The Middy, August 25 1999

Fitting memorial to the lads who died.

In the closing weeks of World War I Lloyd George and the Imperial War Cabinet met in the Great Hall of Danny House, Hurstpierpoint, to work out the terms of the Armistice.

The guns fell silent on November 11, 1918, and Thanksgiving Services were held throughout Sussex.

Celebrations followed on Peace Day in July 1919 and preparations began for permanent memorials to the war dead.

The war claimed the lives of three quarters of a million British servicemen including 6,709 men from the Royal Sussex Regiment.

Travelling through Mid Sussex today, war memorials inscribed with the names of the fallen can be seen in almost every village.

In Hassocks, there is a garden of remembrance created by Edward Stafford, a veteran of the Boer War who lost his eldest son Ewart in 1917.

Mr Stafford owned a fine Victorian house (now Adastra Villa) off Keymer Road and ran Stafford’s – a profitable department store in Western Road, Brighton.

His son Ewert went into the Royal Flying Corps after leaving public school in 1916. He arrived at the front in February 1917 and began a series of daring flying missions to observe the German infantry.

While flying over the German lines at Wancourt he received a gunshot wound to his leg and fainted through lots of blood as he tried to land his plane.

Under fire, a cavalry doctor ran out to the crashed plane and was himself struck by shellfire as he gave emergency treatment to the young flight lieutenant.

Edward was taken to hospital at Abbeville in a critical condition and the War Office gave mission for his parents to visit him.

They were both at his bedside when he died on Sunday, April 22, 1917 and attended his burial at the soldiers cemetery, Abbeville.

After the war, Mr Stafford began to draw up plans for a Garden of Remembrance to his son and the other fallen heroes from Keymer and Hassocks.

He chose a strip of land fronting Keymer Road that had once formed part of the garden to his villa

Mr J. Charlton from Tunbridge Wells was selected as the winning designer in 1923 and the garden opened to the public the following year.

No expense was spared. A finely carved lych-gate was reflected in a shallow pond by the western entrance and a central path through the garden led to an Italian pergola covered with roses and wisteria.

In the centre of the pergola was a bird bath with a stone statue carrying a bird poised for flight.

Carved beneath the statue were the words: "The bird of life is on the wing.”

Further along the path was a sundial bearing the message "after darkness, light.”

The path ended with a large wooden shelter with seats. The names of the fallen were carved into the shelter along with the inscription "when peace returns to the countryside, thanks shall be to the lads who died.”

Lydia Lidstone described the garden in an article published in the Sussex County Magazine in 1924:

"It is difficult to convey in words the spirit of peace and beauty that haunts this garden of memory. Sometimes on a quiet summer evenings when the fragrance of the roses fills the air, one sees little groups of people resting there after the heat and toil of the day. Some of those whose husbands and sons will never return to them.

As they sit there and gaze at the distant Downs, all aglow in the fire of the sunset, their eyes seem to look beyond, until they see among the poppy fields, "that little bit of France whose name shall be forever England.”

When Edward Stafford died in 1947, his family scattered his ashes in the garden which now fronts Adastra Park.

"Adastra "was taken from the air force motto Per Ardus Ad Astra (Way to the Stars).

Today, the pool, sundial and statue I've gone and the names of the fallen inscribed on the wooden shelter are beginning to wear away.

The view of the Downs is masked by housing. But the garden is still a place of beauty, marred only by the roar of traffic along Keymer Road.