously but without haste. Graves laze through the seasons, comfortable, companionable, and undisturbed, graced in spring and summer by wildflowers and by the vibrant berries of autumn and winter.
But one grave here unsettles me. Beneath a statue of an androgenous child, it records the deaths of twin babies:
“WHO PLUCKED THESE FLOWERS?
I, SAID THE MASTER, AND THE
GARDNER HELD HIS PEACE.”
In loving memory of
our darling twins
Phyllis
Born June 17th, 1903
Died June 23rd, 1903
Victor
Born June 17th, 1903.
Died June 17th, 1903
“THEY FOLLOW THE LAMB
WITHERSOEVER HE GOETH.”
It was a popular epitaph on the graves of children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, expressing acceptance that young lives taken by god were his to take. It is impossible not to wish that the grieving parents found consolation in erecting the sad memorial and believing the resigned words.
Yet the death of the babies was not even the end of the pitiful story: the reverse side of the stone records another death, an elder son who like thousands of other young men died in the meaningless carnage of the First World War. The parents’ gentle acceptance was unshaken, for the words read:
Also
Of our beloved eldest boy
John Hay Maitland Hardyman,
D.S.O.M.C. Youngest Lieut. Col.
In the British Army
Born September 28th, 1894
Killed in Action
August 24th, 1918
“YOU WERE OUR PRIDE,
WE DREAMED GREAT THINGS
OF YOU. GOD INTERVENED, AND SO
OUR DREAMS CAME TRUE.”
O Grand and Blessed Death,
Quite ready for the call.
He heard his captain’s voice.
Life’s Battle Fought,
Life’s Victory Won.
The soldier thus received
His welcome and his crown.
Certain that all religions are but myths and fallacies, such conviction and gentle forbearance in the face of such cruel and arbitrary deaths seems strange to me. And were I to believe in some omnipotent being, I could only be repelled and angered by the terrible masterplan or capricious action of a careless god who played so needlessly and mercilessly with young lives.
I have always been fascinated by the experiences of evacuees, those children of the Second World War who were sent from their city homes to more rural locations away from the threat of the Blitz. Photographs of the time show them clustered on railway stations, clutching gas masks, small suitcases, teddy-bears. Some beam cheerfully at the camera, for there must have been a sense of adventure as they headed towards a new world and a new life. Others force a brave smile trying to cover their anxiety and apprehension. A few are blank faced, already uprooted and bewildered. Older siblings keep a determined hold on smaller brothers and sisters, the latter too young even to read the identifying labels around their necks. And several cannot hold back the tears.
National and local archives document the evacuations, and they are brought to life in the many personal reminiscences which have been recorded.* Their stories tell of children who led two lives: for the luckiest ones a sunny, bucolic interlude followed by a happy return home, and the bonus of two loving families forever after; for others a traumatic and heartbreaking time away from the warmth and security of parents and familiar environment; and for a third and perhaps the saddest group an interval of intense happiness and expanding horizons before returning to cold, indifferent parents.
Strikingly apparent from many of the accounts are the very deep class divisions which severed Britain in the 1940s. In an early teaching post, I learned more of this from two older colleagues who had been evacuees. Ron, from a working-class background in south London, found himself with a prosperous family in Kent who treated him kindly, but lost in an alien world he was desperately homesick and twice ran away, determined to walk home. After the second attempt his mother decided he was better off risking the bombs with his parents than facing further distress and misery alone. This proved a wise decision, not least because Kent was soon redefined from a Reception to an Evacuation Zone due to the threat of invasion.
Mike by contrast left his very middle-class London home for a working-class village in Scotland where he felt isolated in a hostile environment, looked upon with suspicion and resentment. His one consolation was the semi-friendly rivalry he developed with the only other high achiever in the village school. Some years later, when he was about to begin his studies at Cambridge, he heard that his former school mate was about to enter a Borstal. “There but fortune,” he reflected wryly.
One of the most pitiful stories of evacuees comes from Gunwalloe on the Lizard Peninsula, one of the oldest settlements in Cornwall. The Lizard coast is magnificent: when the sun shines the sea caresses auriferous shores, and in winter the austere beauty of the granite cliffs competes with the grey lowering skies, and the waves pound contemptuously on the rocks.
Golden shores in the sunshine
The austere beauty of winter
Gunwalloe must have seemed a paradise to imaginative, adventurous evacuees, a story book location with deserted beaches, cliffs to climb, rock pools, a history of smuggling and shipwrecks, and swimming in summer.
But those beaches deemed suitable for amphibious landings by enemy tanks and troops had been mined.
Ronald Munting, an evacuee from London, and his friend Harry Dale, a local lad, both aged twelve, were killed by an unmarked landmine on one of those beaches.
The medieval church of Saint Winwaloe crouches at Church Cove surrounded by its graveyard, and there two pitiful graves bear stark testimony:
The church of Saint Winwaloe at Church Cove
In Fondest Memory of
Harry
Beloved son of
Henry Cyril and Caroline Dale
Accidentally killed in a minefield
July 23, 1944, aged 12 years.
In
Memory of
Ronald Munting
Died 26 July 1944 aged 12 years.
Evacuated from Hornsey Rise N.19
Came to Cornwall. Was killed with his
Friend Harry Dale by an unmarked landmine
At Gunwalloe Fishing Cove. His parents
Were also killed in the London Blitz.
Faced with the brutal irony of a child sent, surely after much heart-searching by sad and anxious parents, from home to a “safe place,” only to meet with a tragic death, it is almost a relief to realise that his parents predeceased him and that had he remained in London he too would probably have been a victim of the Blitz. For even today for all the surrounding beauty a deep melancholy hangs over the churchyard at Gunwalloe.
The evacuation has also spawned a wealth of literature, not least the children’s books, chief among them Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden, herself an evacuee, and Michelle Magorian’s Good Night, Mister Tom.
An exhibition at Portsmouth Dockyard in 2016 marked the centenary of the Battle of Jutland. 36 Hours: Jutland 1916, The Battle That Won The War, was a multimedia presentation chronicling the only major sea battle of World War I. On 31 May – 1 June 1916 British and German dreadnoughts blazed at each other, through the poor visibility generated by mist, cloud, a dark evening sky, and an increasing volume of smoke from burning ships caught by gunfire. But while the exhibition captured the terrifying noise of constant bombardment, and the confusion and horror of intense shellfire, the claim that this battle won the war rang hollow.
Jutland was an indecisive disaster for both navies despite both claiming a victory: the German fleet retreated, but Britain lost more ships and twice as many men, the German dead numbering 2,551 and the British 6,097. The faith which both Britain and Germany had placed in their navies, building up immoderate numbers of battleships, proved unfounded.
Britain had been confident of victory over the numerically inferior German fleet. The huge losses suffered by her “invincible navy” led to so much criticism of the naval leadership that the Admiralty considered censoring and delaying the official report on the battle.
Moreover, when Kitchener, the then popular Secretary of State for War, drowned five days later when a German mine struck the ship on which he was travelling, and when losses on the Somme numbered 19,000 on the first day of the battle on 1 July, there was a clear need to staunch declining morale in Britain.
Jack Cornwell was fifteen years old when he enlisted in the navy in 1915. He was trained as a gun sight-setter and assigned to HMS Chester which took part in the Battle of Jutland. The ship received seventeen direct hits in the battle. Many of the gun’s crew were killed instantly and others were mortally wounded. The Chester retired from the action and reached relative safety. Medical assistants sent on board found Cornwell, severely wounded with shrapnel and shards of steel penetrating his chest, standing in the shattered gun mounting. He died in Grimsby hospital two days later and was buried in a pauper’s grave. His mother arranged for his exhumation and reburial near their home in Manor Park Cemetery, East London. It was another pauper’s grave.
Two months later however, on 29 July, Jack Cornwell was exhumed again and reburied with full military honours; it was the largest public event which took place during the war. Crowds lining the streets witnessed the coffin born on a gun carriage, with a naval band, boys from Jack’s old school and others from the Chester marching behind it. The local MP, Bishop and Mayor accompanied the coffin, a bugler sounded the last post, and shots were fired over the grave.
When the official report of the Battle of Jutland had been published in early July it had included an account from the commanding officer of the Chester which described Cornwell standing alone at his post awaiting orders until the end of the action. Writers on The Daily Sketch had uncovered the reference and turned it into a front-page story with a photograph of Cornwell’s brother George dressed in a naval uniform. With other journalists they fomented public pressure for recognition of Jack’s bravery, criticising the navy for allowing a hero to be buried in a pauper’s grave.
After the military funeral, the Admiralty awoke to the possibility of boosting public confidence in the war, and providing the navy with some face-saving publicity after the disaster of Jutland, by awarding Jack a posthumous Victoria Cross. On 15 September Jack Cornwell became the third youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross, awarded for a conspicuous act of bravery. The citation read: “mortally wounded early in the action… Jack Travers Cornwell remained standing alone at a most exposed post, quietly awaiting orders till the end of the action, with the gun’s crew dead and wounded all around him. His age was sixteen and a half years.”
The court painter, Frank Salisbury, portrayed Jack standing at his post by the gun, and prints were distributed to schools accompanied by booklets entitled “Faithful Unto Death” which used his death to encourage concepts of duty and sacrifice. Six days after the award of the VC schools all over Britain celebrated Jack Cornwell Day. A Cornwell Memorial Fund was established, and fund-raising badges were sold to children for 1d each raising £18,000 to finance a ward for disabled sailors at the newly established Star and Garter Home in Richmond. Patriotic propaganda wielded the emotive story of obedience, courage, selflessness, and honourable conduct to boost flagging resolve.
In truth it is hard to imagine that the poor boy could have done other than to remain at his post. On the deck of a severely damaged ship, surrounded by the dead and dying, himself seriously injured, possibly traumatised, frightened, and shell shocked, where could he go? Probably no more or less brave than any other sailor, the strongest impression his story leaves is that a child of sixteen should not have been involved in the fighting at all, and that his memory was cynically exploited in the interests of war time propaganda, to deflect criticism of the conduct of the Battle of Jutland and to revitalize dedication to the war effort.
*************************************
From 1915 onwards stone memorials had begun to appear commemorating the war dead and serving to promote military recruitment. London’s first memorial appeared on 4 August 1916 in the churchyard of St. Botolph-without-Bishopsgate bearing the names of both Kitchener and Cornwell. A Pathe News of the time shows the Lord Mayor unveiling the cross and linking the popular ageing commander with the working-class boy hero as he reminds the assembled crowd that the cross drew together “the statesman-warrior”… and “a young, innocent and humble origined (sic) lad…cutting across all divisions of class and educational background in their sacrifice to a common cause.”
The first World War One Memorial Cross to appear in London. St. Botolph-without-Bishopsgate
Jack Cornwell is specifically remembered on the plinth,
as is Kitchener.
In 1920 pupils and former pupils of schools in East Ham placed a stone marker bearing a cross and an anchor on what had become the Cornwell family grave. With Jack were his half-brother Arthur Frederick, killed in action in France in August 1918; his father who died in October 1916; and his mother who died in poverty in 1919.
Grave of John Travers (Jack) Cornwell, Manor Park Cemetery, East London
The grave carries a quotation from Ovid:
It is not wealth or ancestry
but honourable conduct and a noble
disposition that maketh men great.
The Ballad of Jack Cornwell by Charles Causley carries a less sententious and more poignant message. Here are two extracts:
