LANCE CORPORAL GEORGE ELTON SEDDING
NORFOLK REGIMENT
23RD OCTOBER 1915 AGE 33
BURIED: WEST WICKHAM CHURCHYARD, KENT, UK
Both John and Rose Sedding, Lance Corporal Sedding's parents, had been dead for 24 years when he died in Hampstead General Hospital from wounds received in action twelve days earlier. Nevertheless, George Elton Sedding's inscription simply identifies him by his relationship to them, and to the fact that they had once lived in "this parish". Sedding was buried in the churchyard of "this parish", St John the Baptist, West Wickham.
In fact, George Elton Sedding's father had done more than just live in the parish of St John the Baptist, West Wickham. As the influential Arts and Crafts church architect, John Dando Sedding, he had remodelled the church soon after he moved to the village in 1889, and he and his wife are themselves buried in the churchyard.
George had been an orphan from the age of 9. He and his siblings were brought up by their aunt and uncle in Upper Wimpole Street. Their uncle was a distinguished physician, Oswald Auchinleck Browne, whose wife, Alice, was Rose Sedding's sister. However, they too died in 1908 and 1909 respectively and George and his sister, Dorothy, set up home in 3F Hyde Park Mansions where in the 1911 census he described himself as a designer and worker in metals (gold and silver).
The 1910 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society catalogue contains numerous examples of his work: altar crosses, processional crosses, pendant jewellery, buckles. Much of this work was probably done in partnership with Martin Travers, at that time a fellow Anglo-Catholic, who like Sedding had also attended the Royal College of Art.
At the outbreak of war, George Sedding enlisted in the Norfolk Regiment. He was determined not to accept a commission, feeling that he could better continue his work of spreading the word of God if he remained with the soldiers as their equal rather than their officer. He took specialist courses in scouting and signalling and was trained in the use of the field telephone. He went out to France in May 1915. On Monday 11 October 1915, the 7th Norfolk's took part in the attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt. Sedding was hit by shrapnel in the hand and thigh. His companions placed him for safety in a shell hole where he was found by stretcher-bearers that night who managed to bring him in. But he couldn't be moved again until the following afternoon. Then began the long evacuation down the casualty chain back to Britain. By the afternoon of Sunday 17 October he was in Hampstead General Hospital. But the thigh wound had become septic and as the infection spread and the fever tightened its grip, his condition deteriorated. By the evening of Friday 22 October he was unconscious and he died at noon the next day.
After Sedding's death his brother, Edward, edited a memoir, 'George Sedding: the life and work of an artist soldier', published in 1917 by the Letchworth Garden City Press. Martin Travers designed the title page. It combined some of the wild flowers, honeysuckle and willow herb that he would pick and put in a jam jar in his trench, with Anglo-Catholic iconography, and with images of St Dunstan, the patron saint of metal workers, and St George.
George Sedding was once described as "the pious son" of John Dando Sedding, even though he was not ordained like his brother Edward. However, in 1926 the Society of St Peter and St Paul published a 'Portrait of Six Christian Heroes'. The heroes were: Appian, Alban, Athanasius, Francis de Sales, Ignatius Loyola and George Elton Sedding.