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mile along the lane from the church – the prime spot
opposite St Mary the Virgin, with its round Saxon tower,
being occupied by Lyons Hall, home to the Tritton family,
Squires of Great Leighs who gave a son, Captain Alan
John Tritton, to the Great War. When I stood peering up
the sweeping driveway of the huge old rectory, sold off
by the church many moons ago, I thought about the groom
and gardener Charles Ward who had started to work for
the Rector in 1909 as a boy of fifteen. Ward had many
duties from looking after the pony and trap to maintaining
the gardens and keeping the drains running clean but he
was always a sickly boy having a weak chest and the
Rector did his best to keep him from the war. When Ward’s
enlistment papers arrived Clark wrote to the Recruiting
Office but they felt that if the young man could manage
the Rector’s workload he would be fit for war and off he
went. Within weeks he’d fallen ill and was hospitalised
but as soon as he was well enough he was sent back to
the front. Charles Ward died in France in November 1917.
Clark wasn’t a well man himself (he would die in 1922
aged 66 and was buried in a very modest grave in Parson’s
Corner in the Great Leighs churchyard) and after the help
left he struggled to keep house and look after his sick and
dying wife but he too had to play his part in the war effort.
Too old to be sent to the front he was however obliged to
join the Home Guard and patrol the lanes and streets of
the village after dark on the lookout for spies, strangers
and foreigners. Rumours were rife of German spies racing
along country lanes on brightly lit motorcycles to guide
the Zeppelins to London! The Great War is such a huge
Men With Splendid Hearts
A Story of the Great War in Rural Essex
If you saw the Jeremy Paxman four part examination of
Britain’s Great War, aired on the BBC in February you
might have seen him visit the church of St Mary the
Virgin at Great Leighs in Essex where the Reverend
Andrew Clark kept a detailed diary of life in the village
during the First World War. The full diary runs to three
million words in 92 handwritten volumes and is kept at
The Bodleian Library in Oxford where the scholarly
Rector had been a student. The living of Great Leighs
was and remains in the gift of Lincoln College, Oxford.
Beginning on 2 August 1914 Clark set about recording
the sights and sounds of the war in rural Essex through
the activities of the villagers, his friends, relatives and
acquaintances. He recorded everything from air raids
and recruitment campaigns to experiences of billeting
and rationing. He wrote down conversations and
eavesdroppings and carefully recorded rumours relating
to the war, comparing them to officially released news
and war propaganda.
The experience of the Great War was very different in
rural Essex compared to cities like London. In Great
Leighs the largely agricultural community of 600 people
learned of the outbreak of the war from a notice pinned
in the Post Office window but it was by no means remote:
seventy-two men from the village would go to war,
nineteen would not return. The Rector recorded it all.
In the 1980s selections of the diaries were published in a
thoroughly engrossing book using the Rector’s own title
for his diaries:
Echoes of the Great War.
Clark lived in the big old Georgian rectory about half a
