Wrekin College Chapel
The chapel at Wrekin College contains a marble tablet dedicated to former students of the institution that fell in the Great War. It originally formed part of a larger tribute that once included a memorial organ, while the current building now houses a commemoration from a nearby school.
Background
Wellington College (the name change to Wrekin only occurred in 1921, when its founder Sir John Bayley sold the institution) made a very active contribution to homefront life in the town, both during the conflict and in the era of immediate post-war reconstruction. An Officers Training Corp (OTC), established for college students in November 1909, was active throughout the period, while the institution also hosted drill training and inspections of the local Civilian Volunteer Corps — which was over 100 strong by November 1914. Between 1916 and 1918, an auxiliary military hospital operated within the college grounds, which were the scene of a fireworks display for the people of the town on the night of the first Armistice commemorations in November 1919. Earlier in the year, in July, a ‘grand outdoor musical and vocal concert’ was also held in its precincts to raise funds for the Workmen’s Hospital Committee (which made a very active contribution to the survival of the town’s Cottage Hospital after the war). One of the defining issues of 1919 in Wellington was how best to commemorate the sacrifice of those who had fallen in the conflict and it was a subject that also generated a great deal of debate within the College, too.
The College Memorials
At least 334 college old boys served in the First World War, of which 52 are known to have fallen in the conflict between 1915 and 1918. The difficulties of choosing and funding a suitable memorial to remember them were felt just as keenly inside the college precincts as they were in the wider town. While a memorial fund was launched within a week of the Armistice, by the summer of 1919 the amount raised (just over £1100) failed to match by some distance the many wide-ranging suggestions put before the committee of parents and friends convened to consider the subject. In the event, a mural tablet in alabaster was unveiled by the Reverend J Sinclair-Moore of All Saints parish church in December 1921. Perhaps uniquely, it records the end of the conflict as 1919, although in terms of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles (which formally ended the war) that date is correct. The tablet was originally housed within a stone canopy and frame (part of which now languishes in the rockery of the Headmaster’s garden!) but after the college chapel was rebuilt, in 1937, it was removed to the entrance lobby and only restored to the interior in 1999.
At the unveiling ceremony, plans to install a new organ were also revealed. At a cost of £1688, it comprised the main item of expenditure from the memorial fund and was dedicated by the Bishop of Lichfield in February 1922. Like the memorial tablet, the organ, a two-manual instrument with 19 stops, and made by Bevington and Sons of London, was also removed when the chapel was rebuilt. It was reconstructed in the gallery of the college gymnasium but was sold to a church in Wales after the building was converted into a memorial hall. All that remains today is the brass plate originally mounted over the instrument, inscribed ‘in memory of those Old Wrekinians who nobly fought and died in the Great War’.
In the summer of 1927, when the walls of the college grounds were remodelled, Sir John Bayley financed a new set of gates at the entrance to Tudor House in Constitution Hill. When completed they were unveiled as a memorial to the old boys who fell in the Great War. Still in situ, they include inscribed brass plates on the pillars either side of the ironwork.
Second Lieutenant Stuart Hodgson
The death of former pupil Stuart Hodgson, who was killed during the Battle of the Somme on 12th October 1916, was particularly resonant for Sir John Bayley. Stuart’s mother, Marion, was the college matron, quartermaster at the VAD hospital within its grounds, and its founder’s personal housekeeper. Stuart lived within the Bayley household from the age of three, studying at the institution from 1911 until 1914 — when he began training as an electrical engineer in Wolverhampton. He was commissioned in 1915 as a probationary second-lieutenant. Aged just 16, his two-year service in the college’s OTC deemed important enough to overlook the fact he was underage at the time.
Despite being wounded and invalided home in April 1916, he was later declared fit and returned to the frontline in September. He was killed at the Battle of Le Transloy, the last major attack mounted by the Fourth Army of the British Expeditionary Force during the Somme campaign. Marion Hodgson was then forced to endure an agonising six months of waiting while the military attempted to establish the exact details of his death (he was initially reported ‘killed in action’, which was subsequently amended to ‘wounded and missing’). His death was officially ‘accepted’ by the military the following April, his body having never having been recovered. Shortly afterwards, Bayley paid a lengthy tribute to his ‘young charge’ in the college magazine, poignantly concluding:
So my brave young friend Stuart, on the battlefield of France we leave thee, peacefully asleep not far from many of thine old schoolfellows, and to all of you our last words are:
Farewell! Farewell! Until we meet, as we shall meet again.
Old Hall Memorial Plaques
At the time of the Great War, Old Hall School (which was founded by Dr J. Edward Cranage in 1845) was located in the ancient building from which it takes its name on the corner of Limekiln Road and Holyhead Road. At least eight former pupils were killed in the conflict and, following the Armistice, it was decided to commemorate their sacrifices in the form of either a new library or place of worship for the foundation. As it was, the Bishop of Lichfield consecrated a new memorial chapel at a special ceremony on Saturday 21st October 1922. The building, which was designed by Shrewsbury-based architect Frank Shayler (who also designed New College in King Street) and constructed by John Carver of Wellington, cost £1200 (around £67, 000 today). A new two-stop organ made by Rushworth and Draper, and costing £450, was also purchased, while the funds for other fixtures and fittings — including a stained glass window — were provided by the parents. At the ceremony, a brass plate remembering the occasion was also unveiled, which was inscribed:
‘This Chapel is dedicated to the memory of all Old Hall boys who fought and fell in the Great War 1914-1918. “They gave their all”’.
Old Hall School relocated to a site in Stanley Road adjacent to Wrekin College in 2006, when the stained glass window from the original chapel (now a private house) was removed to the entrance lobby of the new building. The brass memorial plaque from the unveiling ceremony, and another recording the names of nine fallen former pupils of Old Hall, also from 1922, was re-housed in the chapel at Wrekin College. Viewing of these memorial tablets is by appointment only.