19
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000
story, too vast and overwhelming perhaps to ever
understand completely, but the diaries of the Reverend
Andrew Clark of Great Leighs give us a very human
and digestible flavour of rural life in Essex during those
tumultuous and unprecedented years.
Today Great Leighs church is typical of many rural
parishes, sharing its priest with two other churches,
hosting Sunday services on a rota system and with
a dwindling congregation struggling to pay its way.
But also typical of many rural parishes it is much loved
by that congregation and when I visited I was greeted
warmly and proudly by parishioner and local family
historian Pat Watkinson and the Church Warden Judy
Goodrum. The ladies are excited by the interest in their
church generated by the Great War centenary and of
course by the visit of Paxman who they both describe
as wonderful, polite and charming. We all agreed we are
glad he’s got rid of the short-lived beard. The plan we
have made together is that when we visit with our
groups the ladies will, in return for a much-welcomed
donation, serve coffee with biscuits and display for us
one of the three Great War commemoration banners
that the villagers of the three parishes of Great & Little
Leighs and Little Waltham are making. Villagers are
being approached to sew a button onto a banner in
memory of a fallen soldier, perhaps a family member
or just for an unknown soldier who died for our country.
On Remembrance Sunday 2014 the banners will be blessed
and hung in the churches.
Groups will come to Great Leighs church and over morning
refreshments our Blue Badge guide will introduce the story
of Essex during the Great War and the diary of the Reverend
Clark - we hope to provide some second-hand copies of the
diary for sale with the money raised going to church funds.
Local family historian Pat is going to tell us about the BBC
visit when Mr Paxman interviewed the niece of Privates’
Arthur and Dick Fitch whose names are on the Great
War Memorial in front of the church. Dick lied about his
age to enlist in 1913 and died at the Battle of Mons in August
2014 right at the beginning of the war. Arthur died on New
Years Day 1915. On the 10 January 1915 the Reverend
Andrew Clark held a service in the church in memory of
the Fitch brothers both of the Essex Regiment and also of
Captain Alan George Tritton of the Coldstream Guards and
Lyons Hall, Great Leighs, who had died on Boxing Day
1914. Pat is going to show us some slides of photographs of
the young men whose names are carved into the Great Leighs
Great War Memorial and of the houses in the village where
they lived together with some information about what they
did in the village before the war and of their families.
It’s a fitting start to our new tour called
Men With Splendid
Hearts
(from a Great War poem by Rupert Brooke) which
tells the story of the Great War through the eyes of the young
men of rural Essex as well as some very brave young men
Churchwarden Judy Goodrum & local
family historian Pat Watkinson at Great
Leighs church. Behind Judy you can
see Lyons Hall former home of
Captain Alan Tritton, Coldstream
Guards and son of the local Squire,
who was killed in action in 1916.
