The Walton Memorial Banner: A First World War Roll of Honour

Among the objects connected to Walton’s New Zealand hospital, one of the most personal is a small embroidered banner, worked by a recovering patient around 1919 and carried every Anzac Day from St Mary’s Church to a graveside nearby for over a decade. It now lives on the other side of the world, in the national collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, which holds full catalogue images of the banner.

Made during recovery, not by trade

Te Papa’s own record describes the banner as worked by “the patients of Walton-on-Thames,” while the museum’s research blog narrows this to one soldier, or perhaps a small number, stitching during their recovery at the New Zealand General Hospital at Mount Felix. Making it was very likely a form of occupational therapy as much as an act of remembrance, the kind of quiet, repetitive work recommended to convalescing men in hospitals throughout the First World War. The finished banner measures 980mm by 890mm, worked in cloth, cotton, silk, metal, wood and cord.

Nineteen names

The banner commemorates 18 soldiers and one nurse who died while connected to the hospital:

• Private James Livingstone Porter, Otago Infantry
• Corporal Thomas Wallace Phillips, Auckland Mounted Rifles
• Private William Fox, Canterbury Infantry (embroidered incorrectly as “Cox”)
• Acting Corporal John Brian Dalton, Otago Mounted Rifles
• Corporal Henry Hudson, Wellington Infantry
• Driver Arthur Hall, Army Service Corps
• Driver William Henry Russell, Field Artillery
• Rifleman Edward Rout, New Zealand Rifle Brigade
• Private Kingi Hamana, 1st Maori Contingent
• Private John Lewis Boyd, Auckland Mounted Rifles
• Sapper Jack Fleming, Field Engineers
• Private Montrose Baker, Wellington Infantry
• Private Ramera Wairau, 2nd Maori Contingent
• Private William Henry Rishworth, Otago Infantry
• Rifleman George Blinko, New Zealand Rifle Brigade
• Private Taura, Rarotongans Unit, 3rd Maori Contingent
• Private Robert Black, Wellington Infantry
• Colonel Charles Mackie Begg, Medical Corps
• Nurse T. W. Bennet, Voluntary Aid Detachment

Private James Porter, one of the men named, had worked as a moulder before enlisting, sailed from Port Chalmers in October 1914, and died of wounds from Gallipoli in October 1916, one life among many that the banner reduces to a single embroidered line and that Te Papa’s own research has since worked to fill back in.

Anzac Day at St Mary’s Church

The banner was installed at St Mary’s Church, Walton-on-Thames, in January 1920, and for over a decade it was carried out from the church to the graveside every 25 April as part of the parish’s Anzac Day service. In 1932, a brass memorial tablet, funded by the Returned Soldiers’ Association, took over as the permanent memorial at St Mary’s Church, and the original banner’s working role came to an end.

The banner today

Brigadier McKinnon presented the banner to New Zealand’s Dominion Museum in 1961; it is now held by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa under registration number GH017123. It is a genuine object of the hospital era, made by a patient’s own hand, and quite different from the modern Mount Felix Tapestry, a community embroidery project created nearly a century later to tell the hospital’s wider story. For the fuller history of the hospital itself, see our guide to Mount Felix.