A visit to the grave of NCVO's 'founding father'

Last month, whilst holidaying in Northern France, I took the opportunity to visit the grave of NCVO's 'founding father', E V D Birchall.

Edward Vivian Dearman Birchall (how's that for a name?) was educated at Eton & Oxford after which he seems to have been involved in social work in Birmingham and London before going to work at the Board of Trade, an Edwardian forerunner of today's Department for Business Innovation & Skills.

Birchall served as a territorial and was already a Captain in the Buckinghamshire Battalion at the start of the First World War. The battalion was mobilised on 4 August 1914 and after eight months of preliminary training, they left Chelmsford for France on 30 March 1915.

In a letter home written on 9 March 1916, Birchall's comrade-in-arms Lionel Crouch wrote,

"Birchall says that he doesn't want to get killed a bit. He wants to die at the age of ninety-five and be buried by the vicar and the curate, and his funeral attended by all the old ladies of the parish! He strongly objects to large objects of an explosive nature being thrown at him, and then his remains being collected in a sandbag and buried by ribald soldiery and dug up again two days later by a 5.9!"

Birchall never came back from France; during the Battle of Pozières, a small town in the Somme, he was badly wounded, and on 10 August 1916, his 32nd birthday, he died in a hospital in Étaples.  He was awarded the DSO for his part in the battle; the citation reads:

"For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in action. He led forward his company with great dash under heavy fire, entered the enemy's trenches, and, though dangerously wounded, refused any assistance till assured that the position won was firmly held."

Before his death he had written to his friend wrote a note to his friend S. P. Grundy, which read,

"If I am scuppered I'm leaving you £1,000 to do some of the things we talked about"

referring to their shared enthusiasm for establishing a more formal basis for the 'social service', or voluntary work, in which they were both engaged.

The note was thought to have been archived at the Imperial War Museum, but I understand that recent attempts to find it have not succeeded.

Birchall's legacy enabled Grundy to set up the National Council for Social Service. NCSS's original objectives were:

• to promote the systematic organisation of voluntary social work, nationally and locally
• to assist in the formation in each local government area representations of both voluntary effort and statutory administration
• to provide information for voluntary social workers

S. P. Grundy became its first Honorary Secretary, and in 1928 NCSS was granted charitable status.

I visited Étaples Military Cemetery on a damp, overcast day.  Étaples is the largest of the military cemeteries in France managed by the Commonwealth War Garves Commission; over 10,000 of the First World War dead are buried there, along with others from the Second World War.  The cemetery was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, who was responsible for the Cenotaph in Whitehall and the Monument to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval.

Like the other cemeteries that I visited at Pozières, Thiepval and elsewhere, Étaples is impeccably well looked after - every headstone is clean and bright, the flowerbeds and lawns are immaculate.  There is a register of everyone buried there, which records their details and the location of their grave.

Visiting the cemetery was a sobering experience; regardless of one's opinions on the rights and wrongs of the First World War or military conflict in general, one cannot but be moved by the sight of serried ranks of white headstones, each one representing a life lost.

Civil society has changed and developed in ways that Edward Birchall would never have imagined; but I think the same spirit, of contributing personal resources to the greater good, that led so many to lay down their lives on the battlefields of the World War continues to drive the work of the voluntary sector today.

• More photographs of the cemetery
• Read more on NCVO's history
• Find out about the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission

About this blog

My intention is to write occasional pieces about the history of NCVO. I should make it clear that I'm not a historian. But having worked here for 18 years I have accumulated a few memories and all sorts of artefacts, and it's these I'll be drawing on to write these pieces.  By doing so I hope to give a sense of NCVO's place in the development of civil society during the 20th century. It would be great to hear from anyone out there who knows more than me about any of this - just add a comment below, or email me directly.