APART from the parish church and village pub, one of the best places for local history is a graveyard.

Over the years I have explored most of them across the Maldon district and I associate each with particular people.

Whenever I visit Langford, for example, I pay my respects to the former railway station master buried there.

At Goldhanger I make a beeline for the headstones of two Great War pilots.

At Tolleshunt D’Arcy it’s a doctor and a famous writer, and at Woodham Walter an 18th-century miller.

The choice is, of course, a personal one, because every commemoration is equally important and those remembered are an integral part of the fabric of their former homestead.

At the waterside village of Bradwell there are three characters from the past that I particularly think of.

the Bradwell three (l. to r. Linnett, Driberg and Poupore) (drawings A. Puttock).

the Bradwell three (l. to r. Linnett, Driberg and Poupore) (drawings A. Puttock).

They all lie, not in the graveyard surrounding ancient St Thomas’s Church, but in the extension further down the East End Road, on the right.

Let me introduce them to you….

I will describe my ‘Bradwell three’ in turn, but not in order of their death, rather when they were born.

We pass through the lych gate, turn right and make for the first one alongside the hedge line – a man who came into this world during the reign of Queen Victoria.

The small, simple memorial takes the form of an open stone book. Although it has suffered the ravages of time, you can still make out (on the left hand side) the name Walter Linnett.

I never knew Walter, but thanks to the skilful writing of the author James Wentworth Day, I feel that I did.

He described Walter as “tall, blue-eyed, soft spoken, with powerful shoulders and a face as brown as leather, a shy man with the quiet manner of those who see few strangers”.

That last comment is something of a giveaway because Walter Linnett was a wildfowler who lived in a remote, solitary cottage, nestling under the sea wall, just a few yards from 7th-century St Peter’s Chapel.

He was born in the weatherboarded cottage in 1877, worked the surrounding marshlands all his life and, when he died in 1958, this “King of the Essex Fowlers” was “laid in state” inside the old chapel.

He was buried in the graveyard on December 8 and the inscription on the stone book tells us exactly where. The right-hand page also remembers wife Gertrude (née Murrell), who was buried on exactly the same day in December, but six years later.

Next we move to an area of more recent burials at the bottom end of the site and find the grave of Thomas Edward Neil Driberg, aka ‘Tom’, Lord Bradwell.

Maldon and Burnham Standard: The gravesThe graves

Born an Edwardian in 1905, he was, to say the least, a rather larger than life character. Journalist, politician, High Anglican churchman, friend (and enemy) of the famous and infamous, all these years on, he still has the power to “make your hair curl”.

If you want to know what I mean, read Francis Wheen’s biography Tom Driberg – His life and indiscretions (Chatto & Windus 1990).

Despite his undoubted failings he was, by all accounts, a good constituency MP for Maldon. For many years he lived at the beautiful Grade II*-listed Bradwell Lodge, described as “one of the most delightful smaller country houses of Essex”.

Again, I never met Tom, but I knew a man who did – my former doctor, David Cargill. When it was suggested that Tom Driberg was a KGB spy, Dr Cargill said he thought it very unlikely as he was “a most unpractical man (who) never acted in a suspicious manner”.

Tom Driberg died of a heart attack on August 12, 1976, while travelling by taxi from Paddington to his Barbican flat. His funeral was on August 19 at St Matthew’s, Westminster, but he was laid to rest in the graveyard extension at Bradwell.

During the war, Tom Driberg was very supportive of the home front and even gave up Bradwell Lodge for use as an officers’ mess for the personnel stationed at RAF Bradwell Bay.

Among those who would have dined in its palatial surroundings was the young man commemorated by our final monument.

Not far from Walter Linnett and easily identifiable as one of those uniform Commonwealth War Grave headstones, it reads “Flying Officer W.M. Poupore. Pilot. Royal Canadian Air Force. 6th October 1942. Age 20”.

William Marshall Poupore was born in the “Roaring 20s” – in 1922, not here, but in Vancouver, British Columbia. He followed his father into the Air Force and trained as a pilot throughout 1941.

He came over to this country and joined 418 RCAF Squadron at Bradwell, flying the three-man crewed Boston Mk.III aircraft. On the date of his death he was conducting an air to sea firing test on his forward guns when he flew W8359 into the water off the Dengie Flats.

It is highly likely that Walter Linnett knew about the crash – he might even have witnessed it.

Equally, Tom Driberg may well have met young William at Bradwell Lodge.

We will never know for sure, but today the three are together, along with many other past residents who make Bradwell such a special, very human, place.