This is a text-only version of an article first published on Tuesday, 30 April 2019. Information shown on this page may no longer be current.
STANDING among the ruins of a French village in 1917, Wilfred James Dashwood spied a man lying in the rubble of a church.
The Christ figure on its new cross in St Mary's.
The Christ figure can be seen high up on the left hand wall, over the third bed from the left, in the Manancourt church.
As the Grenadier Guards Lieutenant moved to help, he realised the figure was a wooden statue of Christ, which, although missing His cross, had survived the devastation. Lt Dashwood took the 17th Century statue home to Wootton-by-Woodstock in Oxfordshire as a memorial to his brother Ernest, who had fallen in the carnage of the Battle of the Somme in 1915. Ernest, a Captain in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, had farmed in the village and the statue was hung above the pulpit of St Mary the Virgin.
But the residents of modern-day Manancourt - the village which had originally housed the figure - remained oblivious to the figure's fate. Nicholas Tomlinson, the church warden of St Mary's, traced its history and contacted the mayor of present-day Étricourt-Manancourt, a new community built from the devastation. In August, 100 years since their community was annihilated, a party of French villagers travelled to Wootton to be reunited with what they regard as their 'last refugee' at a service of re-dedication. "We assumed everything had been destroyed. . . "Jean-Pierre Coquette, the Mayor of Étricourt-Manancourt, said: "We assumed everything had been destroyed and, as a result of the war, the population of our village had been displaced.
The ones that returned had to start from scratch, so to experience this is very emotional. "Lt Dashwood returned to the front before the statue was re-dedicated at St Mary's.
He was fatally wounded at the battle of Passchendaele - the fifth Dashwood brother to be killed in battle. Canon Frank Ransome Marriott, the Rector of Wootton for 45 years, dedicated the Christ figure and His new cross of English oak.
But, just three weeks later, his 19-year-old son, Second Lieutenant John Douglas Marriott, was killed near Ypres. In a ceremony of re-dedication, the present Rector of Wootton, the Revd Stephen Jones spoke of the miracle of this delicate figure being virtually unharmed in the midst of the destruction all around.
After the service the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Étricourt-Manancourt, who were staying with Mr Tomlinson, showed 600 photographs which demonstrated the devastation and regeneration of the French village. During the German occupation the church had been used as a field hospital and Mr Tomlinson spotted the Christ figure on the wall.
He said: "It was an incredible moment.
Our French visitors were quite overwhelmed as no-one alive today who knew of its existence. "Aimé Langleterre, an 83 year-old representative of the French church said that his first thought had been to take the figure home to install in one of the two new churches in modern-day Étricourt-Manancourt.
However, he said that as it had been here for 100 years it now 'probably only understood English and therefore it would be wrong to take it back to France'. Framed photographs of the figure now hang in both the French church and town hall after being presented by the Wootton villagers.