It consists of a three-stepped stone base, a square plinth, and a shaft that rises 16 feet (4.9 m) and terminates in a small wheel cross.

[7] Shortly before her death in 1920, Madeline Wyndham, the matriarch of the family, commissioned two plaques for St. Mary's Church, one commemorating her five grandsons,[3] and another, designed by Alexander Fisher, recognising all those from East Knoyle who died during the war.

[4] The architect chosen to design the memorial was Herbert Maryon,[4] who taught sculpture, including metalwork, modelling, and casting, at the University of Reading.

[13][14][15] Maryon had established himself in the Arts and Crafts movement before moving to academia,[note 1] and in the years following the war designed several memorials.

The side facing the road bears an inscription commemorating those who died in the First and Second World Wars; their names are listed to its right and rear, respectively.

[22] Another cousin, Colonel Henry Hales Pleydell-Bouverie,[29][30][31][32] was a trustee to the estate of their uncle Alfred Seymour,[33] which had donated to the memorial's fund.

[4] Among those in attendance, the Western Gazette reported, included three members of the Wyndham family—Guy Wyndham, his daughter Olivia, and his son Guy Richard Charles[38]—and four of the Herberts: George Herbert, his mother the Dowager Countess of Pembroke, his sister Lady Muriel Jex-Blake, and her husband Arthur John Jex-Blake,[4] whom she had married the previous month.

[4] Others included the memorial's architect Herbert Maryon, committee member F. W. Barnes, the local physician and surgeon Joseph Charles Blythe and his wife,[41][42] the vicar of next-door Hindon Rev.

Frank E. Yeomans, the Primitive Methodist minister in nearby Mere,[51] read a lesson, before Rawlinson removed a Union Jack from the memorial and delivered a speech.

[4] Rawlinson read the inscription on the front of the memorial, then commented on his childhood in East Knoyle; he recalled a number of people, such as his late uncle Alfred Seymour, and said one had been a close friend and aide-de-camp.

[4] The hymns When I Survey the Wondrous Cross and There is a Blessed Home were sung, and buglers from the Wiltshire Regiment performed the Last Post.

[4] In late 1945, months after the surrender of Japan marked the close of the Second World War, preparations were made to celebrate the return of veterans to East Knoyle, and commemorate the fallen.

[20] The listing entry termed the memorial "an eloquent witness to the tragic impact of world events on the local community and the sacrifice it made in the conflicts of the [twentieth and twenty-first centuries]".

[60] The research pushed the recognised number of East Knoyle deaths from 20 to 27; the additional seven—the brothers Percival Henry and Walter Geoffrey Hill, the brothers James Henry and Tom Samuel Lampard, and William George Caddy, William John Clifford, and George Elliott—were born in East Knoyle but raised elsewhere.