Newbold Parish Church: A Sketchbook Among the War Graves

Over several visits this summer — the last week of July through to the end of August — I found myself returning again and again to the churchyard at St John the Evangelist, Newbold, just up the road from where I live. I hadn't set out with a plan. I went with a pen, a small tin of watercolour, and no real idea I'd end up spending an entire sketchbook on one corner of ground.

There are thirty-seven Commonwealth war graves in that churchyard. I didn't know that when I started. I only knew that every time I looked up from one headstone, there was another leaning nearby under the same old, heavily buttressed tree — its roots thick as an arm, its bark drawn in more ink than I usually give a whole page. That tree ended up in almost every drawing. It felt right that it should. It was there long before any of these men were born, and it's still there now.

I copied the inscriptions as I found them — service numbers, ranks, regiments, ages where they'd been given. Sherwood Foresters, Royal Artillery, Royal Air Force, Machine Gun Corps, a lone Royal Canadian Air Force navigator a long way from home. Some stones had nothing beyond name and date. Others had a few lines a family had chosen, seventy or a hundred years ago, to say the one thing they most wanted remembered: Gone but not forgotten. Worthy of remembrance. For our tomorrow they gave their to-day.

One stone stopped me for a long time. It belongs to Flying Officer J.F. Ollett, a navigator with the Royal Canadian Air Force who died on the 24th of June 1944, aged twenty-six. Underneath, someone had chosen a verse from an old poem, There Is No Death, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton — this life is but a suburb of the life elysian. It turns out he wasn't simply a Canadian airman passing through on his way to a bomber base. He was married to a Chesterfield woman, Elsie. He had a home here. I sat with that a while before I drew the tree behind his stone.

Looking into the names afterwards — Chesterfield and Derbyshire have kept remarkably good local records of this churchyard — a few more of these threads came loose. Two stones I'd copied as belonging to a father and son named Pashley turn out, once you check the dates and ages against the parish's own record, to actually belong to two brothers named Shipley: John William, who died in July 1918, and Robert Henry, who died in April 1920 — both twenty-two, both sons of the same Newbold mother, two years and an ocean of grief apart. Easy enough to misread a weathered stone; I'll go back and look again.

Then there's the Rodgers family grave, which reads almost like three short lines of a much longer story: a father, George Albert Rodgers, and his wife Elsie, and beneath them their own son — also George Albert, a young Bombardier in the Royal Artillery — who died in February 1947 at just eighteen. Not in the war itself, but in the year and a half after it. National Service, most likely. A different kind of loss, still inside a family already old enough to remember the last one.

I don't think I set out to make this a history project. I went out with a sketchbook because it was a beautiful old churchyard and I wanted to draw an old tree. But once you start copying down names properly, you can't help wanting to know who they were, and that tree ends up standing over rather more than I first realised.

These pages aren't for sale — they're simply part of the working sketchbook, done on site over several evenings between the last week of July and the 22nd of August. But I wanted to share them here, as they are, waves of chattering crows and all.

For our tomorrow, they gave their to-day.