Ditchingham, Norfolk, UK - a photo on Flickriver

            Church of St Mary

World War I Memorial. North aisle opposite entrance. Francis Derwent Wood. Bronze and black marble. Exhibited Royal Academy, 1920, unveiled 27 September 1920. Commissioned by Colonel William Carr, with smaller contributions from parishioners, including Rider Haggard

The best account of this impressive memorial is that by the Rev John Charles Scudamore (b.1854), the rector of Ditchingham from 1888 until his death in 1936, in his unpublished  History of Ditchingham: ‘There is one important addition, however, which deserves a paragraph to itself; the magnificent War Memorial. The Dedication Service and unveiling was held on Monday, September 27th 1920. The effigy is that of a tall, clean-built English soldier, with strong, finely moulded features. The figure is not conventional. His hands lie half closed by his sides. With greatcoat open, collar turned up, his legs swathed with sand bags, he lies just as he had been carried to burial from some front line trench. The face is calm and the figure speaks of courage and self-sacrifice, and teaches lessons of patience and steadfast endurance in a good cause, which are for all time.’
Scudamore’s account continues, a reference kindly provided by Richard Barnes after consultation with Mrs Nada Cheyne: ‘To the best of my belief, this form of War Memorial is unique among the monuments which commemorate the brave men who died to keep England free and her honour unstained. It was designed by the well-known artist Mr Derwent Wood R.A at the insistence of Mr W. Carr, who himself bore about nine-tenths of the entire cost of eleven hundred pounds. Sir Rider Haggard contributed £100, Dr J.F Bright £50 and the relatives of the commemorated dead also subscribed a small proportion in order to associate themselves with the magnificent cenotaph.’
The reclining image is modelled with striking realism in the crumpled coat, the boots and sand bags converted into puttees and tied around his feet, a distant, but much grimmer, version of Renaissance tombs, where the effigy of the dead lie peacefully on a sarcophagus. Derwent Wood had signed up as an orderly in the Medical Corps in 1915, developing a technique for masking facial disfigurements, which he published in the Lancet in the following year. This experience underpins the realism which Derwent Wood used to positive effect in the striding First World War infantryman of his 1921 Cotton Exchange War Memorial in Liverpool, an image suitable for unveiling by Field Marshal Earl Haig. Since Derwent Wood’s 1922 memorial for the Machine Gun Corps at Hyde Park Corner was erected to: ‘commemorate the glorious heroes of the Machine Gun Corps’, he turned to a very different image, Donatello’s beautiful naked bronze David in the Bargello, Florence, probably from the 1440s, standing in triumph over Goliath. His Memorial to Violet Morgan in the north transept of Norwich Cathedral,  illustrates another aspect of his work in the idealized portrait of the youthful Violet.
Derwent Wood had stayed with Colonel Carr in June 1919 and would have been aware of the relatively large number of dead for such a small village, of the heavy bombing on 2nd August and 2nd September 1916, and of the 270 injured nursed at Ditchingham hospital.
Richard and Sarah Cocke, The Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool University Press for the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, 2013, pp. 88-90

Detail of the soldier's legs swathed with sand bags
   

Taken on: April 15, 2015

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