An easy 2.5 mile circular walk from Aston-on-Clun village hall to Hopesay, passing Hesterworth, a grand Victorian House Built by the Beddoes family and later acquired by the Habershons and visiting the churchyard to learn about George Gorschen’s unlucky war.
War and peace in a Shropshire churchyard
In Hopesay churchyard stand with your back to the church porch and take the narrow path on your half right. Pause by the wooden crosses to the Habershons and look at the headstone by the hawthorn. Sharing a marital grave is the most adventurous couple in Shropshire. Reported dead, taken prisoner, used as a hostage, invalided home, George Gerrard Goschen had an unlucky war. Yet his wife’s African adventures make George’s war sound tame. Have you ever wondered how a war begins? George knew better than anyone. He was on the spot in the final hours of peace before the war to end all wars began. In August 1914 he was an attaché at our embassy in Berlin. His father was the Ambassador. As the minutes of the British ultimatum ticked away, a mob attacked the Embassy. Father and son saw those “lamps … going out all over Europe” [Sir Edward Grey Foreign Secretary].
When they returned to England George enlisted in the Grenadier Guards. By Christmas 1914 his father had been told he was dead. Perhaps it was worse; the wounded George was treated as a hostage in reprisal for Churchill’s treatment of German submariners. His exchange was secured by the American ambassador.
In November 1915 George arrived at Fenchurch Street. His father had been pacing up and down for an hour. George walked slowly with the aid of a stick and the two men shook hands. Even by stiffupper-lip standards, it seems a little restrained. Leaning on his father’s arm, George was whisked away to hospital. The Times obituary could have been kinder to George; “he charmed his way through life with every gift but that of bread-winning.” His wife Vivienne’s life offered rich experiences for three books. She had spent much of her childhood here at Hesterworth. Aged 22, her father twisted her arm to accompany him on an eighteen-month African safari. He was to obtain big game trophies for Bern Natural History Museum. In the first seven months they covered 1,250 miles on foot. Vivienne was diarist, photographer and camp nurse. Pursuing a wounded lioness, her father was mauled and dragged himself back to camp. She tended to him in his dying hours and she dug his grave, on the banks of the Ishasha in Uganda. Before his death, she had never shot an animal. Yet she fed the 50 porters, and completed the museum’s assignment. This dramatic safari is the subject of her first book ‘Out in the Blue’. Undaunted, she returned to Africa to pursue her private dream “to go into the wild unarmed and, to win the friendship of the beasts. Life itself, I thought, is glorious only when you live it dangerously, accepting the challenge with glad faith, risking all, giving all with both hands, ready to greet the unseen with a cheer.” Two more books followed.
Text © 2014 Keith Pybus & Sandra Spence