Famous People Connected with Hersham

Hersham’s list of notable connections runs from a seventeenth-century astrologer to a wartime secret agent to a punk frontman, a genuinely wide spread for a village of its size.

John Profumo

John Profumo is remembered nationally for one thing: his resignation as Secretary of State for War in 1963, after his relationship with Christine Keeler became a political scandal that shook the Macmillan government. That single episode has tended to overshadow the four decades that followed it, in which Profumo rebuilt his public life almost entirely through unpaid charity work, becoming chief fundraiser and a tireless volunteer for Toynbee Hall, the East London charity, for more than forty years, work for which he was appointed CBE. Profumo lived his later years locally, and his ashes were buried alongside his wife’s in the family vault in front of St Peter’s Church, Hersham, following his death in 2006 at the age of 91.

Odette Sansom GC MBE

Odette Sansom, later Odette Hallowes, was a Special Operations Executive agent working undercover in occupied France during the Second World War, captured, interrogated and eventually sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she survived by refusing to betray her fellow agents under torture. In 1946 she became the first woman awarded the George Cross, Britain’s highest civilian award for gallantry. In later life Sansom lived at Eriswell Road in Walton-on-Thames with her third husband, the former SOE officer Geoffrey Hallowes, and both are buried at Burvale Cemetery in Hersham, a quiet local resting place for one of the most decorated women in British wartime history.

Jimmy Pursey

Jimmy Pursey, frontman of the punk band Sham 69, grew up locally and began performing as a teenager at the Walton Hop before forming the band that would take a piece of local graffiti as its name and put Hersham directly into the UK singles chart with “Hersham Boys” in 1979.

William Lilly

William Lilly, the seventeenth-century astrologer known in his own time as the “English Merlin”, retired to a small estate in Hersham after the Restoration and practised medicine locally until his death in 1681. He remains one of the most significant figures in the history of English astrology, and his Hersham years, along with his connection to St Mary’s Church in Walton, are covered in full in our dedicated article on William Lilly.

Frederick Wicks

Frederick Wicks, born in 1840, was an English author and inventor who retired to Hersham, where he died on 30 March 1910. As a writer he is remembered for The British Constitution and Government, a popular political text that ran to several editions, and for a run of Victorian novels; as an inventor, his Wicks Rotary Typecasting Machine, patented in 1878, dramatically increased the speed at which newspaper type could be cast, a genuine piece of Victorian industrial innovation quietly connected to this corner of Surrey.