Restoring St Bartholomew's War Memorial

During the First World War, a small wooden shrine was attached to the wall of St Bartholomew’s, as a focus of prayer during the fighting. After the war was over, Harold Brakspear designed a stone memorial (built by Osborne Bros) to replace it, bearing the names of all those Church of England men of Corsham who had died.

The memorial at St Bartholomew's Church, Corsham.

The 92 names were carved into the limestone, but not painted. After a hundred years of weathering, some had become rough, small areas of stone had fallen away, and a few names were quite illegible.


Having done a similar job on the Town memorial, I was asked to restore the lettering on this Church memorial to legibility, by painting in the letters. I brushed the stone down, and Rob Fleming (stonemason) carefully replaced one missing area with stone filler. We scraped out a few of the shallower letters with a point to give a bit of depth again. Then, using Humbrol enamel paints, from a model shop, and a tiny brush, I painted in each name with two coats of grey undercoat, which gave a fairly smooth surface on which to paint another two coats of brown gloss enamel - over an hour on each name in total. It was like painting on very rough sandpaper to start with, but each coat helped, and I aimed to make it all look quite uniform despite the variation in definition of each name. It was quite a challenge to do so !

Before the restoration.

And now, after the restoration. 

The font used is attractive, with a bar across the top of the A, and an interesting letter R, and it was good to see how the stonecutters (there were at least two, with slightly different styles) had adjusted the spacing and the abbreviations of longer Christian names (including 12 Fredericks) to fit the space. While I was working, many people came and told me about their great-uncles or grandfathers whose names I was painting, and we held those names in our hearts, and talked about the dreadful loss of so many young men. Although poignant, it was a solemn joy to bring these names back into legibility and remembrance, on behalf of the congregation and the town of Corsham.


Celia James

2014

'Corsham Commemorates' would like to thank Celia James for her incredible work restoring the war memorial at St Bartholomew's and for writing this post. You can find Celia on Twitter here.

We encourage everyone to visit St Bartholomew's to see the restored memorial which is also one of the sites on our Memorial Walk.