12 November 2022

The war that changed families
but never put an end to all wars

The War Memorial on Horsefair Green in Stony Stratford, designed by the architect Cecil Greenwood Hare (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Patrick Comerford

Tomorrow is Remembrance Sunday (13 November 2022), yesterday was Armistice Day (11 November 2022), and I hope to be at the memorial service at the war memorial in Stony Stratford on Sunday afternoon.

The War Memorial in Stony Stratford is at the east end Horsefair Green, where Calverton Road meets Silver Street. The striking yet simple memorial is six metres tall and built of Doulting stone. It takes the form of a foliated cross a on top of a tall column, with a bronze sword of sacrifice, a square plinth and a five-stepped circular base.

The people of Stony Stratford had considered a number of options for a memorial, including a library and clock chimes. A proposal for a cross was agreed, the foundation stone was laid in May 1920, and the memorial was unveiled by Thomas Francis Fremantle (1862-1956), 3rd Lord Cottesloe, on 21 June 1920.

The architect of the memorial was Cecil Greenwood Hare (1875-1932). He was a pupil of the Gothic Revival architect George Frederick Bodley and later went into partnership with him. When Bodley died in 1907, Hare took over the practice of Bodley and Hare.

Hare designed many war memorials after World War I, including those in Castle Donington, Walford, Tutbury and Ampthill. His work as an architect in this area also includes the chancel in the Church of Saint Mary and Saint Giles, Stony Stratford (1928).

The builders were Woodbridge & Simpson of Oxford, and the memorial was built at a cost of £360, met by public subscription. The war memorial garden was completed in 1922.

The memorial has 92 names for World War I and 18 for World War II. The additional plaque naming 18 men who died in World War II, was unveiled in 1950 by Major W Scott-Evans.

Names from World War I on the war memorial in Stony Stratford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Any time I look at the memorial I am struck by how young many of these men were, by the names of brothers who died within weeks of each other, by the names of those lived on High Street where I live too, by those who died on Thessaloniki where my grandfather had been stationed until he was sent home with malaria in 1916, by those who have no known grave, and by the poignancy of the names of at least two men who died weeks after the war had come to an end.

Herbert Church of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, died of his wounds in Thessaloniki on 22 May 1917. He was 30, and he is buried in the Lembet Road Military Cemetery in Thessaloniki. Two weeks later, his younger brother, George Church, a private in the Duke of Edinburgh’s (Wiltshire Regiment), died of his wounds in Flanders on 8 June 1917, aged 27. Their parents, Thomas and Ada Church, lived at 129 High Street.

Alfred [John] Mackerness was a private in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, and his parents, William and Jane Mackerness, had lived at 50 High Street, Stony Stratford. Shortly after volunteering in February 1915, he was sent to the Western Front, where he fought at the Battles of Ypres, Loos, Albert and the Somme. He was 31 when he died at Cambrai on 21 March 1918 during the allies’ retreat.

RP Parker from 146 High Street, Stony Stratford was an RAF air mechanic at Thessaloniki Aircraft Park. Although the war ended on 11 November 1918, he died on 10 December 1918, aged 21. He is buried in Mikra British Cemetery in Kalamaria, 8 km south of Thessaloniki.

William Arthur Tombs, a private in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, was 20 when he died in Thessaloniki on 15 October 1918. He is buried in Doiran Military Cemetery in northern Greece, and sometimes I think of his name when I go for a walk in Tombs Meadows by the banks of the River Ouse.

The brothers James John Arles and William Arles were from York Road. William was 29 when he died of wounds during the Gallipoli landings on the hospital ship HMHS Soudan on 22 August 1915. James died on 30 January 1916 after being sent home to England with his wounds.

Joseph J Sprittles, a sergeant in the Duke of Edinburgh’s (Wiltshire regiment), was killed in action at the Somme on 7 October 1918. His brother Frederick James Sprittles was a sergeant in the Canadian Infantry. He was 25 when he died on 20 February 1919. He is buried in France. When he died, World War I had ended more three months earlier.

The ‘Salonika Campaign’ was fought in northern Greece, Serbia and Albania from 1915 to 1918. The campaign began on 5 October 1915 with the landing of the 10th (Irish) Division and French 156th Division at the port of Thessaloniki from Gallipoli and France.

British and Irish, French, Greek, Italian, Russian and Serbian contingents fought alongside colonial troops from the Indian subcontinent, Africa and Indochina.

By 1917, a multinational allied force that was 500,000-strong faced the Bulgarian army and German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish units, totalling 300,000. The front line stretched from Albania to the mouth of the River Struma in Greece.

As well as battle casualties, the force suffered severely from malaria, with about 160,000 hospital admissions in three years, almost equal to the fighting strength of the force. The health of many men was permanently ruined, and many the emotional and economic fabric of innumerable families had been torn apart.

As I was poring over the list of the 92 names of men from Stony Stratford who died in World War I, I counted at least 12 who had been killed in Thessaloniki – a large proportion from what was then a small market town in north Buckinghamshire.

I wondered how many would recognise Stony Stratford today, with growth and changes it has experienced since the development of Milton Keynes. I thought of how the lives of many families – parents, wives, siblings, children, girlfriends, even former schoolfriends and work colleagues – had been damaged irreversibly. And I wondered how many of them may have come across my grandfather, Stephen Comerford (1867-1921), who was in Thessaloniki at the same time.

Did they share the same billets, sit at the same tables, travel in the same units, fight in the same battles, catch malaria at the same time, share coffee or a cigarette, share their fears or share their anxieties about those back home?

The ’Salonika Campaign’ also transformed political life in Greece and contributed to shaping the modern Greek state. Pro-Venizelist army officers, with the support of the allies, launched an uprising in Thessaloniki in 1916. This led to a pro-allied temporary government, the Provisional Government of National Defence, headed by Eleftherios Venizelos. It controlled northern Greece and the Aegean, against the official government of the King in Athens. Ever since, Thessaloniki has been known to Greeks as η Συμπρωτεύουσα (i symprotévousa, the ‘co-capital’.

Most of the city was destroyed on 18 August 1917 by a single fire accidentally sparked by French soldiers. The fire left 72,000 people homeless out of a population of about 270,000. The Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917 destroyed almost half of the city’s Jewish homes and livelihoods. Later, With the city expanded enormously with the arrival of Greek refugees from Asia Minor in unexpectedly large numbers.

The ‘Salonika Campaign’ remains one of the least studied and explored parts of World War I, yet it totally transformed Greece’s second city, the life of my grandfather and the future of his family. On Sunday afternoon, I shall also think on how it irreversibly changed the life of countless families in Stony Stratford – and how the ‘war to end all wars’ never put an end to all wars.

Names from World War II on the war memorial in Stony Stratford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Praying in Ordinary Time with USPG
and the poetry of TS Eliot:
Saturday 12 November 2022

‘The child wonders at the Christmas Tree’ TS Eliot … a Christmas card with the Church of Saint Mary and Saint George Church, Comberford, in a watercolour by Freda Morgan (2008)

Patrick Comerford

This is Remembrance weekend: yesterday was Remembrance Day, and tomorrow is Remembrance Sunday. Before this day gets busy, I am taking some time this morning for reading, prayer and reflection.

Throughout this week, I have been reflecting in these ways:

1, One of the readings for the morning;

2, A reflection based on the poetry of TS Eliot … ‘The Waste Land’ was first published 100 years ago, in 1922;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary, ‘Pray with the World Church.’

‘... the child/For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel/Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree/Is not only a decoration, but an angel’ (TS Eliot) … an angel atop a Christmas Tree in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Luke 18: 1-8 (NRSVA):

1 Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. 2 He said, ‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.” 4 For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming”.’ 6 And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 8 I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’

‘The child wonders at the Christmas Tree’ TS Eliot … a Christmas Tree with Christmas presents on the floor, in Castle Durrow, Co Laois (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,’ by TS Eliot: a reflection

Throughout this week, from Monday to Friday, I have been reflecting each morning on TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ first published 100 years ago in 1922.

It is still six weeks to Christmas. But already many of the Christmas decorations are up in Stony Stratford, and the anticipation has begun in the build-up towards switching on the Christmas lights in the town two weeks from now (26 November 2022).

Many shop fronts have Christmas themes in the windows, cards and Christmas baubles are on sale, and some people are already planning their Christmas trees.

So, following this week’s reflections on ‘The Waste Land,’ my choice of a poem this morning is ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,’ by TS Eliot.

Eliot’s poem ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’ was first published on 26 October 1954 as part of a newer series of his ‘Ariel Poems’ by Faber & Faber, and was illustrated by David Jones. This poem is numbered A66 in Gallup’s bibliography of Eliot’s works.

Christmas has a significance throughout Eliot’s work, not only in the Ariel poems, but in his play Murder in the Cathedral, where Thomas à Becket preaches his Christmas sermon.

The four earlier Ariel poems – ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927), ‘A Song for Simeon’ (1928), ‘Animula’ (1929) and ‘Marina’ (1930) – are Eliot’s first poems of declared Christian belief and were published in successive years as illustrated Christmas greetings by his London publishers and employers Faber & Gwyer (later Faber and Faber). They are severe and rigorous examinations of the significance of Christmas. The original four could hardly be described as ‘festive.’

But ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’ relents a little in this respect. When I first read this poem, I thought it was a more lightweight and less serious poem than the other Ariel poems or other well-known poems by Eliot, such as ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), ‘Ash Wednesday’ (1930), and the poems in ‘The Four Quartets’ (1935-1942) Yet, in many ways, this poem is marked by its wry understatement.

This poem is much later and is less well-known than ‘Journey of the Magi’ or ‘A Song for Simeon’ (1928). In those poems, Eliot presents the Nativity not as a joyous event but in the context of the ‘bitter agony’ of death that is inextricably linked with this birth.

The speaker in ‘Journey of the Magi’ is one of the Magi, now elderly, for whom Christ’s birth represents his own death but who is uncertain of the significance of what he has witnessed.

In ‘A Song for Simeon’, the narrator is also an old man, Simeon, who sees, understands and embraces the significance of the new-born child presented in the Temple.

In many ways, ‘Animula’ is the bleakest of the Ariel poems, tracing human life from birth to death, while recalling in the child ‘taking pleasure/ In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.’

The fourth Ariel poem, ‘Marina,’ seems to be the most hopeful, in which Eliot recalls the ‘scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog,’ so that the boat carries hints of Christmas trees, as this life is only a foretaste, ‘Living to live in a world of time beyond me.’

Eliot returns to the Christmas theme in ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,’ and in this poem he turns to the meaning of Advent and Christmas that can so easily get lost in the panic about chores, turkeys and cards:

Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.


Here, we find echoes of Eliot’s opening words in ‘East Coker’, the second of ‘The Four Quartets’: ‘In my beginning is my end,’ and of his closing words: ‘In my end is my beginning.’

While ‘A Song for Simeon’ and ‘Journey of the Magi’ address specifically Biblical and theological themes, ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’ deals directly with the holiday season, and is filled with contemporary observations of popular devotions and rituals that we all love at this time of the year.

By the time he wrote this poem, Eliot was 66 years old, but he imagines himself as a more elderly man looking back at the Christmases of his childhood, recapturing his own childhood memories as he anticipates Christmas morning.

Eliot seems to strike the appropriate tone when he discusses the proper celebration and meaning of Christmas. He advocates the innocence and simplicity of a sentimental celebration of Christmas, filled with a beautiful tree, a bountiful feast, and new toys. The spirit of the season is not idolatry, but is a truly Christian ‘happiness and cheer.’ This is a season of cheer and goodwill, a season filled with the warmth and joy that Christ’s coming into the world should inspire in a loveless world that is in need of saving.

Here we read Eliot’s last poetic comments on the mystery of the incarnation and on the mystery of life itself. The same mystery that in majesty creates the child’s wonder also brings the soul and the world to judgment.

The first sentence of the poem introduces several possible attitudes towards Christmas, of whom the childish is the one Eliot wants us to give priority. The second sentence, which constitutes the rest of the poem – thanks to three colons, a semicolon, and several sets of parentheses – tells the reader how Christmas should be viewed and experienced.

Eliot now pictures vividly the various trappings of Christmas and the wonder they should inspire from childhood onward, while warning against ‘bored habituation,’ fatigue, tedium, awareness of death, consciousness of failure and

... the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit.


Then, in parentheses, he recalls his own memories of Saint Lucy’s Day, which he may have been part of his American childhood experiences, but is difficult for readers in this part of Europe to grasp. He clearly wants to link the celebration of this day and its inclusion of children with the celebration of Christmas, and paints a visual image by evoking the flame of light in darkness and of brave martyrdom when he speaks of ‘her carol, and her crown of fire.’

Saint Lucy was a young woman in the third century who maintained unflinching faith in the face of martyrdom. Her name comes from the Latin for ‘light,’ and some traditions say she was miraculously protected from being burned alive. On her feast day on 13 December, Scandinavian girls dress as Saint Lucy, wearing crowns of candles and singing carols about her.

Eliot closes the poem with a reminder of the true significance of Christmas and the future. Christ’s birth leads to his death and resurrection, and to the founding of the Church, when ‘fear came upon every soul.’ His first coming at his incarnation also foreshadows his second coming in judgment:

Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.


‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’ was published in 1954 and illustrated by David Jones

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees by TS Eliot.

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish – which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.

The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,

So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):

So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

‘I remember also with gratitude / St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire’(TS Eliot) … an image of Saint Lucy on the Campo di San Geremia door of the Chiesa di S. Geremia e Lucia in Venice (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

The Collect:

Almighty Father,
whose will is to restore all things
in your beloved Son, the King of all:
govern the hearts and minds of those in authority,
and bring the families of the nations,
divided and torn apart by the ravages of sin,
to be subject to his just and gentle rule;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Post Communion Prayer:

God of peace,
whose Son Jesus Christ proclaimed the kingdom
and restored the broken to wholeness of life:
look with compassion on the anguish of the world,
and by your healing power
make whole both people and nations;
through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Additional Collect

God, our refuge and strength,
bring near the day when wars shall cease
and poverty and pain shall end,
that earth may know the peace of heaven
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Collect on the Eve of the Second Sunday before Advent:

Heavenly Father, whose blessed Son was revealed
to destroy the works of the devil
and to make us the children of God and heirs of eternal life:
grant that we, having this hope,
may purify ourselves even as he is pure;
that when he shall appear in power and great glory
we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom;
where he is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The theme in the USPG Prayer Diary this week has been ‘A New Commandment.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday by Sue Claydon, chair of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship.

The USPG Prayer Diary invites us to pray today in these words:

Let us pray that our hearts may be open towards our neighbour. And for those who persecute us, or intend, or would like to harm us – then we are directly following Christ’s commandment. Help us to work together for the common good.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

TS Eliot’s former offices with Faber and Faber at 24 Russell Square … ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’ was published in 1954 as part of a newer series of his ‘Ariel Poems’ by Faber & Faber (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

‘The child wonders at the Christmas Tree’ TS Eliot … the Christmas Tree in the Rectory in Askeaton, Co Limerick, last Christmas (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)