The Steventon War Memorial
Throughout its history, some world events passed Steventon by, but some touched it painfully.
The war memorial records 33 village men gave their lives in the First World War and 8 in the Second World War
The memorial was erected in 1920 to commemorate the fallen in the First World War.
This was a war fought below ground surface in the vast maze of trenches that stretched from the Belgian coast to the border of Switzerland. Ironically, the men of Steventon knew all about trench digging because if it wasn’t for the continual maintenance of the village’s network of ditches, their homes and fields were at risk of flooding.
Fred Fletcher was a farmer. From his home in Portage la Prairie, 75 miles west of Winnipeg, he could see the vast plains of wheat fields that stretched from horizon to horizon, flat as a billiard table, and rightfully earning the claim to be the bread basket of Canada. But it wasn’t on the Great Plains that he learned his trade in agriculture; that rite of passage took place four thousand miles to the east, at Hill Farm, Steventon. Fred was a Berkshire boy and so was his family, his mother and father, and his nine older siblings. He was born in 1891, and lived with his parents, Robert and Sarah, in one of the tied cottages at the farm. When in 1910, Frederick decided that there was no future for the tenth youngest child in a labouring family and he sought his fortune in Canada, there must have been just a hint in his memory of the great, flat expanse of Steventon Common Field as he surveyed the plains of Monitoba.
Fred Fletcher, 8th Canadian Infantry Regiment. Walking up today’s High Street towards the railway bridge, on the right hand side, stands a row of terraced houses. This is Timsbury Terrace. Here, at number one, lived Mr and Mrs Joseph Ellaway and their son, Percy Ellaway. He was a good bit older than Fred Fletcher, having been born in 1884, but in a population of just a few hundred, the two families would have been familiar to each other.
Amongst the other young men of the village was Fred’s classmate at Steventon National School, Arthur Denton. The pair of them must have sat together in the Victorian classrooms, in which our children still receive their lessons today. These young men had more in common than just living in a peaceful, Berkshire village: in 1914 and thereafter, they answered Kitchener’s call and enlisted in the army to serve King and Country. Over the next few years, the men of Steventon dug a greater length of trenches than all the ditches of their home village put together.
Of the names on the village war memorial, five came home and are buried in the churchyard of St Michaels: Arthur Betteridge, died of fever February 1917, lived in The Mill and left a wife and six children: Ernest Terry served with Royal Field Artillery and was a neighbour of Percy Ellaway in Timsbury Terrace; Albert Howard, a private with the Royal Berkshire Regiment and lived on The Causeway; George Prior a guardsman with the Grenadier Guards whose death must have caused great anguish to his parents living at Butchers Farm, he died eleven days after the armistice was signed; and Walter Bunce, who also died a few days after the armistice and whose parents lived in Station Road.
The thirty-three names of the fallen of the First World War, together with those of the Second World War, are on the war memorial at one end of the village, and five of these thirty-three lie buried in the churchyard at the other end. Between them runs The Causeway, the ancient path that was so much part of their lives as it is of ours today.
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