Puttenham Church & War Memorial

I’m sure that someone thought they were being highly artistic, or exceedingly modern, or deferentially retrospective,…

…when they chose the typeface for the Great War names,…

…but the truth of the matter (in the background here, across the road, we see Duncan the Elder momentarily possessed by the spirit of Hare Krishna.  Baldrick, it might not surprise you to hear, has never been seen to be so animated.)…

…is that it’s just plain difficult to read.  Plain, actually, would have been good.

Let’s take a look inside the church.

This one’s for me because, although I don’t suppose I’ve mentioned it before, I like mountains and by extension mountaineers and the history of mountaineering (see below – part of the mountaineering library, and part of a guitar, too, come to that), and here’s a tragedy I knew nowt about.  Geoffrey Winthrop Young, incidentally, was an early pioneer of the sport of mountaineering, and a close friend of fellow-mountaineer George Mallory, whose desiccated body would eventually be found on Mount Everest in 1999 after his disappearance back in 1924 (did he fall on the way up, or on the way down – we still don’t know, and probably never will).  Winthrop Young would suffer the amputation of a leg at the knee following a shell explosion in the mountains of the Austro-Italian front in August 1917 where he, a conscientious objector, was working for an ambulance service.  He walked – as best he could – sixteen miles after the amputation to escape being captured by the Austrians, and after the war, refusing to let his disability end his mountaineering exploits, continued to climb in the Alps, summitting the Matterhorn eleven years later, in 1928.

Of the other mountaineers mentioned on the memorial, one, John Cornwallis Madan, later a lieutenant in the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, would be killed in action on 2nd March 1916 aged 27, his name now to be found on the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing.

Nice walled garden – bet that looked stunning a hundred and fifty years ago.

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