MAJOR-GENERAL SIR G. ASTON

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 135, 5 December 1938, Page 10

MAJOR-GENERAL SIR G. ASTON

(Received December 5, 2 p.m.)

LONDON, December 4. Major-General Sir George Aston is dead.

Major-General Sir George Grey Aston was born in 1861 and educated at Westminster and at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. In 1879 he entered the Royal Marine Artillery. In 1914-17 he was commandant, and he retired with the rank of Major-General in 1917. For some years he was on the Admiralty Intelligence Staff, and, in 1896-99 was Professor of Fortification at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. In 1904-7 he was D.A.A.G. at the Staff College and in 1908-12 was brigadier-general on the General Staff in South Africa. He served in the Sudan and South Africa and commanded expeditions to Ostend and Dunkirk in 1914. He wrote a good deal of defence matters. He married a daughter of Vice-Admiral W. Wilson and had-three sons and two daughters.

shock at first, but let anyone who doubted go and sit in the north transept on a summer evening when tha sun was lighting up the wall .of the cleaned south transept and he would see a sight of entrancing beauty. The work of cleaning was laborious, involving the use of a vacuum cleaner, scrubbing with methylated spirits, and washing down with cold water. At first condensed milk was used to finish the work and give it a protective film, but such a,film, however carefully applied, necessarily tended to blur the details, and it was felt that in a properly heated building such as the Abbey now was, and lit by electric light instead of gas, such a preservative was unnecessary. CLEANING OF MONUMENTS. Another delightful aspect of the work had been the careful cleaning of monuments, bringing out the colour which lay hidden beneath grime. Recently in cleaning a monument an interesting discovery was made. Behind a desk in St. Benedict's Chapel was found a little window, so placed that anyone looking through it would see the altar of the chapel. Just to the side was a door (now blocked) which seemed to have no obvious purpose, but, taking it in conjunction with the window, and with some other hints, Sir Charles Peers and he had come to the conclusion that it must have led into a little room, and that therein must hava dwelt the Abbey anchorite or recluse. Through that door must have passed the young Henry V on the night ol his father's death to vow to lead a new life. ~ . . Shortly the most recently cleaned chapel of St. Edmund would be reopened, and it would come as a revela. tion to many when they saw what had been done in the way of cleaning the tombs there. Finally, Mr. Tanner described the exhumation in 1933 of the "remains of the "Two Princes in the Tower," which was the subject of a long article in "The Times" of December 1, 1933. Concluding, he said that more and mor« people turned instinctively to tht great Abbey Church at Westminster in times of crisis. It never failed them. Today, as ever, it laid its spell on all who entered within its walls or who served it alike by its associations and by its incomparable beauty.