A Rare Survival

Meifod is a village just north of Welshpool.  Its main memorial is an unusual one, consisting of a copper sheet set into the outside of the church wall. One of the names listed is that of Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, only son of the ‘Big House’ in Meifod. 

He left Eton College early to sign up during the fir wave of patriotic enthusiasm at the outbreak of the First World War. After a few weeks’ training, he was gazetted as a Second Lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards. He was killed at Ypres in October 1914 only three days after he had joined his regiment at the front, aged 18. He also has a memorial inside the church. The striking symbolic relief above its inscription incorporates two figures looking up at a cross. Attached to the wall next to it is a rare survival, a wooden battlefield cross with his name stamped on a small metal tab on it. Although over a century old now, these crosses seem to bring back the horrors of the battlefield with startling immediacy. During battles such as Ypres, men were killed by the thousand each day and were buried nearby in hastily created cemeteries with the graves often marked by these wooden crosses. Later, when the Red Cross’s Ambulance Unit (later to become the Imperial and then Commonwealth War Graves Commission) set about the huge task of identifying as many of the bodies as possible and re-interring them in the formal cemeteries we recognise so well today, the wooden crosses were offered to the families of the deceased. Some were buried in local churchyards, others – like that of Charles Williams Wynn – placed on display inside the church.

In her autobiographical work ‘Testament of Youth’, Vera Brittain described the emotions the arrival of the cross could generate: “It’s such a queer feeling to have it here, when it’s been above him all that time … I am sorry in a way that they have removed it … It’s a strange world – where the symbols of people count so much because they’re all one has left”.