IT was interesting to read the investigations being carried out by Roger Gill to try to trace the descendants of William Lewis who’s grave is in the cemetery of All Saints Church in Wyke Regis.
When I was a young choir boy at Wyke Church in the late 1940s, whilst wandering round the churchyard, I came across Williams Lewis’s grave and was intrigued by the script on the headstone.
It was some years later that I read the novel ‘Moonfleet’, written in 1898 by John Meade Falkner, and realised that he, too, had seen the headstone, and had used it in the novel, with a different date and name, and with part of the text rewritten.
Around thirty years ago, the headstone was beginning to suffer from weathering, with the text almost impossible to read, and so I approached the church personnel, and suggested that the headstone be removed, the text re-carved and the stone placed on display in Weymouth Library, with details of the connection with Meade Falkner’s novel. Sadly this was refused and the headstone is still in place, rapidly deteriorating, and now impossible to read.
Mike Boyce
Portland
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