Walter P. Starmer

Walter Percival Starmer was born in 1877 in Teignmouth, Devon where his father, Henry, was minister of the Congregational Church.

From October 1914 until the summer of 1919 he served as a volunteer with the YMCA and the Red Cross on the Western Front in France and recorded what he saw in drawings and water colours.

Eleven of his pictures were included in Sir Arthur Yapp’s ‘The Romance of the Red Triangle' - the story of the YMCA in the First World War.

The paintings are noteworthy for recording the presence of Indian troops and Chinese workers at the Front and the provision made for them by the YMCA.

In 1919 he was employed at St Jude’s Church, Hampstead Garden Suburb initially to decorate the Lady Chapel as a war memorial.

The most notable part of the scheme is a series of depictions of women from Christian history up to the present including the anti-vivisectionist and suffragist Frances Power Cobbe (d. 1904), the social reformer and women’s right campaigner Josephine Butler (d.1906), Angela Burdett-Coutts (d.1906), philanthropist and supporter of animal causes, the executed nurse Edith Cavell (d. 1915), Elsie Inglis (d. 1917) a Scottish doctor and suffragist who had established all-women medical units, and Agnes Weston (d. 1918) who had dedicated her life to the welfare of the men of the Royal Navy.

His final commission for St Jude’s was for a memorial to Michael Rennie, elder son of the third vicar, the Reverend W. H. Maxwell Rennie, who had died of exposure after rescuing children from the sea after the evacuation ship on which he was an escort, the SS City of Benares, was torpedoed on 17 September 1940, with the tragic loss of 258 lives, including 81 children.