Festing Four Forever on Remembrance Sunday

Commemoration of former residents who gave their lives in WW1

The Festing Road pavement memorial and Private Down's battlefield cross

November 14, 2023

Far from the madding crowds on Remembrance Sunday neighbours gathered to commemorate the four lads from Festing Road who left their homes in 1914-18 and never returned.

In 2018 residents laid a stone for Albert Biscoe (former occupant of number 3), John Copping (43), George Down (75) and John Gobbey (11). The stone bears Wilfrid Owen’s line “They stood at the end of the world”. Thirty stood and observed the last post and the two minutes silence. Street organiser Hugh Thompson said, “Brighter is the street and its future fair, Because they walked its pavement because they breathed its air. And their memory brings us all closer.”

Because of the work of the Wandsworth Historical Society we know a little about them. Not least George Down.

Toda,y Festing Road boasts at least ten nationalities, several have children who live abroad. Nothing strange for metropolitan professional workers living in a globalised world. But 100 years ago, it was different. Then very local blue-collar workers and tradesmen rented, now very white collar professionals owning their own million pound plus homes live in the road.

George Down, a house painter who was killed in action in 1917 aged 33, had moved recently to Festing. Not from far. From three streets away Pentlow Street where lived his father a postman, mother, brother Herbert a joiner, sister Emily and brother Walter a milkman and Robert a schoolboy. The 1911 census has 15 living at 3 Pentlow. No wonder George and his wife moved.

Did the lads join as Philip Larkin says in his 1914 poem, “Grinning as if it were all An August bank Holiday lark”? Whatever, not only did George pay the ultimate price, but so did his brothers Herbert and Walter. As Larkin writes “ Never such innocence Never before or since”.

Dead man's penny

The Down brothers did not get white feathers they each got a dead man’s penny (see above and a wooden cross. George Down, a private in the Buffs, his battlefield cross now rests in All Saints Church, Putney Common.

Hugh Thompson