Gloucestershire After The War

Discovering the county’s Arts and Crafts memorials of the First World War

- Kirsty Hartsiotis

It’s now 102 years since the end of the First World War, but we’re reminded of the war in nearly every city, town and village in the country by the memorials the grieving nation built. Many of those memorials were completed in and around 1920 and so are themselves reaching their centenaries.

As most places in the country needed them, war memorials became quite a business. There were pattern books of them, and most are variants on a theme: obelisks as in Cheltenham, cenotaphs as in Gloucester, memorial crosses, wall tablets and more.

However, many of the memorials in Gloucestershire are different. An unusual number of them were made by designers of the Arts and Crafts movement. I’ve counted nearly 50 in total, some village memorials, some in churches and some to individuals. Gloucestershire was a hotbed of Arts and Crafts designers, and it makes sense to use the designers you have to hand, although, as we shall see, this course didn’t always run smooth.

Architect and designer Ernest Gimson had been based at Sapperton with his friends Sidney and Ernest Barnsley since the 1890s. Between them they contributed three war memorials in Gloucestershire. Gimson’s is one of the finest, sited in the churchyard at Fairford. Sadly, Gimson died in 1919 while the memorial was only in the planning stages. It was up to Sidney to push things through. The question, of course, was cost. The fee for the project was £300. The parish had to raise this money by subscription, as with most war memorials. Money was often a problem – the disparity between the ambition of the designer and committee and the money available.