Authors: Esther Hamilton
[F]or the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs
Eliot, G. (1874) Middlemarch
Much of what we know of the personal experience of war lived by those that served from Chilmington and Great Chart in the First World War comes directly to us in their own words. These soldiers’ voices, written in their own hand in over 900 letters from the Western Front, and even as far afield as India, were sent directly to Elizabeth Quinton Strouts, of Great Chart.
Elizabeth Quinton Strouts moved into Singleton Manor in 1906. In 1915 she masterminded the organisation of the Great Chart Sailors And Soldiers War Fund, which mobilised those on the Home Front in funding the sending of letters and parcels to local men on the front lines. The soldiers’ gratitude towards the charity of Quinton Strouts and the Fund is palpable, with many letters addressing her as ‘Dear Lady’, and one soldier, Private W G Bennett, calling her ‘the best friend that I have ever known’.
Although Quinton Strouts wrote directly to over 100 soldiers over the course of the war, only one of her letters remains intact, from October 1918, and was discovered in 2014. We do, however, have her annotations marking the deaths of those on whose letters she marked their passing using red ink.
In 1921, after the unveiling of the Great Chart war memorial, an anonymous ex serviceman wrote to the Kentish Express to thank Quinton Strout, ‘who by [her] energy and untiring zeal in everything connected to the Servicemen have gained the gratitude and respect of each, and in doing so, have, like those sleeping quietly on foreign soil, also gained a place in the history of Chart.’[i]
[i] Kentish Express, 13th August 1921