Jack L. Airy, St. Peter’s, Theberton, c 1940. V&A Museum, London.
The roof is thatched. According to Hugh Bryant’s1 careful records of the county parishes, eighteen churches with thatched, or partly thatched, roofs still, in 1912, survived the improving zeal of the nineteenth century. Lest it be thought that the twentieth century has lagged, the reader can be assured that there are not eighteen now; but, besides Theberton’s, examples can be seen at other places like Uggleshall and Fritton.2
Norfolk and Suffolk being destitute of building stone, thatching was an easy, effective, and cheap way of roofing as long as thatchers were plentiful. That race is now dying, but all round Theberton noble hatchings meet the eye and cheer the heart and prove that the secrets of the profession are not yet forgotten.
St. Peter’s, a mixture of Norman and Perpendicular, is principally of the fifteenth century. The south chapel is full of murals, windows, and other memorials of Doughtys, the family at the big house, The Hall, where on 19 August 1843 Charles Montagu Doughty3 was born. One likes to hope that the author of Arabia Deserta4 will be remembered longer than Count Zeppelin,5 and that even an air-minded posterity will be drawn to the south chapel rather than to the grave, in the churchyard, of sixteen Germans,6 members of the crew of L 487, destroyed over Theberton in the night of 17 June 1917.8
Recording Britain, Vol 2, Suffolk, p 88-89.
Image: Jack L. Airy
Text: Arnold Nottage Palmer
1 Bryant, Thomas Hugh, County Churches: Suffolk Vols 1&2, George Allen & Company, Ltd., London, 1912.
2 The parish churches in both Uggleshall and Fritton still have their thatched roofs. For more on this tradition see The Thatched Medieval Churches in East Anglia.
3 Charles Montagu Doughty (1843-1926) was a British poet, writer, explorer, adventurer and traveller, best known for his two-volume 1888 book, Travels in Arabia Deserta. As a 19th-century ‘Orientalist’, Doughty came under fire many years later in Edward W. Said’s classic treatise on the subject. Said wrote of Doughty and his contemporaries: “The main issue for them was preserving the Orient and Islam under the control of the White Man.” (Orientalism, Vintage, 1979, p. 238)
4 Travels in Arabia Deserta was republished in 1921 with an introduction T.E. Lawrence, who was an admirer of Doughty’s work. Another devotee was the writer Henry Green.
5 Count Ferdinand August Adolf von Zeppelin. Of all the 161 rigid airships built and flown between 1897 and 1940, 119 were built by the company that Zeppelin founded. He died in 1917, three months before the downing of L 48.
6 The sixteen crew members of L 48 killed that night and buried at St Peter’s were later exhumed and reburied at the Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery in Staffordshire. There were three survivors: Heinrich Ellerkamm, Otto Miethe, and Wilhelm Uecker.
7 Zeppelin LZ 95 (L 48) was shot down over water by Great Yarmouth but then crashed near Theberton. It was hit by several RAF planes, but the coup de grace is commonly ascribed to Canadian pilot Second Lieutenant Loudon Pierce Watkins, flying a B.E.12, a single-seat aeroplane made by the Royal Aircraft Factory. For more on the story see R.L. Rimell’s The Last Flight Of The L 48.
8 Palmer’s preference here speaks very much to his time and not-so-subtle jingoism. The name Zeppelin is certainly more well known than that of Doughty these days. Palmer could have hardly predicted the work of Edward Said, and his dismantling of Orientalist assumptions, even less so the coming of Messrs Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham.