Great Dunmow War Memorial

[Neil Mackenzie]

Kate.

Thanks for such a great account of the Great Dumow memorial.

I have friends who live in Great Sampford so sometimes my route takes me past this memorial when I visit them. It is fascinating to hear the details of its creation.

Good luck with the research.

Neil

[KateJ]

Thank you everybody that has posted messages of support on this thread about my research into Dunmow War Memorial. I wasn’t sure if people were finding this interesting as only a few people have posted responses but as my “viewing” figures appear to be increasing I’ve had to assume that people were.

This research is very much “work in progress” hence the delay in posting the on-going information. I started researching this a couple of years ago but then, like all things, had to put it aside because of work/family commitments and didn’t even get the chance to write any of it up properly. A lot of the information I’ve been posting, I have scattered on bits of paper around my office at home. I’ve been spurred on by Passchendaele Archive’s request for photos of men killed in the 3rd Battle of Ypres to carry on researching and get this into some reasonable sense of order.

Some of the information I’m waiting to get back via photocopies/photographs from various archives and so am reliant on their “10 day turn around”. Please keep reading the thread – knowing that other people are enjoying reading it as much as I’m enjoying researching keeps me going!

Kate

[greatspywar]

Hi Kate,

I think you are an inspiring example of motivated research.

I look forward to the other results!!

Kind regards,

Jan

[KateJ]

The story of the Kemp brothers’ service for “king and country” has to end here. Like so many other millions of soldiers, they were “ordinary heroes” and were not awarded any medals so the evidence of them as soldiers is probably not in conventional military archives.

Behind every name on every memorial and every gravestone in every CWGC cemetery there are stories of men (and women) and their families. The brothers had 3 sisters and a brother all of whom survived the war, the last of which died in 1988 – long before I got involved in their brothers’ stories (or even knew of their existence). The family custodian has passed to me some evidence of the Kemp brothers but unfortunately there are not any letters home to mother nor photographs of them in uniform.

However, the Kemp have left their indelible mark on the town of Dunmow and so it is now local history that has to be used to unravel more of their story. As someone on the forum asked me, how is it that two men who were born in Tottenham (Middlesex) and enlisted in Yarmouth (Norfolk) ended up on a War Memorial in Dunmow (Essex)?

Below are two photographs of a road in Dunmow. The first I took on Monday morning of this week (whilst dodging the cars as it is no longer a sleepy road!) and the second was taken between 1905 and 1914. Wouldn’t it be great if I could tell you that the occupant of the second car was one of the Kemp brothers! Alas, unfortunately not – he has been identified as the local doctor, Dr Gardiner.

The road is called “Rosemary Lane” and it is a shortcut if you are driving from the direction of Thaxted/Saffron Walden towards Bishops Stortford/M11 and want to bypass Dunmow town centre. Both photos are looking up Rosemary Lane towards the direction of the town from a vantage point half way down the road. As you can see, not much has changed between the two photos (except street furniture & the dreaded double yellow lines).

[ian turner]

Kate,

Good job! This is the best we can do to give, if not some form of life at least some dignity, back to them and not leave them just as an unknown, fading name on a memorial.

Keep up the good work.

Ian

[KateJ]

If you follow Rosemary Lane to the top in the previous photos, behind the lamp post (next to the car) in the b/w photo, you will see a house at the top of the hill.

Below is how the house looked this week. According to English Heritage it is "late C14 and C16/17. Timber framed and plastered with gabled peg tile roofs. 'T' shaped, but with hipped roofed, white weatherboarding, later outbuilding at rear of W end. Front has crosswing at E end with cast iron, leased light window over rectangular bay window with small panes and wrought iron sign bracket. Main block has very small, gabled dormer in front roof slope, 2 large cast iron leaded light windows on first floor over a lean-to porch with brick steps and timber painted handrail. Also a 2 light iron leaded light casement and slightly bowed similar window. The West gable has 4 light, leaded light casement over a C19 leaded light square bay window. Lean-to at E flank of crosswing and off-centre big stack in front of ridgeline and stack against E end of crosswing. Interior reveals fairly complete frame of late C14 crosswing but without its central crownpost. "Hall" range suggests early C17 later raised."

Although a private house today, it's shape gives away it's past life.

[KateJ]

This is the house in 1911. It's an old pub called "The Royal Oak". Standing outside the pub door is James Nelson Kemp, father to Gordon & Harold Kemp.

[KateJ]

The following picture is a photo of an old postcard that was reprinted in the "Dunmow Broadcast & District Advertiser" in June 1978. The quality of the reproduction is poor but you can see a shadowy figure of a man in the doorway and a man sitting in the pony trap.

[spike10764]

What an amazing piece of research Kate and thanks for sharing it with us.

[KateJ]

Thanks Spike.

This is the best bit coming up (well for me at least!). The last picture was in the newspaper as cited above - I hadn't seen the photo before last week. Who could the figures be? The man in the door way could be James Kemp licensee of the Royal Oak, but the man in the horse and cart?........

In August 1978, the following letter was published in the Dunmow Broadcast and refers to the postcard.

It's a picture of Gordon Kemp doing his delivery job for his father before the war to end all wars killed him in the mud of Flanders.

[marina]

It's as well we cannot see what lies ahead. Gordon K seems to be smiling in the photo.

Marina

[ian turner]

Kate,

It seems a long way from this rural idyll to the mud of Flanders....

On another note, I wonder whether the picture with the donkey cart predates the other picture of the apparently rennovated pub. It looks shiny and new in the first pic, whereas the donkey cart view shows the wall (with post box) and the low wall (with fencing) as carrying old whitewash. Probably not important, but I mention just in case!

Ian

[KateJ]

Kate,

It seems a long way from this rural idyll to the mud of Flanders....

On another note, I wonder whether the picture with the donkey cart predates the other picture of the apparently rennovated pub. It looks shiny and new in the first pic, whereas the donkey cart view shows the wall (with post box) and the low wall (with fencing) as carrying old whitewash. Probably not important, but I mention just in case!

Ian

Well spotted Ian! I hadn't noticed that but I think you are correct. The Kemps were at the Royal Oak from approx 1905 until 1911. The following two photos are also of the Royal Oak - the first is again a photocopy from a newspaper so is poor quality. Notice the little girl - I think she is Harold & Gordon's sister. The wall doesn't have the whitewash. The 2nd photo has been dated to 1915 - by which time the Kemps had left Dunmow - again the wall doesn't have whitewash.

[KateJ]

Researching local history can sometimes be a very frustrating past-time. Time and time again I find myself asking questions that perhaps can never be answered. In the Kemps case, why did they leave Dunmow? How did they end up in Great Yarmouth (as seen by the place of Gordon’s enlistment & the obituaries in the Essex local paper). Did Harold go with them? His place of enlistment is not (yet) known, but his obituary says that he “will be remembered as singing solo in the old church the Sunday before his departure for South Africa” – does the “old church” mean Dunmow, or Yarmouth?

Fortunately for us (or me at least!), the local newspaper once again gives answers to this question. Harold & Gordon’s father decided to give up the licence trade to take up politics! The following extract is from the Essex County Chronicle 13th October 1911.

Dunmow Teetotal Publican

How he left the bar for the Platform

Interesting Interview

Mr James Nelson Kemp, the well known teetotal publican of Dunmow, in which town he has held a licence for 21 years has decided to quit the bar – where he has been “at home” to all comers, and which he has made famed for the discussions that have there taken place – to become a lecturer upon the staff of the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, and on Wednesday (Oct. 11) the licence of his house, the Royal Oak was transferred to another tenant. All who know “Kempy” sincerely regret his departure and he keenly feels taking farewell of his Dunmow friends.

Mr Kemp had become recognised as the local philosopher and friend, and it is his proud boast that he has not an enemy in the world. Visitors to the Oak were in no wise expected by the teetotal publican to drink.

<<<large photo of Mr J N Kemp>>>

A notice outside the main door informed passers by that the Encyclopaedia Britannica was “at their service within”, and every information was to be obtained from the man behind the bar.

A representative of the Essex County Chronicle who visited the Royal Oak found Mr Kemp busy getting ready for his departure.

“I don’t like going away”, said Mr Kemp, “because I have the best of friends all over Dunmow, from the Vicar downwards. During the time I have been here I have succeeded in meeting all my engagements, but the conditions placed up the licensing trade made me prefer some other living, and an accident, nothing less, has led me to become a professional speaker for the cause I have always advocated. I wish I could go about and talk Conservative politics as an amateur, because I love it, but of course I have to live, and I might just as well live that way as any other. I became a public speaker all through a foggy night which prevented a speaker from reaching a village meeting during Colonel Lockwood’s campaign about four years ago. It happened at Broxted, where I had gone to hear the Colonel and I was seated among the audience when word went round that the speaker had been lost in the fog. The Colonel was on the platform and the audience were ready, when the Colonel called to me “Kemp, you will have to come up here with me”. So I got on the platform, alone with the Colonel, and when he told me I had to speak for half an hour I wondered what about. However, it had to be done, and I did it, with the result that from that time on they never left me alone. I had not the remotest idea of being a speaker, but Colonel Lockwood wrote of me, “I don’t believe there is a man in Essex who will be listened to with more pleasure by our agricultural labourers than J N Kemp of Dunmow? From that time I was taken about, and I am happy to say I helped Colonel Proby during the campaign when Saffron Walden Division was won by the Conservatives.

“Hall-marked”

“My policy is absolutely for Tariff Reform. I am an out-and-out, 18 carat hall-marked Tariff Reformer and that is the political teaching I am going out to spread. I have studied the question for 30 years – from the man on tramp who comes to your door with a can in the morning and asks for hot water to make tea, to the landed proprietor. I have also watched my customers in the bar, and have noticed that they get less and less money to spend, owing to intermittent employment. I say Tariff Reform is going to absorb a great deal of the unemployed labour in this country by finding work for the men in making goods which are now brought in cheap from foreign institutions. The other day at West Ham I was with the Rev. Pierrepont Edwards the “fighting parson” of Mersea, and we were promised a warm quarter of an hour, but I spoke for forty-five minutes without interruption and was complimented by the most ardent opposer of Tariff Reform. It is in the country villages more especially that I shall work. I have come into close contact with the agricultural labourers in Essex, and they all complain that in this Free Trade country they cannot live during eleven months of the year owing to the price of things, but in the twelfth month, which is their harvest, when they earn better wages, the price of food sinks into insignificance with them because they can afford to pay. If the labourers like they can make the whole year like the harvest month, when they have plenty of money. I say the agricultural labourer can be raised so that he will earn enough money in fifty weeks of the year to live comfortably and be able to take two weeks’ holiday. I am going out to fetch the labourer, because I say he is much more free to make a choice than the workmen in towns who vote as their unions direct,

Logic in the Bar

‘Hw will the labourer be raised by Tariff Reform? Why, when wheat crops are worth growing hundreds of acres of hedges and ditches which have never been cultivated and never produced a penny worth will be drained and cleared and put into cultivation, and the agricultural labourer, under the improved conditions, will be able to command his price and full work for fifty weeks of the year, which will be all he will want. It is as impossible to go back to the high prices under Protection in the sixties as it is for a many to live under water. In the old days there were not the means of transit we now have, nor the machinery to manipulate the harvest. In Essex it took from one harvest to another to deal with the produce of the farms. I was born at a water flour mill in the little village of Bickleigh, Devonshire. My father was a miller, driving six pairs of stones and I have helped to make scores of sacks of flour. I remember Russian wheat used to cost 16s a qr carriage and take six or eight weeks to reach this country, today it comes in less than three weeks at 3/4 d per qr carriage. It was the introduction of machinery that made bread cheap, and not Free Trade, and it was the sailing boats that made bread dear. I have many times been told in Dunmow of the hungry days of the sixties, when the labourers ate barley cake but I have never yet been told what it was that built up the constitutions of our Essex labourers to enable so many of them to take the pension after seventy years old because they must have been born in those hungry days. I am a small shareholder in the Dunmow Bacon Factory, and I find the farmer cannot now fat pigs at profit because feeding stuffs are dear. This is because the foreigner sends in flour to England ready ground, and keeps the offal to fat his own pigs, consequently we are short!

The Labourer and his honey

“The small holder about here can produce stuff five times as fast as he can dispose of it, because of the difficulty in getting to market. There is enough stuff wasted on the allotments and small holdings about Dunmow in a year to keep London for a day. This year has been a remarkably successful one for honey. I now an energetic farm labourer who keeps bees, and he has been running about trying to sell his honey, as have other cottagers. I know cottagers who have had to sell their honey at 6d a section, while foreign honey dumped into London is making 1s a section. I am one of the fools who believe it is possible by putting a duty on foreign corn in a scientific manner to make bread cheaper, inasmuch as I would give the home farmer preference over the Colonist, and the Colonist a preference over the foreigner.”

“I have been a teetotaller all my life. I don’t know one beer from another except by the look of them, and it has always been my practice to let my customers judge. A doctor never takes his own physic.”

At Dunmow Mr Kemp served for a term as a Poor Law guardian and rural councillor, and he was one of the most prominent supporters of Lady Warwick’s rural nursing association, having frequently been called upon by the Countess to speak at the meetings over which she has presided.

[ian turner]

Kate,

Amazing spin-off from Grerat War research into local history. A warning to us all - there is no end to it!

At least we now know why the election poster was on the pub chimney!

My guess is that Kemp sr had the pub rennovated before selling up?

How nice would it be to visit the pub in the days of the donkey cart? Dream on....

Ian

[spike10764]

This is the best bit coming up (well for me at least!). The last picture was in the newspaper as cited above - I hadn't seen the photo before last week. Who could the figures be? The man in the door way could be James Kemp licensee of the Royal Oak, but the man in the horse and cart?........

In August 1978, the following letter was published in the Dunmow Broadcast and refers to the postcard.

It's a picture of Gordon Kemp doing his delivery job for his father before the war to end all wars killed him in the mud of Flanders.

Once again thanks Kate. I can only guess how you felt as this piece of history was unfolding before your eyes. The discovery of the picture being Gordon Kemp......from a 1978 news article....amazing.

[KateJ]

Once again thanks Kate. I can only guess how you felt as this piece of history was unfolding before your eyes. The discovery of the picture being Gordon Kemp......from a 1978 news article....amazing.

This research has been an amazing experience for me. I originally started it as "family history" (my great-grandmother was sister to the Kemp brothers' mother so my grandfather was their cousin) but its taken a turn to local history and how world history has an effect on local communities.

My grandfather enlisted too (he was underage) but unlike his cousins he survived the war. I wonder if he enlisted after hearing about his cousins' death? I'm sure he and his "intended" (my grandmother) are in the crowd at the unveiling of the Dunmow war memorial but I don't think I'll ever be lucky enough to find concrete evidence of that!

More pictures to come!

Kate

[KateJ]

Harold’s obituary in the local paper states that he was in the local choir in Dunmow. The following two photos are from Dorothy Dowsett’s local history book “Dunmow through the Ages”. The first photo she’s dated to 1893 – whilst she was a contemporary of the boys in the photo she’s sometimes a few years out with her dates so this could be at the earliest about 1891 and at the latest about 1895. The 2nd photo shows Rev John Evans who was the incumbent from 1905 to 1914.

Which one is Harold? He was born in 1885 so would be aged about 8 to 10 in the first photo and a young man in his early 20s in the second. Is Gordon in either photo? He was born 1887 so possibly is not in the first photo but is he in the second one? I think I’ll probably never know.

As the caption says, the choirmaster Stacey King was killed. Here is his entry on CWGC

Name: KING, STACEY BATES

Initials: S B

Nationality: United Kingdom

Rank: Private

Regiment: Honourable Artillery Company

Unit Text: 1st Bn.

Age: 28

Date of Death: 08/12/1916

Service No: 4389

Additional information: Son of Fredric and Susannah King, of "Crosby," Grove Hill, Woodford, Essex.

Casualty Type: Commonwealth War Dead

Grave/Memorial Reference: VIII. C. 201.

Cemetery: BOULOGNE EASTERN CEMETERY

How many other men and boys of these two photos died fighting for their country?

[BottsGreys]

Kate:

A small (and coincidental) world it is! I picked up this photo postcard (unused) at a Pennsylvania postcard show back in September (a well spent .50 cents). I confess I didn't know anything about Dunmow, but I thought that someday--perchance--a Forum thread might arise which in some way would have a connection or through which someone would have an interest. Little did I think that it would be so soon.

Chris

[KateJ]

Kate:

A small (and coincidental) world it is! I picked up this photo postcard (unused) at a Pennsylvania postcard show back in September (a well spent .50 cents). I confess I didn't know anything about Dunmow, but I thought that someday--perchance--a Forum thread might arise which in some way would have a connection or through which someone would have an interest. Little did I think that it would be so soon.

Chris

What a coincidence! I live about a mile away from the church and still haven’t managed to get there to take a photo and you living thousands of miles away have the very picture I’m missing from this story. Can you make out any of the names on it?

Thanks for posting it.

Kate

[KateJ]

The following extract is from “A short history of Great Dunmow Parish Church” by W J House, Vicar of Dunmow and Rural Dean. He was vicar from 1915 to 1926.

“When the present incumbent came in 1915, we were at the beginning of the four war years. Owing to the lighting restrictions the clerestory windows were painted black and other windows heavily curtained, so that our sorrow and anxiety seemed to be reflected in the dark and gloomy appearance of the church. In spite of the alarums and excursions of the air raids, we never missed a single service between 1914 and 1918 though our congregations were naturally small. We could often hear the roar of the guns in France – it was seldom that we did not know by the dull continuous murmur in our ears when a battle was being waged in Flanders. And several times when we came to church on a winter’s evening the star-shells going up when an air raid was threatening, lighted us on our way.

Elaborate but unnecessary plans were drawn up by the military authorities for the removal of all our people to the west, in the event of a German landing on the East Coast. Farm carts were allotted for the carriage of women and children, the sick and infirm, while the able bodied were to march on foot. Their route was to be by Green Lane to Stansted, avoiding the main roads, and their final destination was to have been Oxford. More fortunate than the inhabitants of big towns we never really suffered from te food shortage, caused by the submarine menace; we never saw a queue of people in Dunmow waiting outside the provision shops for their ration of tea, sugar, meat or margarine.

When the news of the Armistice came 11 am, 11th of November 1918, the townsfolk spontaneously came to church that evening and held a memorable thanksgiving service together. That very week Mr Goodey cleaned all the paint off the windows, the curtains were taken down, and as the blessed sunlight streamed once more into the old church, it seemed as if all the clouds of darkness and sorrow that had overhung us so long, were rolling away.”

[BottsGreys]

Kate:

Thanks for the info. about the church--very interesting. Here is a cropped image of the names.

Chris

[Neil Mackenzie]

Kate.

In the choir photos I think the young lad in the middle (5th from left or right) of the second row of the first photo is the same person as the young man in the second photo 4th from left of the back row.

They seem to have the same shaped chin and mouth and parting on the same side. What do you think?

Doesn't mean this is Harold though of course.

Neil

[KateJ]

Kate.

In the choir photos I think the young lad in the middle (5th from left or right) of the second row of the first photo is the same person as the young man in the second photo 4th from left of the back row.

They seem to have the same shaped chin and mouth and parting on the same side. What do you think?

Doesn't mean this is Harold though of course.

Neil

Neil, I think you could be right. I also think that 2nd row number 3 from left on 1st photo is back row 6th from left on 2nd photo.

Anybody else think there’s any that look the same?

Kate

[KateJ]

The following extract is from a local historian, Dorothy C Dowsett, who wrote her memoirs in the 1970s in “Through all the Changing Scenes”. The photos are from a book “The Dunmow Centenary Book 1894 -1994” by Dunmow Historical and Literary Society

“On August Bank Holiday 1914 some friends and myself went to Easton Lodge Flower Show. After a good day there, we walked home from Easton by the fields, singing merrily. It was one of those glorious summer evenings when one does nto feel like hurrying home to bed.

On reaching the town our attention was drawn to a notice on the Post Office (then No 7 High Street) announcing that War had been declared with Germany. This did rather dampen our spirits, but we did not realise the full meaning of it. In fact, we teenagers felt a kind of excitement, that this would liven things up a bit. Not that we were ever bored. Such an attitude was not thought of in those days. We made our own fun, and life was free and happy.

But it was not long before it was brought home to us, that this war was going to be a very serious matter.

In the next few days men “on reserve” were called up, both Army and Navy, and of course, the Territorials. Each day in the following weeks, men and horse, cannon, and all kinds of Army equipment, were passing through the town on their way to the ports, to embark for the front. Larger posters were put up – “Your King and Country Needs You”.

Before many weeks our young men were answering the call and this, to us young ones, was a serious challenge. One Saturday night there were eight young men in our shop. It was their usual routine, when they left off work, but on this occasion, they all made up their minds o go to Chelmsford on the Monday to enlist. They were put in the Ninth Essex Regiment. Of these, only two lived to come home at the end of the war, and one of those only lived to the next Spring, as he had been gassed while in France.

On Sunday morning, 23rd of August 1914, we found the town full of soldiers. They were lying all over the pavements, and were so sore-footed and exhausted. The officers said that they could take them no farther. However, it was decided to leave one Battalion here, and send the rest of the Brigade to Braintree.

Soon the warrant-officers were round for billets, so before dinner we had two soldiers to swell the family. We were just in the midst of our meal when we almost simultaneously said “What’s that!” All made a rush for the garden. Yes, we had closed with our adversaries, and they with us. This was the Battle of Mons. The “Old Contemptibles” of about 80,000 were facing about 300,000 of the German crack troops. Many, many times we were to hear these great artillery battles, when the wind was in the right direction.

The Notts and Derbys remained with us till the following January. By this time the recruiting was for Kitchener’s Army. The first 100,000 were enlist, and the second 100,000, but by now Lord Kitchener was missing. He went to sea to confer with the Russians, and was never heard of again, the ship being “presumed sunk”. About this time the Post Office was asking for young women to replace the men who had joined up, and I was keen on offering myself for this kind of work.”

Willet’s [Dunmow] in the war years – newspaper headlines

Recruiting Posters outside Brick House, North Street, Dunmow 1915