The Memorial

Domesday Book put our village on permanent record. I never heard that the village did anything to deserve it. Perhaps existence for centuries along the Crown Forest of Salcey in the County of Northampton was justification enough. We seem to have got into the news twice since William the Conqueror’s day. Once around 1200 A.D. when the church was moved stone by stone to its present site; and again in the 1914-18 war when a German zeppelin dropped two bombs in the forest, making Wicken’s cow calve prematurely. So last year, when television cameras were set up under the plane tree by the old school fence, and Anglia Television later gave up three and a half minutes’ special coverage for the world to see, we knew that generations of obscurity had ended once and for all. The Focal point in the village of Hartwell on Sunday, 14 November 1965, was the parish war memorial.

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What happened at Hartwell around 14, November 1919 never became news; we kept very quiet about it. The Great War ended at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918, but our village hostilities went on a lot longer. The parish council wanted to put up a war memorial on one site, the parochial church council on another.

The parish council voted for a timber memorial on the green along the Forest Road; the parochial church council voted for a stone memorial in the churchyard. The parish council could count on the backing of the woodsmen and timber crews from the forest; the parochial church council were assured of support by the cutters and masons from the stone-pits.

There was a real shindy.

Colonel Campbell chaired the parish council, Father McNally the parochial church council. Caught in the crossfire between Scot and Irish, uncomplicated villagers found life becoming very complicated indeed. Life for us had been pretty clear-cut: we were either Church or Chapel, Top House (the Plough) or Bottom House (the Rose and Crown), Tory or Liberal. Now all kinds of secondary issues confused our age-old loyalties. Folks who had always been Church found themselves anti-vicar; timber men could not support idols of stone. Locals at the Rose and Crown found it hard to play a friendly game of skittles with follower of the Colonel. The Colonel, who was a good enough churchman. Found himself with a chapel man as secretary of the village memorial project. A Liberal was heard to say publicly that his father would turn over in his churchyard grave if he knew they were planning a memorial of timber.

Relations between Forest End and Lower End were strained to breaking point; tense and wordy battles broke out at any get-together; bitter sanctions were imposed by both stonemasons and woodsmen. Hostilities hotted up, and people began to ask what would happen if there were two war memorials, on which should appear the names of their ‘glorious dead’.

Communiqués were released from the respective headquarters at school and church. It became clear that there were to be two war memorials, two subscription lists. The latter sparked off new insults. Each collector was seen as an agent provocateur. As provocation followed provocation, the village cold war ended.

Father McNally’s faded biretta disappeared from his vestry at a wedding. The Colonel was given out l.b.w. in the Marrieds v. Singles match after cutting the ball past the third man. Door-knocking, carbide-tin explosions in the fishpond, and paddock-gate opening became daily or nightly occurrences. Parish councillors found their bicycles removed or tyres let down at council meetings, parochial church councillors emerged from the vestry to be submerged in an avalanche of snow from the church roof. The church bell tolled mysteriously at midnight. The following night the clerk to the parish council heard noises in his garden, only to find in the morning that his well-water had gone deep purple from potassium permanganate crystals.

A council of war was never actually declared; it might have cut too openly across family trees. But many a man was set against his brother, and son against father. How else explain that one frosty morning Tom found a sow and litter of white pigs in his sty at the end of the village, and Dick found Tom’s black and white boar in his?

Meanwhile the work went on: woodsmen fashioned their finest oak, masons quarried their selected stone. Both cut and hauled, shaped or faced timber or stone, as was their habit. Construction gangs took command, two memorials took shape, each visible from the other.

The rivals sought clergy to dedicate, trumpeters to sound the last post and reveille, for each memorial bore the names of all the fallen. One village, two memorials- born of bitterness, executed in anger erected in strife.

After the unveilings the village sank into an uneasy armistice. For years we remembered ‘our glorious dead’ and resurrected our own unhappy factions by wood or stone: two wreaths, two last posts, two reveilles. There is no-one like the villager for hardening cussedness into custom.

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Forty years had passed. One morning in 1962, speaking for the B.B.C. in the programme ‘Lift Up Your Heart’, I mentioned the timber memorial and the way local craftsmen had fashioned it as a worthy monument. I said nothing of the feud. So started the events that led to the television news bulletin after Sunday, 14 November 1965.

Listeners to ‘Lift Up Your Heart’ took another look at the parish memorial. They saw it dilapidated, neglected, decaying. Soon questions were being asked in parish council meetings. News began to come over the village grape-vine that the condition, durability and safety of the memorial were being considered.

In no time at all an offer was received from a village timber firm to replace the decaying memorial and the broken timber surround. The offer was accepted. Measurements were taken and docketed. Trust deeds were searched planning permission sought. Eric Whatton approached the Forestry Commission, as his father had done nearly half a century earlier, and asked for timber from Salcey Forest. The Commissioner generously gave a tree and pointed out the site of the best timber in a north-east quarter near Hackleton. The tree was felled, trimmed and hauled by one gang of men. Next it was sawn in the rough (not in the round, to avoid splitting) and left for months to dry.

When the process was complete, carpenters and joiners shaped and fashioned the oak to the exact pattern and measurements of its predecessor. Finally on Friday, 5 November 1965 another gang of men erected the new memorial on the site of the old. There it stands – a rather better piece of timber than the first, with promise of a longer life-span.

The parish council, very much aware of past history, invited the vicar to bless the new village memorial, after the chairman had unveiled it. This vicar did, and to me was given the task of reading out those same names of long ago (and the names of the two men who died in the 1939-45 war) that appear twice in the village story. After the unveiling and silence nearly all the villagers marched slowly by the stone memorial in the churchyard to a service in the parish church.

Hostilities have ceased: peace has been declared and won. As the television cameras brought the news to the nation I heaved a sigh of relief that, in our own forty years’ war the last battle had ended.