Image: The Monument to Edward Horner in Mells Parish Church (6026100830)

Description: Edward Horner (1883-1917) was one of the two sons of Sir John Horner. His younger brother, Mark, died aged 16 in 1908. A year before, his sister Katherine had married Raymond Asquith the eldest son of Herbert Henry Asquith, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1908-1916. Raymond was killed in action in 1916 and Edward died from wounds sustained at Noyelles in Picardy, France on 21 November 1917. Both he and Raymond are remembered in the Parish Church of Mells, Somerset. The village had been the ancestral home of the Horner family from the 16th century and was subsequently to become the home of the descendents of Raymond Asquith. "In St Andrew's Church, and equestrian bronze by Alfred Munnings standing on a pedestal by Lutyens poignantly evokes the last age of chivalry. It commemorates Edward Horner, whose body lies where he fell in France. Horner was remembered by his friend Reginald Hancock, a vet who published his memoirs in 1952, as 'one of the finest brains of any man I have ever known'. Wounded at Ypres, Horner was posted to Tidworth Barracks, where he arrived with his own valet, groom and charger – and objected to sharing a room with some 'some bloody awful vet', as he described Hancock. When Lutyens, who commissioned the bronze, visited Mells in 1919, he lamented to his wife: 'All their young men are killed.' He designed a village memorial in the form of a tall task in column, surmounted by a figure of St George slaying the dragon; it rises above a curved wall, into which to benches have been incorporated, for the laying of wreaths." Clive Aslet, Country Life, 7 November 2012.
Title: The Monument to Edward Horner in Mells Parish Church (6026100830)
Credit: The Monument to Edward Horner in Mells Parish Church
Author: Robert Cutts from Bristol, England, UK
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
License: CC BY 2.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0
Attribution Required?: Yes