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Why war memorials matter

War memorials around the country are being neglected and destroyed, but they are important to ensure the sacrifices of others are not forgotten. When the Cenotaph in Whitehall and the grave of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey were inaugurated in 1920, they became the focus of national mourning

By Richard van Emden

9:15AM GMT 30 Oct 2011

By the end of the Great War, more than three quarters of a million British soldiers were dead, more than 192,000 wives had lost their husbands, and nearly 360,000 children had lost their fathers.

The scale of the suffering was almost beyond comprehension, and the official and public recognition of that pain - even if it was just a name on a memorial to the missing as in the great arch of the Menin Gate at Ypres - was enormously significant in helping these families to face the future.

War memorials matter. They stand in village squares, on railway stations, in churches and in football grounds, and they are cared for by the same communities from which the men were drawn.

Many were Kitchener volunteers, who had been to school, worked and enlisted together.

Their families knew each other well, and the grief was shared. Today, the record may be up to date, including the dead from Iraq or Afghanistan, but the suffering they represent is the same as it ever was.


Historically, war memorials celebrated famous victories and the generals who won them, while the bodies of dead soldiers were generally buried in unmarked mass graves.

It was only in the Boer War at the end of the nineteenth century that the dead themselves became the centre of attention, but the need not only to remember the fallen but to acknowledge publicly the sacrifice made by their families developed gradually during the Great War.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Warrior's coffin was adorned with the equipment of a private; webbing, bayonet and steel helmet, an ordinary soldier with whom the mass of the population could identify; this ordinariness became typical nationwide, where the representation of soldiers on or surrounding community war memorials was often of a resolute but weary private, collar open at the neck.

In the week before the Unknown Warrior's tomb was sealed, one and a quarter million people filed past, leaving wreaths from officialdom and heart-rending tributes from ordinary families, such as one tiny bunch of lilies with a card attached, 'In loving memory of Tom, from Dad and Mum'.

For half of all those killed in France and Flanders, their loved one had no known grave, and so they identified with the nameless soldier they were honouring - he became emotionally their husband, their son.

This close relationship between the memorial and the families of those recorded there was repeated in every town and village where a war memorial was erected.

These were, and remain, local tributes to the local dead and to those who mourned them. Nowhere was this more powerfully illustrated than in the Scottish town of Newport on Tay, when its eighty-four lost sons were to be commemorated.

The design was of a granite pillar, with bronze panels on which the names of the dead would be inscribed.

The memorial, as everywhere else, was paid for by public subscription, but one decision was made exclusively by a panel of local dignitaries: they decided that the name of Private Peter Black, shot for desertion in 1916, should be omitted.

The townspeople were furious, not least ex-servicemen who threatened to demolish the memorial using gelignite stolen from a local quarry if Private Black's name was not included.

The attitude of the public had been misjudged, as had the determination of the ex-servicemen.

A community meeting was called and in a packed town hall, it was agreed unanimously that Private Black's name should be included; a committee of local people was hastily formed, and the original panel resigned. The gelignite was quietly returned.

This case is interesting in part because it shows the depth of feeling about the memorial, and the very real sense of community ownership: they had suffered, and they were going to make decisions about their memorial.

Interestingly, none of the original panel had actually served abroad in the war.

The last veterans of the Great War have died, but there is a pain of loss which continues from one generation to the next, and we ignore that suffering at our peril.

Donald Overall, now aged 98, went to France in 2007 to visit his father's grave.

As he stood there, he remembered: 'I'm an old man, I am supposed to be tough, I thought I was hard, but I'm not. He's my dad. I miss him. I missed him as a boy and I miss him as an old man... I feel closer now than I have ever been.'

* Richard van Emden is author of The Quick and the Dead: fallen soldiers and their families in the Great War, Bloomsbury 2011

