East Looe, Cornwall - Pages of the Sea

East Looe, Cornwall

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On the day: A Sea Scouts group performed songs and schoolchildren’s commemorative artwork was displayed. Gig rowers took to the ocean, and there was a specially choreographed performance by East Looe Pioneers Running Club.

 

The portrait revealed on this beach was:

Kenneth Walton Grigson

Devonshire Regiment

Age: 23 Date of Death: 20/07/1918

Son of the Rev. Canon W. S. Grigson and Mrs. Grigson, late of Pelynt Vicarage, Looe, Cornwall.

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Captain Kenneth Walton Grigson (29 June 1895 – 20/ July 1918)

Much of what we know about Kenneth Walton Grigson comes from his youngest brother, Geoffrey, who became a poet in the period between the First and Second World Wars. Kenneth was born in Pelynt, Cornwall, to Mary and Reverend Canon William Grigson. As a second son with six brothers, he would have been expected to join the priesthood himself, until the outbreak of war intervened.

Kenneth became a serjeant in the 7th Company, Reserve Battalion, Devonshire Regiment, later gaining the rank of captain. A younger brother, Lionel, joined the same regiment and was reported missing in France in May 1917, only one day after arriving at the front. Kenneth survived a year longer, but he was eventually killed in action in 1918, just a few months before Armistice. In his autobiography, The Crest on the Silver, Geoffrey remembers his brother fondly as a child, reminiscing about pushing him round the vicarage garden in a wheelbarrow, then later during the war returning for leave with an “extremely white face”.

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