Cusop Churchyard

The talk last night at the Cusop History Society was about Cusop Churchyard.
There was a serious technical problem at the beginning of the talk where the memory stick wouldn't talk to the laptop that controlled the projector, but a Heroic Tech Guy took the laptop outside, and when he came back, it was fixed, and Jane could quickly go through the pictures that accompanied her talk up to the point she had reached.

Jane Weaver, who also belongs to the Camera Club, was asked to take photographs of the graves in Cusop Churchyard. An old list had been found (from around 1990) with a map of the graves and their inscriptions. Since then, of course, more graves have been added to the churchyard, and the churchwardens wanted to have an up to date record.
Then, when Jane had started the project, someone else found a different list of graves, so there were two documents to work from, one with 43 pages and the other with 13 pages.
It wasn't as easy as it sounded, to just record them all. Jane decided to work from the "John Wilkes list" (he compiled it), as it was more comprehensive, and started in the corner of the churchyard near the lych gate, where the graves are mostly in neat rows. The Booth family are buried there, the most recent being Richard Booth the King of Hay.
One of the problems Jane found was that the churchyard has not always been as it appears today. Her map showed rows of flat graves up in the top corner (if you take the lych gate as the bottom corner), which have been overgrown to the extent that many are no longer visible. Other grave stones have broken, and there is a pile of them against the wall of the church. In the 1970s, a group of men "who were good with crowbars" tidied up the churchyard by moving a lot of gravestones, and laying them flat under one of the yew trees like a pavement. They had a serving police officer as part of the group, to add a veneer of legality to the proceedings, but they didn't seem to make any record of what they were doing. Apparently, at the time, the churchyard was in a bit of a state, with a pony tethered near the lych gate and sheep grazing, and brambles overgrowing areas.
Another problem Jane found was that memorials which had been legible in 1990 had deteriorated, and were no longer legible, so that in some cases she couldn't find graves that had been recorded.
The oldest grave she found was by the church door, of Thomas Watkins who died in 1792, I think - he'd been a local JP.
One of the other early graves was of William Seward - it's now illegible, but they know where it is, because William Seward was a nonconformist preacher who was injured while preaching to an unruly crowd, and later died of his injuries. Jane wasn't sure why he had been buried in Cusop, but someone in the audience thought that he had been taken to a farm nearby, where he had died. There is a memorial to William Seward inside the church. Celia, one of the present churchwardens, said that their next project would be to restore the box tomb where William Seward is buried.
Jane also photographed the memorials inside the church - William Seward's, and also the First World War memorial, which starts with a member of the Royal Flying Corps. There is no memorial for the Second World War. One memorial mentioned in an old historical article is no longer there, and the two bells mentioned in the article were removed in the 1960s.
Another member of the Royal Flying Corps buried at Cusop went on to train as a doctor after the First World War, and ended up as quite a high ranking surgeon in the Royal Navy.
Another interesting grave is of "Johnny the Pilot". He was a Polish airman during the Second World War, and one of the Cusop History Group is doing a little project to find out more about him. He was shot down twice, and came to live in Cusop after the War. There are quite a few other graves of military men in the churchyard, too, including one young soldier who died in India, and another who died in the Transvaal.
One picture Jane showed was of a typical family plot, with eight members of the family buried there. "It's the Adams Family," she said, looking round the room. "Not a titter!" she complained.
She had also looked at the grave of a Victorian curate who worked at Cusop - I missed the name. The rector of Cusop had been absent at the time, so he employed the curate to do the parish work. He is buried with his wife Isabella, and the grave monument is interesting. It consists of three steps, meant to symbolise God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, with a cross on top. The memorial to Isabella is on the East side, where Jane expected to find the curate's details - but he is memorialised on the West side of the monument. Various beliefs about the Last Judgement were mentioned here - like the idea that Jesus would come from the East to raise all the dead from their graves - so the details were recorded on the west side of the grave where Jesus would see them!
After the talk, I mentioned the previously unknown chapel I had helped to dig in Norwich, back when I was an archaeologist. We found the grave of a man we assumed to be the priest, partly because he had been buried with a small chalice and paten, and partly because he had been buried in the opposite direction to everyone else in the graveyard - so that on the Day of Last Judgement, he would rise from the dead to face his parishioners.
It was a fascinating talk, and brought out quite a few memories from the audience who had known some of the people mentioned, or their families. Jane was thanked at the end, for the quality of the research she has done.

The next talk will be by John Price, on 13th March, who will be showing local photographs from the Mary Ridger Collection, including some stereographic 3D photos of Cusop.
On Friday 17th April, Tony Usher will be giving a talk "From Roman Roads to Railways: Connecting People in Herefordshire"
In June there may be a trip out, to be confirmed, and on July 10th Heather Hurley will be talking about the Green Lanes of Herefordshire.