Recently a priest associate of Revd Liz visited St George’s to see the Memorial Window in the old chapel. Revd Anthony Hulbert is a descendant of the Hulbert family. He is a retired priest in Portsmouth Diocese.
Revd Hulbert writes:
Thank you so much for your welcome and for showing us round this morning. It was lovely to come to St. George’s and Nicola and I enjoyed our visit very much. I was very interested to see the family connection.
I did a little research later today. Walter Hulbert was a solicitor in a family firm in London. Apparently he and his wife Ella were very socially conscious and it is believed set up and paid for the first national District Nurse. Ella was a VAD in WWI. They were fluent in French and often spoke French at home. Ella had at one stage acted as an interpreter for Nurse Cavell in Belgium – presumably before she was shot in 1915, and before the war, when she was running her hospital in Brussels – apparently they were very devoted to the life of the church and seldom missed a Sunday. Freda and George were first cousins to my grandfather.
It is believed that the artist who was commissioned for the Memorial Window was instructed to emulate George’s face in the stained glass in the person of St. George. It was Walter’s grandfather George Alexander who built Hulbert Road and he stated that it must have curves in it to stop any speeding horses going down a straight run! and I think he started the school (Hulbert Junior, now Springwood). The road appears to have been designed as a community asset and was built somewhere about 1830. We shall hope to come over for a Sunday parish Communion one day soon.
Interestingly, there is an article in the September 2000 issue of St George’s News, which says that Walter Hulbert was one of the two Churchwardens first appointed when St George’s PCC was set up a hundred years ago in March 1923.
https://www.stgeorges.church/2000/07f13.htm
