Category: Churches and graveyards

Yet Another Fascinating Find in a Dorset Graveyard

Hero or Villain? The Much-Maligned Army Officer Edward James Montagu-Stuart-Wortley.

Taking advantage of a recent day out to Highcliffe castle, I went out to explore the local churchyard of St Marks in Highcliffe. I hadn’t gone along deliberately to seek out ‘celebrity’ gravestones but it was here that I saw signs to ‘The Selfridge Family Graves’ and perhaps I’ll write a post about Harry Selfridge on here one day.

Wandering through the graveyard, which has some pretty spectacular statues and memorials, I was struck by one particular one, a semi-circular wall with the wording ‘Pax Eterna’ ‘Eternal Peace’. The memorial was dedicated to one Edward James Montagu-Stuart-Wortley CB, CMG, DSO, MVO, and his story is a fascinating one.

He was a man, not short on bravery, who experienced some of the most significant events in warfare of the late 19th and early 20th century when the British Empire was most powerful, but in his later years suffered at the hands of his superiors, rightly or wrongly, you decide.

Early Years

He was born on 31st July 1857 into a family of some distinction, his grandfather was a Tory politician and 2nd Baron of Wharncliffe, his uncle was a peer and 1st Earl of Wharncliffe.

‘Eddie’ attended Eton College and went on to gain a commissison to The King’s Royal Rifle Corps in 1877.

Pre-World War I

Before the first world war, his career was action-packed and took him all over the world. He saw action in the Afghan war in 1878 where he was mentioned in despatches.

He served with the Natal Field Force in the first Boer War (1881), before his association with the Egyptian Army. He was Military Secretary to General Valentine Baker (1882) and then ADC to General Sir Evelyn Wood (1883-4), taking part in the battle of Tel-el-Kebir. He served throughout the Nile Expedition (1884-5), and was twice mentioned in despatches.

He was Brigade-Major at Malta (1893-6) and during the Nile Expedition (1897-8) was 2i/c of a Gunboat Flotilla, winning a DSO. During the South African War, he commanded 2nd Battalion King’s Royal Rifle Corps (1900-1) at the relief of Ladysmith. From July 1901 until July 1904 he was British Military Attaché in Paris. He commanded 10th Infantry Brigade, at Shorncliffe, from April 1908 until April 1912 and in June 1914 took command of the North Midland Division Territorial Force.

Links to Kaiser Wilhelm

After his marriage to Violet Hunter Guthrie in 1891, Eddie was living in Highcliffe Castle and in 1907 Kaiser Wilhelm II rented the property for the summer to recover from a throat infection. In return for his hospitality, Edward was given two stained glass windows for the castle and invited to visit the German Army’s manoeuvres at Alsace the next year. This connection with the Kaiser brought Eddie into royal circles and during WWI, the 46th (North Midland) Division became the first Territorial division to deploy to France as a complete formation and in March 1915, King George V took a particular interest in its fate and asked Montagu-Stuart-Wortley to write to him weekly. Although Montagu-Stuart-Wortley received permission from Sir John French and Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien to do this, when the correspondence came to the notice of the GOC XI Corps, Richard Haking, and the GOC First Army, Sir Douglas Haig, during the King’s tour of the front in October 1915, they expressed their ‘severe displeasure’. Montagu-Stuart-Wortley was a marked man.

Hohenzollern Redoubt, the Beginning of the End

During his time as General Officer Commanding (GOC) the 46th North Midland Division, the division saw action in the Battle of Loos when it made a costly attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt. Montagu-Stuart-Wortley had foreseen the difficulties with a frontal attack and proposed a bombing raid. He was overruled by his corps commander General Richard Haking and ordered to undertake a frontal attack. The attack, as he had imagined, led to a catastrophic loss of life with 180 officers and 3583 men killed, wounded, or missing. The attack would go down in military history as ‘a tragic waste of infantry’. Haking, in correspondence with the King, openly blamed Montagu-Stuart-Wortley for the ‘unnecessary losses’ and paved the way for any future encounters.

Gommecourt, a Reputation in Tatters

In planning for the Somme in 1916, the 46th, along with the 56th North London Division, was tasked with creating a diversionary attack at Gommecourt salient at the northern end of the British line.

When the initial attack took place at 7.30 am on the first day of the Somme offensive, they found that the German army had reinforced its’ numbers and the attack was a complete disaster. Despite the heavy losses incurred in the opening attack and Montagu-Stuart-Wortley being able to see clearly that any further attempts would be a futile waste of life, he was ordered to launch a renewed attack at midday. However, the 46th had reached a state of chaos in its’ own lines and was unable to re-engage. After several failed attempts to organize his troops, it became clear to Montagu-Stuart-Wortley that there was no chance of success whatsoever. But at 3.30 that day, he was ordered, again by senior officers, to launch an attack and so, in perhaps what can be considered a humane gesture, he ordered a token attack by two rifle companies, with only one platoon of 20 going ‘over the top’ and of that platoon only 2 men returned unscathed.

That evening, the 56th, who Montagu-Stuart-Wortley’s 46th were meant to support, were forced back after 13 hours of continuous fighting and suffering heavy losses. The 46th, for its’ part, had the rather ignominious record of suffering the fewest losses (2455 killed, wounded, or missing) of any of the 13 British divisions involved that day.

The fallout was swift and brutal. The 46th gained a reputation as a poor quality military formation for leaving its’fellow territorials to fight on in an impossible situation. Montagu-Stuart-Wortley was openly castigated by VII Corps Commander Lieutenant-General Thomas D’Oyly Snow who stated in his report that the;

’46th showed a lack of offensive spirit’ and that ‘Major-General the Hon. E J Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, is not of an age, neither has he the constitution, to allow him to be as much among his men in the front lines as is necessary to imbue all ranks with confidence and spirit .’

Lieutenant-General Thomas D’Oyly Snow

Field Marshall Haig agreed and Montagu-Stuart-Wortley was dismissed from his post with the recommendation that he should never serve as a divisional commander again. He thus became the only officer to be sacked from his post during the war.

Later Life

Upon his return home, he was appointed to the backwater command of the 65th (Second Lowland) Division in Ireland until March 1919. He retired from army service on 31st July 1919 and spent many years protesting fruitlessly on his own behalf to the government for his perceived maltreatment at the hands of Haig and Haking.

His orders on that fateful day at Gommecourt were to ‘occupy the ground won by the artillery‘ and since no ground was won, his dismissal remains the subject of some controversy with many believing that he and the 46th were made scapegoats for the;

‘fatally flawed concept dreamt up by higher authority..the diversionary attack at Gommecourt’

( Alan MacDonald. ‘A Lack of Offensive Spirit?’)

Nevertheless, what didn’t help Montagu-Stuart-Wortley’s case was that despite his early successes in his career, he made himself a target to Haig by corresponding with King George and also disagreeing with Haking over Hohenzollern Redoubt and so, in many ways, his future was already set with two very powerful and influential officers waiting for him to make any sort of error.

The futile sacrifice of the millions of men during World War I is well-documented in the history books as the ‘lions led by donkeys’. What is not always so well-known is the stories of the individuals like Montagu-Stuart-Wortley who, were it not for upsetting some influential people, could well have retired from the Army with a glowing record.

Another Fascinating Find in a Dorset Churchyard

Rector, scientist, artist, coin collector, antiquarian; the list of achievements of Rev. Thomas Rackett go on and on.

Drive along the A350 from Corfe Mullen towards Blandford, and you’ll go past the church of St John the Baptist in Spetisbury. In the cemetery stands an imposing three-sided pyramid about 7 feet high. This is a memorial to one Thomas Rackett, rector of the parish and his wife Dorothy.

Such a striking memorial stands out against the more commonplace tombstones dotted around the cemetery, and little wonder because Rackett was quite an influential character.

Early years

He was born in London in 1757 and was a rather precocious child. At the age of 14, he recited the ode for the Shakespearean jubilee to the renowned actor David Garrick. He was so impressed that he presented Rackett with a gilt copy of the speech. In 1771, Garrick went one better and presented Rackett with a folio copy of Shakespeare.

The fact that the young Rackett was consorting in such company may come as a surprise to some, but growing up he was in touch with some of the most influential and greatest minds of the day. He was taught to draw by Theodosius Forrest and Paul Sandby a founding member of the Royal Academy; he was given an interest in natural history by the renowned surgeon and scientist John Hunter, who worked with Edward Jenner on the smallpox vaccination https://celebrantglynbawden.com/a-fascinating-find-in-a-dorset-graveyard/ and as a young boy he had his portrait painted by the renowned artist George Romney.

He graduated from Oxford with an MA in 1780 and at that same time became rector of St John’s in Spetisbury, the position he would hold for just over 60 years.

London life

At the time, the Dorset parish was one of the wealthier parishes, bringing in rental sums of around £750 pa, more than enough for a rector and his family to live on, and prior to Rackett, that is exactly what had happened. However, Rackett was more interested in pursuing his many other interests and living a life in London, than he was in being rector of a small parish in Dorset.

Throughout his 61 year tenure, he spent about 30 years at his house in London rubbing shoulders with eminent scientists and antiquaries of the day and spending the rental income from his post as rector on various treats and works of art.

He was friends with the Italian astronomer and scientist Tiberius Cavallo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius_Cavallo#:~:text=Tiberius%20Cavallo%20%28also%20Tiberio%29, who stayed with him at his home in Spetisbury. He also studied Dorset’s natural history, archaeology and geology.

In the early 1800’s, there was such an influential group of scientists and antiquaries living in Blandford that Dorset, for some years, became the centre of enlightenment thinking and scientific discovery and Rackett was right at the heart of it.

Problems

Unsurprisingly, his parishioners became disillusioned with their absent rector and voiced their c0mplaints to the landowner Lord Lansdowne, who took the complaint to the House of Lords. In addition to this, suspicions had been raised to the Bishop of Bristol as he discovered that several parishioners were converting to Roman Catholicism and Rackett was leaving a low paid curate to do his work in his place, and so wrote a letter to Rackett asking for an explanation.

Rackett had to answer his case to both the bishop and the House of Lords, but evidently was a very persuasive man because no further action was taken and he was allowed to continue his varied pursuits for many years afterwards.

An accomplished artist, he illustrated the second edition of the Rev. John Hutchins life’s work ‘ History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset’. He was a member of the Royal Society, the Linnean Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London and was an avid collector of Greek coins and in his 80’s was studying conchology.

On his memorial on the pyramid in St John’s church Spetisbury are carved the words;

‘During near LX years His diligence and eminent talents were not confined to the exercise of Parochial duties…’

Never were there truer words said. It was a remarkable life, lived to the full at the very forefront of, what was then, cutting edge scientific, artistic and historical investigation.

A Fascinating Find in a Dorset Graveyard

How a day out in a Dorset village led us to finding out about the renowned 18th-century farmer and pioneer of inoculation, Benjamin Jesty.

as our lockdown woes began to ease recently, we decided to go out for a day trip to the Dorset countryside.

We’d been recommended to go to Worth Matravers, a few miles outside of Corfe on the way to Swanage. It was a glorious day and because some restrictions were still in place we were able to park in the charming village without any bother.

The village itself looks probably much the same as it did back in the 17th & 18th centuries, with the small cottages built from local stone. In fact, any new dwellings still have to be built from the same stone.

As we took in the village, I saw St Nicholas Church and made my way in to take a few photos. To the far side of the church and not visible from the road were two very well-tended gravestones. Thinking they must be the graves of recently deceased local dignitaries, I looked closer and found they were the graves of Benjamin Jesty and his wife Elizabeth, both of whom had died in the early 19th century.

Who was Benjamin Jesty?

Benjamin Jesty was a farmer from Yetminster in Dorset, born in 1736. He married Elizabeth and together they had four sons.

What made Jesty remarkable was that at the time he was alive, smallpox was rife throughout Europe and frequently resulted in epidemics ( over 400,000 deaths annually). It became apparent that milkmaids and others who worked with cows and had contracted cowpox were able to nurse those suffering from smallpox without the danger of contracting the killer disease.

Jesty and two of his servants had already had cowpox and so were immune and when a smallpox outbreak occurred in Yetminster in 1774, Jesty had the bright idea of inoculating his wife and his two eldest sons.

Bearing in mind that Jesty was by no means a medical man, but had the idea that if he could introduce the disease into his family deliberately, they would be immune. And so, using a darning needle he transferred cowpox into his wife and children by scratching their arms. Thankfully, although his wife suffered quite a severe reaction, they all survived.

Was Jesty hailed as a hero?

You would think that after such a significant medical breakthough, Jesty would be lauded wherever he went. But this was the 18th century and instead he was reviled because people thought that introducing animal diseases into man would lead to some sort of metamorphosis into that animal.

Edward Jenner takes the credit

In 1802, some 20 years after Jesty’s pioneering work, physician Edward Jenner received a reward from the House of Commons of £10,000 ( equivalent to £1 million today) for his work on vaccines and a further £20,000 five years later. Physician George Pearson was familiar with Jesty’s earlier work and tried to get parliament to give him recognition but although Jesty’s case was well-documented he failed to petition in person and so the case was disregarded.

However, all was not lost because another physician and reverend, Dr Andrew Bell of Swanage, prepared a paper proposing Jesty as the first vaccinator and Jesty was invited along with his son to London to give their version of events before a panel of medical officers at the ‘Original Pock Institute’.

After cross-examination and inoculating his son again with smallpox, Jesty was awarded with a pair of gold mounted lancets and the results of the examination were published in the ‘Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal’.

Jesty was a country farmer who had realised there may be a link between immunity to one disease and the contraction of another. I don’t think he ever sought fame or riches and as if to illustrate this, when he was invited to London and his family tried to persuade him to dress in a more up-to-date fashion, he said he didn’t see why he should dress better in London than in the country.

It seems a shame that Jesty didn’t get the recognition, ( or the £10,000) that he so thoroughly deserved for most of his life, but at least now there is a permanent memorial in a Dorest graveyard to his intuition and bravery.

How a Change of Holiday Destination Led This Celebrant to Witness Something Extraordinary.

‘Let’s go somewhere we’re never likely to go back to.’

Like all the best ideas, that was how it started. Just an off-the-cuff conversation about changing our pretty routine holiday choice.

We’d been going to the same sort of places for years, pretty typical European tourist spots in Portugal, Spain and France, so we thought it would be a good idea to go somewhere completely different.

And that was what led us to Nepal. We looked online and saw an organised tour of Nepal for 12 days on TripAdvisor. We checked out the itinerary and after deciding to upgrade our hotel ( thank goodness, no offence to Nepal but three stars in Kathmandu is not anything like three stars here).

In February we were off. After being picked up from the airport we were heading to our ( 5 star) hotel and as we were stuck in traffic, not uncommon for anyone who has ever been to Kathmandu, it’s a wonder anything ever gets done, ours eyes were caught by an impressive group of temples. We enquired what they were and were told by our guide it was the Pashupatinath Temple ( https://www.welcomenepal.com/places-to-see/pashupatinath.html ) the largest temple complex in Nepal. It straddles the sacred Bagmati River and it is here, on raised platforms, at this UNESCO Cultural Heritage site that open air cremations take place every day.

My curiosity was well and truly piqued and we decided that when we had a free day we would make our way to the temple to witness the ceremony.

After 10 days of touring and seeing some astonishing sights we returned to Kathmandu and had a free day, so we decided to walk from our hotel to the temple. We had been reliably informed by our guide that it was a walk of about 35 minutes.

One hour and 20 minutes later, after touring various Kathamandu back streets we arrived, dusty and thirsty and entered the temple complex.

Frankly, nothing had prepared us for what we were to witness. On a raised pyre, one of several, by the river’s edge, a man in a white apron steadily built up a funeral pyre underneath a platform, stuffing it with twigs and logs as if a Sunday afternoon barbeque was being prepared.

When the pyre was prepared, family members emerged carrying the deceased, wrapped in orange cloth, at shoulder height on a wooden stretcher. The deceased was then placed carefully onto the platform and any clothing was removed with a cloth held up to maintain dignity.

A family member, presumably the next-of-kin or senior family member circled the platform several times, strips of orange cloth were removed and tied to the poles supporting the roof of the shelter that the pyre lay under.Then the family retreated and the fire was lit.

As the flames burnt the dead body, we were struck by how quiet the mourners were. The whole ceremony took place with in an alarmingly ( to us) matter-of-fact manner. There was no sadness, no tears and seemingly no grief-stricken relatives that we are so familiar with in the West.

Of course, as a predominantly Hindu nation, the Nepalese attitude to death is as far removed from the western view as possible. To Hindus, life and death are both part of what they call ‘maya’, a grand illusion; Hindus believe that when a soul dies, it gets born into a new body. The cycle of death and rebirth — ‘samsara’ — ends only when a soul realizes its true nature — indistinguishable from the absolute godhead, which Hindus call Brahman.

And so, this devout belief system in a life after death softens the blow of losing a loved one.They may never be replaced but there is a confidence that their soul will live on elsewhere. There is much to be applauded in such a strong religious belief system that salves the pain of the death of a loved one and can go some way towards giving a meaning to life.

From the point of view of a celebrant, I felt hugely privileged to have witnessed the rituals of cremation from another culture and religion. It was, like the whole of the trip, utterly spell-binding and eye-opening. An experience that will live with me forever.