The Herne Hill Society, in association with Southeastern Railway, who run Herne Hill station, has commissioned a hand-engraved Welsh slate plaque in memory of “all the people of Herne Hill” who suffered as a result of the 1914-18 war.
Calligrapher and stone-carver Mark Brooks is designing a hand-carved Welsh slate plaque, financed by Southeastern Railway and to be unveiled by Helen Hayes MP at the station ticket hall on Remembrance Sunday.
Everyone is welcome at the unveiling: 10:45am on Sunday 10 November.
Currently based in Canterbury, Mark's formative years were spent in Kennington, Walworth Road, Stockwell, Crofton Park, Honor Oak, Forest Hill, East Dulwich and Crystal Palace!
Mark says: “It is a wonderful opportunity for me. I am delighted to be making something beautiful, interesting and appropriate for this important memorial”.
Southeastern, whose Managing Director David Statham is a former Herne Hill resident, have been strong supporters of the Society’s “Remembering Herne Hill 1914-18” research project.
There are several individual memorials in churches to men who lost their lives, but nothing to commemorate all the people of Herne Hill. The station, at the heart of our community and a place through which countless men must have passed on their way to the Channel ports and thence to France and Flanders, seems the most appropriate place for a permanent memorial.
David Statham says: “During the First World War the railways played an important role in the transport of troops and resources to and from the front. It's a fitting privilege that, come November this year, Herne Hill station will serve as the site for a permanent memorial in commemoration of all those residents who died, were wounded or otherwise suffered in that terrible conflict.”
Colin Wight, Chair of the Herne Hill Society says: "When we began our National Lottery-funded research project together with the Charter School North Dulwich two years ago I never imagined that it would lead to the creation of a new First World War memorial. I would like to thank Southeastern, who have generously funded this superb artwork."
The text of the memorial follows. You may recognise a short quotation from Philip Larkin’s poem “MCMXIV”.
Herne Hill 1914-1918
In memory of all the people of Herne Hill who suffered in consequence of the war, including more than 500 who lost their lives
Never such innocence again
This stone was placed here in 2019 on behalf of
The Herne Hill Society * The Charter School North Dulwich * London & South Eastern Railway Limited
***
The new memorial links to another important centenary with a local connection.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed 100 years ago on 28 June 1919. It is a little known fact (not mentioned in his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or in our own book Herne Hill Personalities) that local resident George Nicoll Barnes was one of the primary signatories of the Treaty.
His signature is there alongside those of Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Balfour.
Barnes was a Scottish Labour politician. He joined Lloyd George’s war cabinet in 1916 and it was for that reason he was present at Versailles. He is included (seated second from the right) in a famous painting by William Orpen, who was commissioned to capture the occasion in the Hall of Mirrors.
George and Jessie Barnes lost their youngest son Henry in the war, killed in France in 1917. His life and death are described on our Remembering Herne Hill 1914-18 website.
The following year they moved to 76 Herne Hill. It was George Barnes’s home until his death in 1940. The late-Victorian house at the junction with Kestrel Avenue, which would have matched the Herne Hill surgery next door, was demolished in the 1960s and replaced by a block of maisonettes.
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