Ely, Cambridgeshire

 

Remember

This bomber is flying over Ely Cathedral in a memorial window in that building commemorating the contribution of Bomber Command during World War II and remembering the airmen who were lost. Lincolnshire and East Anglia were the home to many squadrons of bombers during the war, and even when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s the landscape was punctuated by control towers and fenced-off airfields. Hangars and a windsock can be seen below the cathedral in the window, representing the bases to which the airmen hoped to return.

Westwell, Oxfordshire

Lives cut off

Cotswold villages: I live among them and think I know what to expect. Stone cottages, cottagey gardens, church towers, a background of hills. Nearly everything is built of the oolitic limestone for which the region is famous – from the churches to the shallow soil flecked with bits of pale flaky rock, it’s all about the stone. Then a Cotswold village presents me with something that makes me pause. Like this: a menhir-sized lump of limestone mounted on two gigantic stone steps. What could it be?

It turns out to be a war memorial. An inscription records that it was put up by Stretta Aimee Holland, who lived at Westwell Manor, to commemorate her two brothers who lives were lost in the First World War. Second Lieutenant Harold Price, who served with the 3rd Battalion Royal Fusiliers, was killed at the Second Battle of Ypres on 24 May 1915, the worst day in the war for the Royal Fusiliers, who lost 536 men. Lieutenant Edward John Price was a submariner whose vessel was stranded in the Dardanelles. He was taken prisoner by the Turks and died in a prison camp in central Turkey, perhaps a victim of the Spanish flu epidemic.

The brother’s names are inscribed on an odd-looking brass plaque, which turns out to be a numeral from the clock on the old Cloth Hall at Ypres that was salvaged by Harold Price after the First Battle of Ypres. I find this rather odd memorial strangely moving. Its combination of salvaged French metalwork and local stone not only recalls the battle but also embodies lives lived, tragically, both at home and abroad. And am I fanciful in seeing the memorial’s rough-hewn state as a vernacular version of the broken column on some monuments and symbolic of lives not simply ended, but unfinished or broken?

Stanway, Gloucestershire

Remember them

Here are last year's snows on my favourite war memorial, not far from where I live. The 1920 bronze statue of St George and the Dragon is by Alexander Fisher, the column was designed by Sir Philip Stott, architect-squire of the nearby village of Stanton, and the lettering on the memorial is by Eric Gill. The memorial is wonderfully sited at a junction as the road begins to rise up the hill, past Stanway's few stone and thatched cottages, and on towards Stow on the Wold. Its sculpture, arresting in form and beautiful in detail, does its job well: makes us pause, and look, and remember. It's a work of real quality, and that is, after all, what those who died in war deserve.
Thanks to Zoë, who took the evocative photograph while I scraped the white stuff off the car.

Great Malvern, Worcestershire

This surprise is in the Barnard’s Green area of Malvern, standing proudly at a road junction from where you take your choice of Malvern’s attractions – the lovely Victorian railway station, the town centre, the stately and all-commanding hills. The little building is not the thing one expects in this elegant English town, a place in so many ways redolent of the age of Queen Victoria or of Edward Elgar. Malvern is all wells, Victorian hotels, and opulent villas behind conifers and laurel bushes.

But not quite all. Meet the modernist war memorial bus shelter and clock tower of Barnard’s Green. I don’t know much about this building. It has a British Legion plaque on it and is in a 1930s modernist style that recalls seaside pavilions. There’s a neat clock, some masonry fins, an overhanging flat roof typical of the style, and seats inside, occupied the day I was there by a group of gentlemen somewhat the worse for drink who shuffled into the shadows when I got my camera out.
Best of all are the war memorial poppies that adorn the end panels around the outside of the little building. Buildings in this idiom aren’t normally allowed floral ornament, but this is different, of course. The poppies give us all the message we need.