The Honourable Company of Gloucestershire Charitable Trust has made a grant of £1,000 to Cheltenham Civic Society towards the cost of a permanent exhibition of the town remaining WWI battlefield crosses.
When soldiers fell in battle – in places such as the Somme and Ypres – their comrades often fashioned crude wooden crosses to mark where they fell. After the war, the War Graves Commission reburied the soldiers’ bodies in new cemeteries. They then returned the wooden battlefield crosses to the soldiers’ families. In Cheltenham, the town’s main cemetery in Bouncers Lane offered those families a corner where they could place the crosses, but over the following decades, many of those crosses slowly rotted and disintegrated. In the late 2010s – before the Covid pandemic – a Cheltenham Civic Society team led by Freddie Gick instigated a campaign to have the remaining 22 crosses conserved. They gained a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant for the conservation work and involved pupils of the local Pittville School in researching the individual soldiers’ stories.
Post Covid, Cheltenham Borough Council offered to house the crosses in a brick-built former gravediggers’ hut. The Civic Society took it from there, working up plans to convert the building into a permanent exhibition and raising funds to deliver that. Work on the building began earlier this year, but the need to deal with a damp issue soon put a strain on the budget. At that point, however, the HCG Charitable Trust stepped in and made a grant of £1,000, which is helping to fund the extra work.
Cheltenham Civic Society expects the exhibition will be ready to open by the summer of this year. Further information about the crosses plus the individual soldiers’ stories is contained in a booklet that can be downloaded from the Society’s website:
