Hugh Ralph Cholmeley was the grandson of the Reverend John Cholmeley who was rector in the village until his death in 1895. Hugh was born on 24th April 1891 in Carleton Rode rectory to Robert Francis Cholmeley and Blanche Elizabeth Roberta Darling. He had one sibling, Dorothy Frances, born in 1889.
The Cholmeleys were a well-respected and pre-eminent family from Lincolnshire. John was educated at Eton and Cambridge before being ordained a priest and serving in his home county before coming to Carleton Rode in 1859. He married two years later and seven children were born to the couple over the next twenty years. After John’s death in 1895, the family moved away (his widow went to live with her unmarried sisters in Hertford) and the 1901 census records Robert’s surviving siblings spread around the country; two school masters, a clerk in holy orders and two surgeons. One of these, Montague served as a surgeon in the RMC in the Great War even though he was over 50. The Carleton Rode Roll of Honour mentions him (although wrongly indicates that he died).
Hugh’s father, Robert was a school teacher and Head of Dame Alice Owen’s School, Islington from 1909 to 1927. He was also a highly respected writer on suffrage and education, especially concerned with women’s rights. Dame Alice Owen’s School, now relocated to Potter’s Bar, has a picture of Robert on its website. Robert was awarded an OBE in 1927.
Hugh’s mother, Blanche was part of the Darling family that were vicars of Eyke in Suffolk from 1859 to 1939. His grandfather was also vicar of the neighbouring village of Blaxhall. Before and after her marriage, Blanche was a well-regarded painter of still life in watercolour and oils, exhibiting locally in the Woodbridge and Ipswich area.
Hugh was educated at a private school in Eastbourne followed by two terms at Sedbergh Public School but left due to ill health. His parents seem to have lived separately for many years. Robert remained in London when he retired from teaching, but Blanche returned to the area where she grew up (although on the 1911 census she is living in Falmouth, Cornwall in a lodging house with Hugh and a sick nurse from her native Suffolk). At that time, Hugh is described as a student land surveyor and we know that he studied at Morton Hall in Redditch and Leverton Lodge in Boston.
At the outbreak of war, he held an appointment in the Colonial Survey, Federated Malay States, and he was a member of the Survey and Police Probationers’ Mess in Kuala Lumpur. Hugh decided to come home and offer his services. He reached England in November 1914, and was gazetted to a Temporary 2nd Lieutenancy in the Royal Field Artillery. He went to France in February, 1915, and was shortly afterwards posted to the 45th Battery, 42nd Brigade, 3rd Division. On the 13th June, 1915, while he was returning from laying a telephone wire to the forward trench near Ypres, he was shot through the head and died the following day. He is buried in the cemetery at Bailleul Communal Cemetery Extension, Nord.
Following her brother’s death, Dorothy served with the Voluntary Aid Detachment running military hospital kitchens overseas in France and Salonika from 1915 to December 1918, achieving the rank of Commandant and was mentioned in dispatches.
Aside from our own war memorial, Hugh is recorded on several others:
Sedbergh School Memorial; a Memorial Plaque in St Peter’s Church, Blaxhall (where his mother lived after the war); in All Saints Church, Eyke, where he is included on the Roll of Honour board behind the altar and his name is inscribed on a door, (further research showed this to be done by his grandfather or uncle – both held the living in succession between 1859 and 1939). Overseas, he is remembered in the Cathedral Church of St Mary the Virgin, Kuala Lumpur and on the Cenotaph in Kuala Lumpur; also at Ipoh in Malaysia where he worked. There is also a Cholmeley family memorial tablet in St Andrew and St Mary’s Church in Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire near the family seat of Easton Hall.
