Eric's memorial

The stone one third scale model of a Sopwith Camel, pictured below, was commissioned by my grandmother Alice Avebury, and was in the family graveyard at High Elms until after my mother died in 1981. The London Borough of Bromley then resumed possession of the site. They transferred some of the monuments into the graveyard of St Giles Church, Farnborough, 100 m up the hill of Churchfields Plantations, but the memorials to Uncle Eric and his brother Uncle Harold, killed in action in the Grenadier Guards April 4, 1918, were not accepted by the then rector. Uncle Eric's aeroplane somehow came into the possession of Lloyd of Bedwyn, stonemason, of Great Bedwyn, Marlborough, Wilts. The monuments in the yard are now being sold off by Mr John Lloyd at an auction on September 19.