The Shrine

In 1914 eighty-four Ecton men went to war.  They did not go together - they were scattered amongst the services and a variety of regiments.  Harry Johnson even served with the Canadian forces.  He was one of the eighteen men who did not come home. 

The shrine to their memory, provided by Mrs Sotheby, the widow of Major-General Sotheby, is an unusual memorial.  It was erected in 1917, before the end of the war, and may have originally been intended as a memorial to Lionel Sotheby, who had been killed two years earlier, but eventually the names of all the Ecton men were rightly enshrined.

It has a suitably prominent position at the top of High Street with the old walnut tree behind and this eventually contributed to the shrine’s deterioration in the 1970s, when children collecting walnuts and some mindless vandalism left it in a sorry state.  Fortunately the village’s collective conscience, and hard work by some willing helpers, repaired the damage and underlined the validity of the shrine’s inscription - ‘ECTON NOT UNMINDFUL’