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?

When Florence’s father, Arthur Charles Trevor, was nine months old, he and his six elder siblings and their pregnant mother, Mary, formed part of the 1842 British retreat from Kabul.

The evacuation was also known as the Disaster in Afghanistan, or the Massacre of Elphinstone’s Army, and was triggered by the killing of Arthur Charles Trevor’s father.

Lest we forget

In 1839, Britain had invaded Afghanistan to reinstate an unpopular but pro-British ruler. A force of British army and East India Company regiments, composed of British and Indian soldiers, settled in Kabul with their families and servants to form a permanent community. There was resistance to the puppet ruler and to the permanent British presence, and in December 1841, after repeated violence, the East India Company political agent and his military aide Captain Robert Salusbury Trevor were assassinated.

In response, on 1 January 1842 the British commander, Major-General Elphinstone decided to evacuate his whole force of 4,500 military personnel and 12,000 camp followers (family and servants; British, Indian & Afghan) by marching in blizzards through a narrow pass in hostile country to Jalalabad.

It was insane. Of the 16,500 souls, only an army surgeon and a few Indian soldiers straggled into Jalalabad over the following weeks. Just over a hundred British soldiers and European women and children were spared for ransom by the hostile Afghan commander. A few hundred Indian soldiers returned to Kabul, where they were enslaved. At least 12,000 soldiers and their families and employees, many of them women and children, were slaughtered or died of cold and hunger in the snow. Their bones litter the hillside to this day.

The British hostages taken back to Kabul for ransom included Mary Trevor and her seven children. Her eighth child who was born in captivity but died at five months old.

On 17 September 1842, a large British and East India Company “army of retribution” freed the hostages, slaughtering Afghan civilians and laying waste to villages along its way. By 1843 the puppet leader had long been assassinated – and Afghanistan was back under the rule of the emir the British had deposed in 1839.

None of this was the doing of young Arthur Lewis Jenkins, of course. But he grew up knowing the history – and knowing his great-grandmother Mary Trevor, who outlived him. As a schoolboy at Marlborough College he was a member in the Officer Training Corps. Given the weight of family tradition both sides, it is hardly surprising that when the First World War broke out in August 1914, he rushed to serve King and country. Arthur was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry in October 1914, aged 22. He was made Machine Gun Officer in the regiment and posted first to India, then to Aden. In 1915, his 19-year-old brother, Evan Meredith Jenkins, who had been serving in France, joined him in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. In early 1917, the regiment was posted to Egypt and Palestine, where the Royal Flying Corps was in action. Arthur volunteered for this exciting new force, getting his wings in July 1917 and being transferred to England in the August. He was posted to Helperby, North Yorkshire, for night flying work while awaiting a move to the Western Front. It was in Yorkshire that, on New Year’s Eve 1917, Arthur was killed in a night flying accident. He was 25.

Florence, by now widowed and living on Kew Road, Richmond with Arthur’s sister Elinor and the younger children, brought him home and buried him in the family plot in Richmond Cemetery. So Arthur’s grave is listed by the Commonwealth War Grave Commission but does not have the standard CWGC headstone.

www.cwgc.org/find-records/find-war-dead/casualty-details/401977/arthur-lewis-jenkins/

So many of those lost in the slaughter lived on only in their loved ones’ memories, and in the brusque official paperwork of their birth, death and military life. But for Arthur we’re lucky enough to have much more.

Photos show us a genial, kindly face, sporting the moustache favoured by young officers to lend them years.

There’s also a lovely image of him here, in his sheepskin leggings next to his kite: kentww1.com/lieutenant-arthur-lewis-jenkins/

His Commanding Officer in the DCLI wrote: “I was a great blow to all of us who served with your son to hear of his having been killed while night flying on duty; he was such a good officer and so popular with all who knew him . . . Whenever I think of him I am reminded of the very gallant way he led his machine-gun section in action on 7 Dec. 1916. He set a very fine example and his men were prepared to follow him anywhere.”

His Squadron Commander described him as, “A very gifted man and a great friend with us all.”

And we have Arthur’s own words, for he was one of the Great War’s poets.

His volume of poetry, Forlorn Adventurers, was published in 1918. This poem from it appeared first in an anthology of war poets, just six weeks before his death.

The Spirit of Womanhood

1. Sending
When as of old the Spartan mother sent
Her best beloved to the perilous field,
One charge she laid upon him ere he went:
“Return, my son, or with or on thy shield.”
Even so we, with anguish unrevealed
By eyes o'er-bright and lips to laughter lent,
Sent forth our men to battle, nor would yield
To tears by pride's fierce barriers hardly pent.

So when they fight and all the world goes red,
No memories athwart their souls shall come
That might unman them in the hour of need,
But such brave glances veiling hearts that bleed
As those old mothers turned upon their dead
On comrades' shoulders borne triumphant home.

2. Rebellion
Was it for this, dear God, that they were born,
These sons of ours, the beautiful and brave,
To fall far from us, leaving us forlorn,
Scarce knowing even if they found a grave?
It comforts not that cheerfully they gave
Their lives for England ; nay, to us, outworn
With grief, it skills but that they could not save
Themselves in saving her from shame and scorn.

Cometh no answer from the pitiless skies
To us in darkness for our lost ones weeping;
Their place is empty, empty as our hearts,
Or as our prayers unheeded, nor departs
The instant anguish: we but hush our cries
Lest they should trouble our belovèd sleeping.

3. Peace
Surely the bitterness of death is past,
Drained to the dregs the waters of despair,
Yea, pride on our belovèd shall outlast
All poor desiring for the things that were.
The men we wedded and the sons we bare
Died valiantly and for the right stood fast:
Yet 'twas our blood that made them strong to dare,
Our hearts that in the battle-scale were cast.

Light of our eyes for all the years to be,
Fruit of our dreams, our dearest selves fulfilled,
These have we laid as gifts on Freedom's altar
With blinding tears, yet all ungrudgingly;
Henceforth our high hearts shall not fail nor falter,
Though in them gladness be for ever stilled.

A. L. JENKINS

Arthur’s poetry speaks repeatedly of the past.

Reading it, and learning about his background, has helped me better understand why he felt an imperative to join up. I think his family history made it a matter of duty and honour for him to serve, no matter what the cost.

Happy Warriors

Clear came the call; they leapt to arms and died
As in old days the heroes prayed to do;
Great though our sorrow, greater yet our pride,
O, gallant hearts in you.

Surely they sleep content, our valiant dead,
Fallen untimely in the savage strife;
They have but followed whither duty led,
To find a fuller life.

Who then, are we to grudge the bitter price
Of this our land inviolate through the years,
Or mar the splendour of their sacrifice
That is too high for tears?

God grant we fail not at the test—that when
We take, mayhap, our places in the fray,
Come life, come death, to quit ourselves like men,
The peers of such as they.

A. L. JENKINS

Fascinating and very moving thread. Thank you @TressiliansStone.

We will remember them

Oh apologies, a correction; I have confused the generations. Young Arthur’s great-grandmother Mary Trevor did not, after all, outlive him: his grandfather Sir Arthur Charles Trevor did. Sir Arthur would have had little memory of his babyhood experiences in 1842, of course, but his elder siblings would have remembered keenly. They clustered in London towards the ends of their lives, and our young Arthur would certainly have known at least four of these survivors of the retreat.

What a lovely and interesting read this thread is! Thank you TressiliansStone and Cinnamon35

We will remember them.

On Remembrance Sunday here's a poem from Arthur's sister Elinor, to whom he was very close.

It might be about Arthur or Evan, but it might also be about Arthur & Elinor's Uncle Harry (Florence's youngest brother) who was killed in France, aged 26, shortly before this poem was published in 1915.

The Last Evening

Round a bright isle, set in a sea of gloom,
We sat together, dining,
And spoke and laughed even as in better times
Though each one knew no other might misdoubt
The doom that marched moment by moment nigher,
Whose couriers knocked on every heart like death,
And changed all things familiar to our sight
Into strange shapes and grieving ghosts that wept.

The crimson-shaded light
Shed in the garden roses of red fire
That burned and bloomed on the decorous limes.
The hungry night that lay in wait without
Made blind, blue eyes against the silver's shining
And waked the affrighted candles with its breath
Out of their steady sleep, while round the room
The shadows crouched and crept.

Among the legions of beleaguering fears,
Still we sat on and kept them still at bay,
A little while, a little longer yet,
And wooed the hurrying moments to forget
What we remembered well,
—Till the hour struck—then desperately we sought
And found no further respite—only tears
We would not shed, and words we might not say.

We needs must know that now the time was come
Yet still against the strangling foe we fought,
And some of us were brave and some
Borrowed a bubble courage nigh to breaking,
And he that went, perforce went speedily
And stayed not for leave-taking.

But even in going, as he would dispel
The bitterness of incomplete good-byes,
He paused within the circle of dim light,
And turned to us a face, lit seemingly
Less by the lamp than by his shining eyes.

So, in the radiance of his mastered fate,
A moment stood our soldier by the gate
And laughed his long farewell—
Then passed into the silence and the night.