Aristocrats Go to War: Uncovering the Zillebeke Cemetery

by Jerry Murland

  There was one other Gordon Lennox who fought with the Grenadier Guards in the Great War. Victor Charles Gordon Lennox was a cousin to Bernard and was appointed to the 5th Reserve Battalion in early 1915. Posted to the 1st Battalion he was wounded in one of the last skirmishes of the Somme offensive at Gueudecourt. He subsequently returned to duty and survived the war.

  Petworth House, where Regy Wyndham was born, is a twenty minute car journey from Goodwood and basks in the Arthur Mee accolade of being described as the ‘greatest house in Sussex.’ Set in a vast Capability Brown landscaped deer park, the house was considerably developed by the 3rd Earl of Egremont during the early part of the nineteenth century. Regy’s grandfather, the 1st Lord Leconfield, made very few changes to Petworth and it was left to Regy’s father Henry to complete the alterations at the south end of the house. In 1947 the 3rd Lord Leconfield gave the house and park with an endowment to the National Trust although the current Lord Leconfield, John Max Henry Scawen Wyndham, 2nd Baron Egremont and 7th Baron Leconfield, continues to live in the south wing with his family.

  Edward Scawen Wyndham, who had been wounded at Messines serving with the Composite Household Cavalry Regiment, recovered from his wounds and was mentioned in despatches in November 1914. A month later the London Gazette reported his award of the DSO. Edward returned to France in May 1915 and survived the war. Regy’s death gained coverage in the national and local press; the local Grantham paper printed his obituary a week after his death, highlighting his love of horses and racing, while The Times of 14 November 1914 drew attention to his ‘delightful humour’ and wrote of his selfless behaviour towards others, a facet of his character that so endeared his men to him in Belgium:

  ‘Among his intimates he was called, after his favourite horse, The White Knight … but to those who knew him best the name had a deeper meaning … his thoughtfulness for others, his forgetfulness of himself – all indeed, that may be summed up in the old word chivalry, while along the difficult paths of colonial life, the turf and society, he maintained those high standards of conduct and honour that are looked for from the stainless knight.’

  Before the war Regy was resident for much of the winter in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham where he had a house on the North Parade. Being resident at Grantham gave him the opportunity to pursue his great love in life by riding with the Cottesmore and Belvoir Hunts. In 1929 his mother, Lady Constance, donated £1,000 towards a memorial to perpetuate the memory of her son. In response Grantham Town Council elected to create the Wyndham Memorial Park by changing the name of the town’s Slate Mill Park. The scheme, begun in 1922, cost about £5,000, whereby about 400 unemployed, many of them old soldiers, were paid by the Board of Guardians the standard unemployment rate of 1 shilling (5p) an hour. In July 1924 Lady Leconfield officially opened the park in memory of her son. Apart from Regy’s name being commemorated on the St Wulfran War Memorial at Grantham and in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords, his name is also inscribed on the Petworth War Memorial which stands outside the parish church of St Mary.

  Generally speaking, war memorials before the two conflicts with the Boers in South Africa, were designed to celebrate victory in battle. With the advent of the citizen volunteer, particularly in the second South African War of 1899–1902, this trend was to some degree reversed with the first ever mass raising of war memorials in this country. In 1918, after the Great War, an event which saw the creation of the largest army ever fielded by a British government, war memorials appeared on village greens, market squares and churchyards in every town, village and hamlet in the UK. Numerous memorials along the lines of the Wyndham Memorial Park were built and funded by those with more wealth, who perhaps envisaged a more lavish and communal memorial to their loved ones.

  Such was the case with the Lee Steere family at Ockley when they designed and paid for the village hall in 1923 as a permanent memorial to John and the others of Ockley who were killed in the conflict. The hall still serves its community to this day and inside there is a large painting of John in the uniform of a Grenadier Guards officer, below which is a plaque which reads:

  ‘To the dear and honoured memory of John Lee Steere, Grenadier Guards, and his cousins. Died 1914: Philip Van Neck, Grenadier Guards, Charles Van Neck, Northumberland Fusiliers and Cholmeley Symes-Thompson, Grenadier Guards. 1915, A. Phipps Turnbull, 10th Light Horse, West Australia; 1918, Edward A. Roberts, 44th Battalion, West Australia and, 1919, Chauncey Stigand, 1st Royal West Kent; who all fell in action.’

  Cousin Alexander Phipps Turnbull was a Second Lieutenant serving with the 10th Australian Light Horse Regiment when they were sent to Gallipoli in April 1915.4 The legendary 3rd Light Horse Brigade’s dismounted charge at The Nek on 7 August 1915 resulted in 372 casualties of which 234 were killed including Alexander Turnbull. Fellow Australian Private Edward Augustus Roberts was killed with the 44th Australian Infantry Battalion during the German offensive on 28 March 1918.5 Major Chauncey Hugh Stigand died in the Sudan attached to the Egyptian Army in December 1919.6 There is a further memorial to John in St Margaret’s Church at Ockley consisting of a marble mosaic in the chancel and a tablet on the south wall.

  In 1915 John’s mother commissioned the well-known portrait painter Sir Phillip Burne-Jones to paint a likeness of her son from a photograph. In order to provide some authenticity she also arranged through her sister, Grace Van Neck, to have his dress uniform delivered to Burne-Jones at his London address, presumably for the artist’s model to wear. Burne-Jones was the son of the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones who died in 1898 and was an established society painter of wealthy socialites. It appears from correspondence between Anna Lee Steere and Burne-Jones that he offered to paint the portrait but the final work was rejected by Anna. In an intriguing letter dated 5 May 1915, Burne-Jones wrote to Anna apologizing for his failure in producing an acceptable likeness of John:

  ‘There does not seem anything for me to say, except to express my very real regret that I have failed so unhappily in the work I had such bright hopes about. Perhaps the sad and unusual circumstances may be some excuse for me … and in frankly telling me that I have not succeeded in recalling the face you loved, you have filled your part of the bargain.’

  There is a final instalment to the Lee Steere story. Twenty-Six years later, when the next generation donned uniform to complete what had been started in 1914, Flanders was destined to be the last resting place of another family member. Flying a Hurricane with 601 (City of London) Squadron, Flying Officer Charles Augustus Lee Steere was posted missing on 27 May 1940 while taking part in one of the many air operations that covered the BEF’s retreat to Dunkirk. He is the only British airman buried at the Oostkerke Communal Cemetery, a short forty minute car journey from his young cousin at Zillebeke churchyard.

  John Lee Steere’s cousin, Cholmeley Symes-Thompson, is remembered with a tablet on the south wall of the nave at the church of St Michael at Finmere in Oxfordshire. His name is also on the village war memorial. The Symes--Thompson family is still remembered in the village to this day despite having finally moved in 1967 and although the estate was sold off, the house is still standing, albeit unoccupied and in a poor state of repair. Cholmeley’s parents, Edmund who died in 1906 and Elizabeth who died in 1920, are buried in the village churchyard, as is his wife Grace, who died in 1940. Grace’s headstone also records the death of Sybil Laura Lassen in 2005, the small child that Cholmeley last held in his arms just before he embarked for France in August 1914.

  Many families were inconsolably torn apart by the deaths of their sons. As heir to the Petersen shipping empire, William’s death in November 1914 was a severe blow to his parents. His death at Ypres may well have been an underlying factor in his mother’s tragic death in 1918 by drowning in her bath at the family residence at Portland Place. Known for his prodigious work ethic, Sir William Petersen dealt with this double tragedy by immersing himself further in his work; which probably contributed to his sudden heart att
ack in June 1925 while in Canada. The previous year his island home on Eigg had been totally destroyed by fire and this, and the fact he had been ill for a while before his death, could only have exacerbated matters. His body was brought back to England on board the SS Melitia accompanied by the Canadian Prime Minister’s secretary. His memorial service was held at the Church of St Clement Dane in London. Second Lieutenant William Petersen’s name is to be found on the Glenalmond School War Memorial which was unveiled in 1922 at the east end of the school chapel. Designed by Sir John Ninian Comper the memorial contains the names of the 157 old boys of the school who lost their lives in the Great War.

  Another family which was shattered by the death of their soldier son was the Stocks family. Michael Stocks and his cousin Francis Levita are commemorated on the rather dramatic broken column in the churchyard of St Helens at Boultham, Lincoln that was erected by Michael’s maternal grandfather Sir George Ellison. Francis was the only son of the Levita family; the broken column indicating he was the last of the male line. The inscription on three sides of the monument is dedicated to three members of the family: George Paget Ellison who, as a Captain in the 9th Lancers, died of enteric fever in 1902 at Kroonstad in South Africa, Francis Ellison Levita and Michael George Stocks.

  I can only imagine the despair at the Gibson household in Ilford when the news of William’s death arrived by post. The long casualty lists that featured daily in the pages of the press would have already listed several of William’s friends, prompting fears for their own son, particularly as the London Scottish had already lost heavily at Messines in October. The family was a large one and apart from William’s father, John, who was employed as a Managing Clerk at a local Ilford tea merchant, four of the grown-up Gibson children still lived at home along with William’s mother, Janet. She must have had her heart in her mouth when she waved goodbye to William’s younger brothers, John and Sydney Gibson. John joined the 22nd Battalion London Regiment and Sydney the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and in 1918 it was only John who returned home to 38, Mayfair Avenue. Sydney was killed serving with the 18th Battalion on 15 September 1916 on the Somme battlefield and as his body was not recovered his name was added to those on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing.7 Anxious that Sydney should have a headstone his parents had his name engraved on William’s headstone at Zillebeke. At the London Scottish Regimental Headquarters at Horseferry Road in Westminster, William’s name is included on the huge memorial that surrounds the fireplace in the main hall.

  Walter Siewertsen’s death also affected his parents deeply and the family home displayed a photograph of him up until his mother died in March 1954. Walter’s father died heartbroken in 1946 and family legend has it that he was buried with Walter’s campaign medals. They are both buried in pauper’s graves at the City of London Cemetery at Manor Park. The name of James Whitfield, the Coldstream NCO who was killed ten days after Walter Siewertsen, is inscribed on the Medomsley War Memorial that was unveiled in March 1921 by Stanley Robert Vereker, who later became the 7th Viscount Gort. Strangely, the memorial cross was first erected in a field on the outskirts of the village but was eventually relocated in the centre of the village near the church. The Whitfield house in the row of terraces where the family lived still stands but the Medomsley Pit was closed in 1972.

  In 1914 the St George family was living at the Ashorne Hill estate near Leamington Spa in Warwickshire when they received the news that Howard had been killed near Ypres. Inconsolable at her son’s death Evelyn St George used her immense wealth to bequeath a number of memorials to commemorate his memory. The first of these was inside the church of St George the Martyr at Newbold Pacey where Evelyn paid for a wall plaque to be erected. Howard is also remembered on the village war memorial, but these were small tokens of remembrance in comparison to those that followed. One of the more noteworthy was the Ivan Mestrovic wood carving ‘Descent from the Cross’, which was exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1915. The significance of the relief in the context of the war was not lost on Evelyn and she purchased the work directly from the artist. The Mestrovic relief recently sold at Sotheby’s for over £200,000. Evelyn was an enthusiastic and knowledgeable collector of art and before her death in 1936 she had amongst her collection several works by Cezanne, Van Gogh and El Greco. Apart from the stained glass window at Zillebeke church, she also financed the St George ward of the American Women’s War Relief Hospital at Oldway House, near Paignton in Devon.

  The culture of celebrating and honouring the war dead was very much part of the public school ethos. In the Great War between thirty-five and forty per cent of all officers from the leading public schools were decorated for gallantry and some twenty per cent were killed or died of wounds. Twenty-Six public schools had two or more recipients of the Victoria Cross with Eton and Harrow winning thirty-one between them. Over 3,500 Old Carthusians served in the Great War and by the end of 1914 the school chapel was no longer large enough to comfortably accommodate the growing numbers of boys and masters who had been killed in action. In 1917 a War Memorial Fund was inaugurated and postwar a new chapel, Memorial Chapel, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, was built in honour of the fallen. Their names are commemorated on stone panels set in the eastern half walls of the antechapel and included amongst them are Robert Rising and Alfred Schuster.

  Both Alfred’s brothers survived the war. Edgar began his military service in Salonika as a lieutenant and after contracting a severe bout of malaria was brought back to England in a very poor state. Eventually he was seconded in 1917 to work with the Medical Research Committee after some considerable string-pulling by the MPs Sir Samuel Scott and the Hon Waldorf Astor. After the war he remained part-time with the council until 1938. Edgar died in 1969. George Schuster arrived in France on 22 August 1915 to join the Oxfordshire Hussars. A series of staff appointments followed with the artillery, eventually culminating with an appointment at First Army Headquarters with the rank of major in 1918. He was awarded the Military Cross in the King’s Birthday Honours List in June 1918. In 1919 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and sent to North Russia with the Expeditionary Force as Chief Operational Staff Officer. A long and illustrious political career followed; he was knighted in 1925 and died aged 101 in 1982 at the family home at Nether Worton in Oxfordshire.

  Apart from the plaque inside Zillebeke church and the Charterhouse Roll of Honour, other memorials that were erected by the family to perpetuate Alfred’s memory were difficult to find. However, it was almost completely by accident that a stained glass window commissioned in his memory was found in the small church of St Brendan in the Devonshire village of Bredon. The inscription in the left light of the window reads, ‘Well done good and faithful servant. In memory of Alfred Schuster – Lieut 4th (Queen’s Own) Hussars’. In the right hand light is inscribed, ‘Enter thou unto the day of our Lord. Born 30th July 1883 Killed in action near Ypres 20th November 1914.’ We shall probably never know why the rather remote village of Bredon was chosen, maybe there was a family connection there, or it was a place he was particularly fond of, especially as he regularly hunted with the Devon and Somerset Staghounds. It was a family connection that led to the second memorial. In the Nether Worton parish church of St James is a rectangular marble family tablet dedicated to Sir George Schuster’s son Richard who was killed in 1941 serving with the Middlesex Yeomanry and also to the uncle he never met, Alfred Schuster.

  The memorial to the fallen at Eton College takes the form of a striking bronze frieze in the Colonnade below Upper School which honours the 1,157 Old Etonians who died in the War. This is in addition to the War Memorial Chapel and the memorial plaques that are to be found on the walls of the Cloisters. The Cloisters provide a rather sombre, almost neo-classical backdrop to the seemingly endless names of war dead. On the left of the entrance are the names of Bernard Gordon Lennox, Michael Stocks, Carleton Tufnell, Chomeley Symes-Thompson and Harry Parnell on the Grenadier Guards memorial plaque.

  At Harrow Schoo
l the old boys are commemorated in the War Memorial Building which was completed in 1926 and contains the school Roll of Honour together with the VC banners commemorating the holders of the Victoria Cross. John Lee Steere’s cousin, Charles Hylton Van Neck, and Captain Norman Neill are remembered on the Harrow Roll of Honour. Norman Neill’s name is also amongst the thirty-nine men inscribed on the Merrow village War Memorial in Surrey. The Harrow School memorials to its dead include those of its former students who were killed in the Crimean War; in the school chapel there is a window over the door of the crypt to the memory of one of Richard Dawson’s soldier ancestors, Lieutenant Colonel Hon T Vesey Dawson, who was killed at Inkerman in 1854.

  I could find no memorial placed by the family, apart from the bells at Zillebeke Church, which remembers the name of Alexis de Gunzburg. However, the Holy Trinity Church at Windsor contains memorials to the Household Cavalry and Brigade of Guards. The chancel screen was specially made to remember those of the Household Cavalry who fell in the war and was unveiled by Lieutenant Colonel Tweedmouth on 6 October 1921. Alexis de Gunzburg, together with all those of the Household Cavalry and Brigade of Guards who fell in the Great War, is recorded in three books of remembrance.