A Hampshire village made the national headlines recently when a local resident took his conviction for speeding to the European Court of Human Rights. Yet West Meon is in many ways a typical quiet village, and is luckier than most as it retains its school, its shops, including an award winning butcher, and two pubs. There is also a pottery which makes handmade architectural and garden terracotta, using traditional techniques. The village is set in glorious countryside at the head of the Meon Valley, close to the prehistoric earthwork of Old Winchester Hill, now a National Nature reserve.One thing missing is a mediaeval church, a familiar feature of almost every other village. St. John the Evangelist, standing imposingly above the village, is an early work of no less an architect than Sir George Gilbert Scott, dating from 1843-46 and built at the expense of the then Rector, Archdeacon Bayley.

Scott, born in 1811, became an admirer of Pugin, and went on to represent the pinnacle of High Victorian Gothic architecture. He was responsible for the restoration of Ely Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and among his most famous buildings in London we find the Albert Memorial, St. Pancras Hotel and the Foreign Office in Whitehall.

In the churchyard lie the remains of two strongly contrasted Englishmen. Prominent in the neatly kept part to the south of the church stands the imposing tomb slab of Thomas Lord, founder of Lords Cricket Ground. The slab was inscribed and placed on the tomb by the MCC in 1951. Lord was born in Thirsk, in Yorkshire, but learnt his cricket at Diss, in Norfolk, where he went to school. Moving to London, he went into the wine trade and found patronage from the nobility, which enabled him to build a cricket ground in Dorset Square. The Lord’s we know today in St. John’s Wood, headquarters of the Marylebone Cricket Club, was in fact his third ground. He retired to West Meon and died there in 1932. Both the Bi-centenary of his birth and the 250th anniversary were celebrated by matches at Lord’s involving the West Meon village team. One of the village pubs is named in his memory.

In stark contrast, hidden away, neglected and overgrown behind the tower on the north side of the church, are buried the ashes of Guy Burgess, a leading member of the infamous “Cambridge ring” of Soviet spies that operated in Britain between the 1930s and the early 1950s - Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt.
His father was a naval officer and he grew up in the village, before going up to Cambridge in 1921. During the war he worked for the Secret service, and was later posted to Washington.

It was just before Maclean was due to be interrogated as a suspected Soviet agent that the KGB ordered Burgess to return to London to arrange his escape, and accompany him to Moscow, where he remained, isolated and strangely homesick, for the rest of his life. When he died in 1963, his mother requested that his ashes be returned to Britain for burial. The earthenware pot, decorated with Russian script, was placed in the family grave at West Meon. The service was held late at night to avoid publicity, and the words “In loving memory of Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess, died 30 August 1963” inscribed on the side of the cross. They are still visible today, yet all but forgotten.

Tom Muckley, November 2006

This article was originally published by the Petersfield Post

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