St Peter's Church, Hersham

Hersham’s parish church is younger than Walton’s, in keeping with the village’s own comparatively late arrival as a separate parish, but it carries a genuine piece of twentieth-century political history in its churchyard.

The parish church

St Peter’s stands as the direct successor to Hersham’s first place of worship, Holy Trinity, a yellow brick chapel of ease built in an Anglo-Norman style in 1839 to serve the growing village before Hersham had its own parish status. Holy Trinity was demolished in 1889, two years after its replacement, and St Peter’s has served as Hersham’s parish church ever since, anchoring the village’s religious life through more than a century of change around it.

The building

St Peter’s was built in 1887 to a design by the architect J. L. Pearson, working in a thirteenth-century Gothic style, a confident, historically minded choice for a church intended to serve a village that had only recently become a parish in its own right. Pearson was a serious ecclesiastical architect with a substantial body of church work across England, and St Peter’s reflects that pedigree: a purpose-built Victorian parish church designed with real architectural ambition rather than simple utility.

The Profumo vault

St Peter’s holds one of Hersham’s more unexpected connections to national history. John Profumo, the government minister at the centre of the 1963 political scandal that bears his name, spent his later decades rebuilding his public reputation almost entirely through charity work, and on his death in 2006 his ashes were buried alongside his wife’s in the family vault in front of St Peter’s Church. It is a quiet resting place for a man whose name is still, for many, shorthand for a single scandal, in front of a church a very long way from the Westminster world where that scandal played out. Read more about Profumo and Hersham’s other notable residents.

A Second World War memorial

Inside the church is a stone plaque to Flying Officer Michael Courtney Franklin Mee. The War Memorials Online register transcribes its inscription as commemorating him “killed off Narvick 8 Jun 1940 aged 23 years”, using that spelling, and records his parents as Frederick Franklin Mee and Nora Courtney Mee of Burhill. That transcription has not been checked here against the plaque itself.

Mee flew with 46 Squadron of the Royal Air Force, which took Hawker Hurricanes to Norway in 1940. He was one of eight of the squadron’s pilots lost when the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, which had taken their aircraft aboard, was intercepted and sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The plaque and most accounts of the sinking give 8 June 1940; the Wikipedia article on the squadron gives 9 June. That difference is not resolved here, and the date on the plaque is the one reproduced above.

The wider air war reached this part of Surrey through the aircraft industry rather than through the village itself. The Vickers-Armstrongs works at Brooklands, over the boundary in Weybridge, was bombed in a daylight raid on 4 September 1940, and that story is told on our Walton at war page rather than repeated here.

The churchyard

Beyond the Profumo vault, St Peter’s churchyard functions as it has for well over a century: the working burial ground of a Victorian parish church, set within a village that has grown considerably around it since 1887 but has kept the church itself at its centre.

Services and visiting

St Peter’s remains an active parish church, holding regular services as the spiritual centre of Hersham in the same way it has done since the Victorian period. Visitors are welcome to view the building and churchyard outside service times, a short walk from Hersham Green at the heart of the village.