Thanks to Covid rules, Terroir spent a surprising amount of lockdown time in the village of Chaldon, perched high on the North Downs in north east Surrey.  Whilst our Bubble visited in the residential care home (once the Rectory, below right), Terroir paced the lanes and footpaths, tarried in the Church of St Peter and St Paul and puzzled over historical enigmas. 

There is enough history in this tiny village to fill a book. In fact, that book is no. 7 in the local Bourne Society’s series of Village Histories http://bournesoc.org.uk/.

But, as with all good books, it leaves some questions unanswered.  Two questions have been niggling Terroir: who created the earliest known English wall painting, on an inside wall of the Parish Church and, what is behind the curious statistics relating to those who lost their lives in two world wars?    

Before we tackle these issues, however, we can provide you with a taste of Chaldon’s back story.  The village is only 17 miles from London’s Hyde Park Corner, and extremely close to Surrey’s only major east/west route (Chaldon is a mile from the so called ‘Pilgrims’ Way’ to Canterbury, and less than 5 miles from what is now the A25).  Yet the village remained an agricultural hamlet with few amenities until after World War I.  Despite archaeological finds representing 5 prehistoric periods, despite documentary references which may date back to AD 727, despite a mention in the Domesday Book, despite underground ‘quarries’, despite the arrival of the railway in nearby Caterham in 1856, Chaldon remained, for centuries, a largely agricultural community.  In 1801 the population was around 100, rose to 280 in 1891 and then dropped to only 266 in 1901. 

Yet, sometime prior to 1200, someone (or perhaps some people?) painted the most extraordinary picture on the west wall of the Church, a building which nestles close to one of Surrey’s many north/south trackways, at the northern tip of the modern village.  At some point the painting was whitewashed over, but was rediscovered in 1870 and has subsequently been cleaned, restored and conserved on more than one occasion.

To quote Village Histories No. 7, the picture “is without equal in any other part of Europe.  It is thought to have been painted by a travelling artist-monk with an extensive knowledge of Greek ecclesiastical art.  The picture depicts the ’Ladder of Salvation of the Human Soul’ together with ‘Purgatory and Hell’”.  It is, to the modern eye, exceptional, astonishing, visceral, blood curdling and stomach turning, and, in the phraseology beloved of Michelin guides, well worth the journey. 

Terroir’s second niggling question also arose from a visit to the Church and has been exercising the Terroir mind for some time. We have asked around for views but, unusually, have decided to blog about this issue before reaching a conclusion, in case others can offer any thought on what follows.

The Chaldon Village Council website (https://chaldonvillagecouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Chaldon-Matters-Winter.pdf) suggests that the roll of honour should actually include 10 names, so there is yet another mystery for which Terroir would welcome an explanation. 

The most popular theory to account for this apparent anomally, and indeed one which occurred to ourselves, is an increase in the population of Chaldon due to the expansion of the village during the inter-war years. This was a time when speculative builders constructed housing estates throughout Brtiain, and this uncontrolled building boom did much to prompt the post WWII planning regulations (we touched on this in last year’s Blog 21 - ‘Privet Land’).   

On reflection, however, Terroir is still not convinced that this is the sole cause of Chaldon’s greater number of WWII deaths.  Surely the Chaldon 1920s/30s expansion occurred in all the local villages?  We cannot think of a village without some evidence of the classic ‘Tudorbethan’ design of the period (below left) but somewhat pared down for the construction of council houses (below right).

We also visited a number of local war memorials (online and in person) and nearly all demonstrate the usual pattern of, sadly, many more names carved on the original WWI memorials, than were later added to commemorate losses caused by WWII. 

A summary of our ‘research’ to date is presented below. This is where you all have a good laugh at our cod stats.  Yes we know we don’t have nearly enough data to make any of this significant, and no we haven’t listed our sources, or checked how comparable our data is. Talk about off the cuff. But, even at this stage, the investigation hints that it is very unusual to have more people die in WWII than WWI.  It also hints that it is hamlets and villages with few inhabitants, which may not follow the typical pattern.  At any rate, we are willing to stick our necks out far enough to say that we don’t think it is necessarily to do with inter-war village expansion, which was not exclusive to Chaldon.

 We will continue collecting data but for now, we beg for comments from those who know far more than we do, about Surrey villages and their heroic contribution to two world wars.