Anyone going near Richmond Cemetery (Surrey) before Remembrance Sunday?

[TressiliansStone]

Over the last few years, I've had little a project of trying to get a poppy cross onto each war memorial where family members are commemorated.

Last year, an extremely kind MNer took one of the crosses to Liberton kirkyard for me.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/scotsnet/4068115-Anyone-going-near-Liberton-War-Memorial-before-Remembrance-Sunday

This year I'm trying to do two people buried in the Cemetery attached to Richmond Park. I write a short biography on each cross, and have found a photo for one them.

Might anyone be willing to place the crosses if I posted them to you?

Yes, I am local and very happy to do this. Please PM me and I’ll give you details of where to send

Oh Cinnamon, that's wonderful! Thank you so very much!

(Might take me a moment to sort out PMing in this name.)

Sorted.

I'll get this underway over the next week, and write a bit about them here too.

Although they died in WWI, I've realised both men buried in Richmond have poignant connections to other wars – each in its own way heartbreaking.

Thats such a lovely thing to do.

@Cinnamon35

Yes, I am local and very happy to do this. Please PM me and I’ll give you details of where to send

Lovely!!!

Nice thread!

Ah I'm afraid it may be a three-hanky job by the end.

I want to blub and hide just thinking about it. You'll see why anon.

Right, those are safely in the post. Should be with you in good time for 11 November.

Remembrance Sunday itself is 14 November this year.

Thank you so much for this.

I wish we could have a button to 'like' posts. This is such a lovely gesture

(Meant to say, apologies for the very re-used packaging. It's what I had available that would fit through a letterbox – don't want to cause lovely cinnamon hassle on delivery!)

I’m sorry I didn’t manage to get down to Richmond Cemetery before today, but at least they are there well before Remembrance Day. I couldn’t find poor Arthur so he’s on the memorial, but I tracked down Jimmy and left his cross on his grave. Will try and attach some photos now.

Tressilians thank you very much for letting me be part of your project. It felt really special.

If anyone is local to Richmond you can spot both within area Z of Richmond cemetery.

What a really lovely thing to do

Oh thank you so very much, Cinnamon, on the memorial is lovely!

It's unusual that there's even been a choice between memorial and grave, because of course the majority died overseas. But this year I chose two servicemen who died in the UK (of war-related causes).

I'm so grateful for your help, and for the beautiful photos.

I said I'd post a bit more about the men. One is my family member; the other someone I was researching for other reasons.

So here's a little about JC Norval, of whose gravestone Cinnamon has taken that lovely photo.

James Charles Norval was born in 1895 in Orange Free State (now South Africa). He came from a Scottish family who had arrived in the Cape of Good Hope as indentured workers in 1817, become farmers along the Orange River, and founded the hamlet of Norvalspont at the river crossing. They married into other settler families on both sides of the Orange River, which formed the boundary between the Cape Colony (British) and the Orange Free State (Boer). Towards the end of the century, some joined the gold rush to the Transvaal Republic (Boer) which eventually kicked off the Anglo-Boer War in 1899.

All of which goes to explain how Jimmy Charles Norval, age 6, found himself interned in a British concentration camp at Norvalspont in 1901.

The Anglo-Boer War concentration camps for white people were not intended as work or extermination camps, being more akin to refugee camps – as was indeed their official title. However the refugees were knowingly created by the British scorched earth policy, which cleared the territory of civilians on whom the Boer guerillas depended and burned farmsteads to the ground. Conditions in the camps were infamously bad, with poor hygiene, lack of tents and severe food shortages. The death rate among internees prompted condemnation of the British government across the world and by many within the UK.

Norvalspont was one of the better camps, but in May 1901, six weeks after their arrival, Jimmy’s mother died there of pneumonia. She was followed three weeks later by her own mother, Jimmy’s grandmother. In all Jimmy lost well over a dozen members of his extended family in the camps.

Jimmy’s father, a gold speculator, was recorded as “on commando” while the family were interned, ie fighting as a Boer against the British.

When the First World War came, Jimmy Charles Norval answered the call for volunteers to fight on the side of the British.

In 1914, the Union of South Africa was a dominion of the British Empire (like Canada & Australia), so was automatically covered by Britain’s declaration of war with Germany. Much of the white population and some of the black had fought on the Boer side. Black South Africans were heavily discriminated against and had been the direct targets of some of British wars. In the Anglo-Boer War, some black people had been interned with their white employers, while tens of thousands were interned in separate black camps and forced labour camps in even more parlous conditions.

So South Africa in 1914 was a country where much of the population had reason to dislike Britain. Yet prime minister Louis Botha and defence minister Jan Smuts donned the uniform they’d fought against and raised more than 250,000 volunteer South African troops of all races for the British and Allied cause, including 83,000 black volunteers. It was an extraordinary turnout from a population of six million people.

Poor boy, just 22. I’m glad we are all thinking of him and Arthur.

Jimmy had followed family tradition to become a cattle farmer. He enlisted as a Gunner in the South African Field Artillery Reinforcements on 20 April 1917. On 8 July he embarked on the troopship HMT “Eastern” for Egypt, where he became ill. By February 1918 he was lying seriously ill in the Red Cross Hospital in Giza. He was not pronounced out of danger until June, whereupon he was transferred to the UK. He was readmitted to hospital in July with a diagnosis of valvular heart disease, but he may also have been suffering from the 1918 influenza. He died on 7 November 1918 at the South African Hospital in Richmond Park: four days before the Armistice in the war he had crossed the world to fight.

The message engraved on his headstone (just visible in Cinnamon’s photo) was requested by his big sister Rensi, who had been 11 years old when she’d had to take care of her little brother in the camp.

It reads, “Jimmy dear boy Greater love hath no man”.

This brought a tear to my eye.
A lovely thing to do and so kind of cinnamon to help with your request.

Lest we forget ♡

And a little about the other lad buried in Richmond.

By coincidence, Arthur too has a backstory interwoven with the British Empire, although his background couldn’t have been more different to Jimmy’s.

Arthur Lewis Jenkins was born in 1892, into Welsh and Indian Raj families. His father’s family, from Llangadog, Carmarthenshire, were dedicated Liberal Party activists for whom public service was a thread of their daily lives. Many, especially Arthur’s aunts, were heavily involved in women’s rights and the development of girls’ education – from Ragged Schools to the founding of Somerville College, Oxford. Aunt Nellie Jenkins married the newspaper editor and MP, William Llewelyn Williams; Aunt Kate, “an ardent educationist and politician,” died being hit by a bus on Whitehall as she was leaving the home of her friend, Mrs Lloyd George, at 11 Downing Street; Aunt Annie married a Bristol soap manufacturer and philanthropist, Herbert Thomas, and the couple continued the work of Herbert’s first wife’s sister, the educational reformer Mary Carpenter. As Liberals it is possible they were among those protesting against the camps in which Jimmy Charles Norval’s family died in the Anglo-Boer War, and WL Williams entirely opposed that War.

It was at Aunt Annie Thomas née Jenkins’ house in Bristol that Arthur Lewis Jenkins was born while his parents were on furlough from India.

Arthur’s father, Sir John Lewis Jenkins, had entered the Civil Service of India and there married Florence Mildred Trevor. The Trevors were one of the four families of whom Kipling said, “certain families serve India generation after generation, as dolphins follow in line across the open sea.” Some were civil servants, others were merchants and military. One of Florence’s uncles, Major-General William Spottiswood Trevor, was awarded a Victoria Cross for valour in Bhutan in 1865. This pales in comparison, however, with the part in military and geopolitical historical played by the same uncle and his siblings (including Florence’s father) as children.