The Cross on the Hill
by James Saynor
by James Saynor
On 10 September 1920, the Sevenoaks Chronicle announced: “The Memorial Cross on the hillside is now completed, and forms a most striking memorial to the glorious dead of Shoreham.”
The chalk Cross above the village on the western hill remains striking 100 years later. While towns and villages across Britain contemplated arches, tablets, church rooms or rows of trees to remember the grievous losses of the First World War, two Shoreham residents came up with the idea for this landscape feature, taking advantage of the chalk bedrock just a foot or so below the soil in a high, scrubby field. They were the vicar, Revd. David Madge, and the church sexton and clerk, Samuel Cheeseman. Madge lost a brother in the war, Cheeseman two sons.
The vicar announced the plan in the parish magazine of April 1920, and on 24 May a ceremony took place on the hill to mark the start of work, attended by villagers in their Sunday best. A hymn was sung and Chopin’s Funeral March played by the Shoreham United Brass Band before speeches from the vicar, the landowner Frank Mildmay and Lord Dunsany, the famed local author.
Dunsany said: “It is the duty of the youngest to remember this ceremony, and in years to come to tell the children of it and to impress upon them that the Cross must be carefully tended. Thus it will become a custom that will not pass away, but the Cross will remain white upon the hill like the oldest memorials in England… The time will come when the names of the men will be forgotten and the memory of the war will fade away, but the Cross will remain.”
There followed a remarkable voluntary effort, across three months, to dig out the Cross. “Every evening sees a procession of men, women and children armed with pick, shovel and pail to the hillside,” one observer noted. “Lords, squires, clerks and commons, rich and poor alike take a hand in the hard work.” The Cross was to be 100 feet long and 55 feet wide, with the depth of the arms slightly wider than the width of the upright to make it look balanced from below. In August 1920, the Church Times reported that “the hand of man has fashioned the noblest memorial to the fallen which the wit of man could well conceive” and the Times Weekly Edition ran a photograph of villagers of all ages with their picks and buckets alongside Lord Dunsany, himself wielding a work tool.
Near the centre of the picture, in a brimmed hat, is Samuel Cheeseman, co-creator of the Cross and the figure who almost certainly led the work parties. For several years after it was finished, Cheeseman would perform his own special ceremony each Armistice Day: he’d haul a small cannon up the hillside to the Cross and set it off. Then he’d pull the cannon back through the village to the church, where it was kept, pausing by the river to reflect on the names of more than 30 war dead inscribed on the stone memorial there, among them his two sons, Richard and Cecil, who were killed just a few days apart in August 1917.
The memorial by the river was installed in 1921, having been built at a cost of around £200 and designed to be an “adjunct”, as the vicar put it, to the Cross on the Hill. The two are linked by the inscription on the stone: “Remember as you look at the Cross on the Hill those who gave their lives for their country.”
A similar hillside cross was carved into the North Downs at Lenham, Kent, in 1922. (The Lenham monument, although about the same width as the Shoreham one, is considerably longer at 188 feet to compensate for the fact that it’s set into a bowl-shaped hill.) In Shoreham, villagers were once more recruited in force to attend to the Cross after the start of the Second World War, dragging branches and shrubs across it to camouflage it from enemy aircraft. A squadron of enemy bombers flying at night would have found it a very useful navigation aid.
After the war, the Cross was edged with concrete blocks and local Scouts and Guides worked to maintain it. It was re-chalked and fenced off in the late 1990s after complaints about walkers, dogs and even motorbikes ranging across its surface. In 1995, candles were lit around it and the vicar, Barry Simmons, led a ceremony to mark 50 years since VE Day and commemorate the more than 50 villagers who died in the two world wars.
You can read more in Historical Society Publication No 40, “The Cross on the Hill: One Hundred Years of a Shoreham Landmark”