The day before yesterday I lost Uncle Ralph’s stick, whilst we were on holiday in Cornwall. A small, but significant, bereavement for me. Either I left it behind after the excitement of seeing a chough on the coast-path near Porthleven, or less plausibly someone nicked it from the open back of the car outside where we were staying. Either way, it’s drawn a sharp line under an eighty five year old story, and Uncle Ralph, aka Ralph Hopper, deserves to have his unsung death in World War 2 told, I think. As there is no longer an artifact to hang the tale on, I guess the web will have to do.
I’ve known this stick literally all my life, for the knobbly piece of (maybe) walnut stood in the corner of the hall in every house we lived in, probably with the vague purpose that my mother would strike any intruders over the head with its heavy top. In the event the only person who ever stuck his foot in the door was a chap in a turban, who would only leave after telling Mum’s fortune and selling her a scarf for five shillings. Bashing sikhs over the head was never her style.
When I was about six, and my brother nine, he was balancing the stick on the tip of his finger when our parents were out of the house. As it tipped over he managed to break the big glass lampshade with it, a shard of which severed a vein in his wrist as it fell. As neither of us knew what to do, there was quite a bloody mess to clean up when the folks came home.
I purloined Ralph’s stick for rambles at various times, and permanently after I got married, for it became my constant companion on both long-distance walks and pleasant afternoon strolls. Here’s 1977, when my wife and I walked the South Downs Way with Scruffy the dog, the year after I qualified.
I did the same route again ten years later with my son, and here he is taking a turn with it himself somewhere in Sussex.
Children grow up, but Ralph’s stick remained in service even after we threw it into a tree to retrieve a football, which knocked out the knot that supported one’s palm. A bit of sanding of rough edges, though, and it was as comfortable as ever, as is shown by this picture taken at Old Harry rocks with my daughter, then expecting her own first child.
And here it is again, only a couple of years ago, as the same daughter, now with two occasional stick-borrowers in tow, waited for a starling murmuration on the Somerset levels. Each generation has heard the stick’s history as they wielded it in under-sized hands.
This is truly an inter-generational stick… for its origin goes back even before my mother had it. Here is what little I know of Ralph Hopper’s story. You can find his name on the war memorial by the bowling green at Guildford Castle, but you won’t find any more information in the Wargrave Commission records. A local historian on the internet assumed he had died in an undocumented air-raid, until I was able to fill in the real story.
Ralph Hopper, born in 1900, was a scoutmaster and a widower, and the best friend of my maternal grandfather, himself a damaged survivor of serving as a private infantryman on the Western Front for most of the First War. A bit of new research today shows that Ralph was a store clerk on the Southern Railway, which ties in with Grandad working in the engine sheds at Guildford. Both had worked for the railway at Faversham since Grandad was demobbed in 1919, and they’d both later transferred to Guildford, and now lived in the same street. They joined the local railway-based Home Guard unit as soon as it formed in 1940.
So it was, that year, that the platoon assembled in the Lancaster Hut above the sidings at Guildford station (gone now, but there as a poignant reminder throughout my childhood) for a demonstration of machine-gunnery – not that the Home Guard was ever likely to be issued with precious machine-guns. I guess a contemporary news report best explains what happened next:
Dover Express – Friday 25 October 1940
FORMER DOVER MAN KILLED.
How a live bullet, which had been mixed with dummy ammunition, caused the death of Mr. Ralph William Percival Edward Hopper, aged 40, an old boy of St. Mary’s School, Dover, and formerly an active worker at St. Mary’s Institute, was described at an inquest at Guildford, Surrey, on Friday of last week. He was attending a demonstration with a machine gun with members of the Southern Railway Home Guard. He died in the Royal Surrey County Hospital two hours after being admitted. The Coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death, and added that, although the question of how the accident happened had not been fully explained, he was satisfied that it was a pure accident.
Mr. Hopper entered the Railway service at Dover in 1916, and was transferred in 1919 to Faversham, where he remained until about six years ago. He was formerly hon. secretary of the Faversham Invicta Football Club.
The funeral took place on Saturday, at Guildford, when the Home Guard and men of the Queen’s Royal Regiment provided an escort.
“Someone had bungled,” but it’s not the kind of tragedy that gets much mention at VE Day commemorations. Grandad, of course, was there to witness his best friend violently killed, in possibly more shocking circumstances than the expected deaths of so many comrades a quarter of a century before. Someone – perhaps Ralph’s mother – gave him Ralph’s trusty hiking-stick as a memento, and so it passed to my mother when she got married, and his story has been remembered to the fifth generation of his friend’s family.
And so you might appreciate why I have a real sense of loss for what was just, in material terms, an old piece of wood. But if there’s a larger lesson, it’s the way that we are able to imbue merely material objects with great significance. Such must have been the traditions associated with the Neolithic long-houses that were turned into long-barrows after their owners’ deaths, or that became the foundation of henge monuments like Avebury for many centuries. Such was the meaning to many of the relatively young sycamore on Hadrian’s Wall, whose felling caused more hurt than seems logical to the utilitarian mind.
So give a thought to poor Ralph Hopper when you read this. And if you happen to pick up his stick on the coast-path in Cornwall, let me know.
