Memorial to the dead of two wars

You may recall a post I once did about the Bechers of Southwell. Mrs Becher lost two brothers on the same day in 1915 and her husband was badly wounded, lay out in the open for two days and eventually died of blood poisoning two months later. One of her sons would eventually die in 1940 during an air raid in Aden. Here is the link. Or here. Two posts, same title, slightly different subject matter.

I decided to rewrite it for the Peterborough Military History group. I have been very unproductive lately and it seemed like a quick way to get back in the game.

I like to add a local aspect where I can, and the attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt reminded me of a man local to Peterborough. In the church at Orton Longueville there is a brass memorial plaque in memory of Captain Herbert Selwyn Scorer. I have seen it many times, as this used to be my parish church, and I last saw it at my mother’s funeral, which is now 12 years ago. Time flies.

This is the memorial to the missing at Thiepval. The army built it to commemorate my great-grandfather. While they were at it they added another 72,336 names. They say missing but they aren’t actually missing, just mislaid. The army hadn’t worked out how to make a durable dog tag, so many of the bodies they recovered for proper burials after the war were unidentifiable. There are approximately 212,000 grave markers bearing the words “Known Unto God”, a phrase suggested by Kipling who was heavily involved in the iconography of the Commonwealth, War Graves Commission. His son was one of those buried under such a stone, though his body was eventually identified and properly commemorated.

Like Becher and his brothers-in-law, Scorer was killed in the fight for the redoubt in October 1915.  He was  a farmer in the village at the time of his death, and a relative by marriage, John Norton Lowe, is also on the village war memorial, having died in 1944 whilst a prisoner of the Japanese.

So I set to and tied up some loose ends. I knew Lowe had lived in a thatched house in the village, and I had been in that same house before I knew the story. It was dark and damp and smelt of cabbage. The ladies i spoke to in relation to the village newsletter could well have been members of the scorer or Lowe families, but I didn’t know the story at that time so never asked.

I then looked up Scorer with a view to pinning down where he had lived in the village. There was no house number for him in the 1911 census, but the next house was the Rectory.

My Great-grandmother’s gravestone with W H Wilson’s memorial inscription. She never got over his loss. There are a lot of stones like this in country churchyards.

These days there is a second house in the Rectory grounds and three modern houses in a row, with a cricket ground behind them. In 1911, I calculate, the next old house along, must have been where Captain Scorer lived, and where his family mourned his passing.  A newspaper report of the sale of his livestock confirmed it was Hall Farm, and that house, though renamed, was Hall Farm, before it became Old Hall Hatchery. Hatchery, you say? Don’t we know someone who was in the poultry business? Yes, you do. It seems that the house I lived in for ten years with my parents, the creaking, cold and somewhat rambling house, was also the home of Captain Herbert Selwyn Scorer. It has taken me approximately 50 years to put all the story together.

If I were more sensitive, this would be a ghost story. But I’m not, I’m just annoyed at the lax way I put my research together. Though I do acknowledge that it’s a very strange thing. Though not a Strange Meeting.