#aldborough

But the best glass is in the chancel, depicting St George and St Edmund above a landscape of Suvla Bay, and is by William Aikman in 1925. St Edmund and St George remember Edmund Gay, who was a soldier in the infamous 1st/5th Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment. Largely recruited from farmworkers on estates in north Norfolk, they sailed for Gallipolli, and were wiped out during the attack on Anafarta in Suvla Bay on the 12th August 1915. Because they had fallen behind enemy lines, they were listed as missing, and a Norfolk legend grew up that they had vanished into a mysterious cloud and were taken up out of this world. This sounds bizarre, but it was of a piece with legends like the Angel of Mons leading the British troops to escape death in Flanders, and with the great rise in spiritualism in this country in the years immediately after the War. [...] Many of the dead boys were workers from the Sandringham estate, and when the bodies were eventually found and identified this knowledge was kept from Queen Alexandra, because it was felt that the truth would be too upsetting for her. Thus, she died believing the legend.