This essay was written for a short course at college. I was asked to investigate a First World War memorial, and chose to look at the two memorials in St Luke's Church, Cheltenham. There are two memorials in this church owing to the fact that the nearby St John's Church was shut down in the late 1960s, the two congregations merged, and the war memorial was transferred to St Luke's, although not in its original form. There are 62 names on the memorial from St John's, and 63 names on the St Luke's memorial. Within this text there are links to photos of both memorials, along with photos of other memorials. I have become very interested in this side of the history of World War One, and hope to do more on the subject at college. If you want to comment or ask questions, do email me.

The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, the Cenotaph, the Field of Remembrance, the Flanders Poppy, the hundreds of village, town and parish war memorials, together with the language, liturgy, ceremony and hymnody that are used throughout Britain, only came into being during, or in the decade after, the First World War and were unprecedented. Notwithstanding the fact that these things have a timeless quality now, they are either taken for granted or regarded with indifference by the majority of contemporary British society. It can be argued that the theme of remembrance permeated British society in the inter-war period to such an extent that any political critique of the Great War, or of post-war society from the perspective of popular expectation or aspiration which, elsewhere took the form of revolution or nationalism, has been denied. A chronology for remembrance can be constructed; a sequence of rituals, events and other manifestations which formed the background to social and political debate during the 1920s and 1930s. In the absence of models from the past, state and Church drew on certain themes which had been uttered during the First World War, and which became axiomatic of remembrance itself.

At the heart of Britain's remembrance rituals lies the fact of the British First World War casualties. British losses in the First World War were in excess of those suffered in any previous war fought by the British. The British public were unprepared for either the scale of loss or the nature of Western Front warfare. Every subsequent ceremonial event developed around the central figure of British and Empire losses, referred to as the 'Million Dead' throughout the decade of the 1920s. This concentration on those who were lost during the fighting was established early in the war when the decision was taken to record the names of all those who were killed. By 1928, the Imperial War Graves Commission was able to report that a total of 1,081,952 names were registered, of whom some 582,783 had been identified and were buried in known graves. Of the 499,169 names recorded as 'missing', 173,213 had been found but were unidentified, and had therefore, been buried as unknown.1 The reason for Britain's war losses being recorded in this way lies in the expansion of Britain's forces from its small regular army that was sent to France in 1914. Kitchener's volunteers were

men whose parents or wives had not accepted as one of the conditions of a professional soldier's career, the possibility of an unknown grave in a foreign country; their relatives poignantly and insistently demanded . . . the fullest information as to the location of the graves of those who fell.2

For the bereaved, the dead took on a sacred character, and the preservation of their memory, beyond the immediate circle of family and friends, began to be seen as a national obligation. National registers and records were reinforced by a multitude of rolls of honour, in which the names of individuals were grouped in accordance to particular allegiances, associations or affinities, such as profession, school, workplace, university, club, community, church, institution or organisation with which, in life, they had been connected. Part of the function of this obsession with rolls and lists was the concern of the bereaved to see proper recognition accorded to the individuality of their loss.

Therefore the origin of this desire to list the names of the dead arose with the concept of the volunteer army. In previous wars, Britain's regular army forces did not enjoy such public interest, only acts of individual valour had been commemorated and celebrated; previously regular soldiers had not been recorded by name on rolls of honour. Volunteers were different, however, and their families expected them to be treated differently. Whether in the official casualty list, in registers of the Imperial War Graves Commission, in the National Register, in street shrines or in local rolls of honour, the compulsion to record the names of those who died was an unusual departure from the British experience of previous wars, and was a powerful impulse towards the development of remembrance.

Mobilisation of popular culture on behalf of the nation's war effort occurred in all the combatant countries, with each nation developing its own language of commemoration, some features of which were universal. One such universal feature was the tendency to place the men of the Great War within that nation's history of martial virtue. In the initial phase of commemorative art, a deliberately archaic language was used to express the glorification of sacrifice, but the problem with using the language of valour and knights, of spiritualised combat and quests, was that it was too unreal, too uplifting and patriotic, and insufficiently sensitive to the desolation of loss. Therefore, other forms of commemorative art emerged, both during and after the war. These rituals and objects were used to express sadness rather than exhilaration, and directly addressed the experience of bereavement.

These two motifs – war as both tragically, unendurably sad and noble and uplifting – are present in virtually all post-war memorials of the Great War, but each memorial differs in the balance struck between the two motifs. That balance was never fixed, no enduring formula emerged to express it, although traditional religious images were repeatedly used to do it.

War memorials, registering in bronze and stone the unprecedented British casualty rate, were to become the most universal and familiar indicator of that casualty rate. The prevailing language of the Great War memorial is spiritual and supranational, rather than conventionally patriotic. The patriotism which is recorded is that of the patria – the local sense of identity and place. At the outset of the war, at least, the pattern of recruitment had emphasised the sense that Britain's total military effort was the sum of the parts – the contributions of the local communities. This meant that there was a powerful link between Britain's military fortunes and the local community, although this link became much weaker after conscription was introduced in 1916.

Both lay and religious communities devoted themselves to the task of commemoration after 1918. The monumental art which resulted from this devotion to commemoration provided a focus for ceremonies of public mourning which began in the decade immediately following the Armistice, and continue to the present day. The icons, imagery and languages adopted varied considerably according to religious practice, political conviction and artistic convention. They also reflected more mundane considerations, such as the community's ability to pay for monuments. In consequence, some plans were scaled down or redesigned to suit the purses of the donors, whilst other plans were scrapped altogether. For instance, the planned Cambridge war memorial (figure 1), which was to have had an eight-foot figure on a twelve-foot base, would have cost £4500 to create. When the memorial committee failed to raise the expected amount from the Cambridgeshire people (figure 2), the committee decided to reduce the height of the figure from eight feet to seven (figure 3). 3

The cost of paying for a war memorial was usually met through appeals either to the community at large, as in town or borough memorials, or to the smaller community, as in the case of parish memorials. Sometimes, however, a memorial was paid for by an individual. In the case of the memorial at St Luke's Church, Cheltenham (figure 4) the money came from both an individual donation – for the stained-glass East Window, which was paid for by a Mr Player (and designed by the then vicar, Rev. C. C. Petch), and donations from the parishioners – for the two memorial tablets alongside the window. 4 In the case of the memorial at St John's Church, Cheltenham, which has been housed in St Luke's Church since the closure of St John's Church in 1968 (figure 5), the money was raised by an appeal and a leaflet was produced and circulated to the parishioners. Letters from the firm, Boulton and Sons, that designed the memorial panels, are still extant. These letters outline the expected cost of producing the panels that formed the reredos either side of the altar (figure 6).

Whilst some war memorials were essentially religious in character, others were primarily secular, but the difference between them should not be exaggerated. In Germany, for example, many memorials with specific religious references were placed in public thoroughfares, as well as in churchyards and cemeteries. The French separation of church and state, and the history and character of Anglican iconophobia made it harder to adopt such flexibility with reference to specifically religious imagery, but even in France and England, exceptions occurred. Amongst the choices available for use in religious commemorative art, the Pieta was a frequent choice to express the sadness of the millions of parents who had lost their sons. This form can be seen throughout Europe, and in Germany in particular.

Stained-glass windows also abounded in churches throughout Europe, although they were rarely used in America. Figure 7 shows an exception; this memorial window to the dead of the Great War forms part of the sanctuary in Winterset United Methodist Church, Iowa. The sanctuary was built in 1918 and the roll of honour lists fifty-seven people from the congregation who served in the Great War. Unusually the last two names on the list appear to belong to women : Beaulah Feely and Carrie Tilton.

In Britain images of tanks and aircraft were added to the traditional lexicon of warfare in art, although St George frequently featured, as in the East Window at St Luke's Church. In a memorial window to an individual soldier at St Stephen's Church, Cheltenham, the saint's face has been replaced with that of the soldier being commemorated, complete with his moustache. There are also two individual memorial windows at St Luke's Church, one features St Michael (figure 8), this window being dedicated to the memory of Private Dudley Kensington of 8th Bedfordshire Regiment who died in France on December 3,1917 aged 33 years; and the other memorial window (figure 9) is dedicated to Neville and Ernest Dicks, sons of Ernest Dicks, for many years the organist at St Luke's. Neville Dicks was a Second Lieutenant in the 8th Worcestershire Regiment and died in France on May 27, 1918 aged 21. His brother Ernest was a signaller in the Royal Navy and was killed in action at sea on June 28, 1918 aged 18. Below both these memorial windows there are tablets giving the details of the men commemorated by the windows.

Such iconography in England particularly is neither surprising nor wholly original. Those who turned to the churches in their mourning to find succour for their sorrow were bound to dwell on traditional styles of devotional art and sculpture. In both Britain, and Ireland (unsurprisingly), Celtic crosses were particularly popular, and crosses and crucifixes appeared across England, and in the British war cemeteries, where Reginald Blomfield's Cross of Sacrifice – a bronze sword on a stone cross – was frequently used, it being an abstract, chivalric form (figure 10).

In commemorative art that has a religious inspiration, the themes of hope, resurrection, transcendence and redemption of the suffering of the war, were never far away. Hope is also a central theme in secular commemoration of the Great War that was expressed in many ways, some profound, some banal. As well as giving hope, war memorials were built to be places where people could mourn, and be seen to mourn. Often the ritual significance of war memorials has been outweighed by their political symbolism, which is sometimes all that viewers can see now that the moment of mourning is eighty years in the past. At the same time, however, communal commemorative art provided a framework for, and a legitimation of, both individual and collective grief.

Remembrance was an act, not an object, and although war memorials would eventually dot the battlefields of the Somme and the Western Front (figure 11), the form these memorials would take, and the words that would be inscribed upon them, would derive from the act of remembrance. The continued debate on war memorial architecture, and the form of that debate from 1916 onwards, demonstrates that a language of remembrance was emerging. Long before the outcome of the war was known or certain, this language was fixed; the rituals of remembrance that followed the November 1918 Armistice and the 1919 Peace had already been defined by this language of remembrance.

Although the Royal Academy formed a committee in 1917 to provide expert advice on the appropriate form and content of war memorials, the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission had a far greater impact on the shaping of the principle features of remembrance. The Imperial War Graves Commission's considerations of the form and style of the commemoration of individual soldiers' graves (figure 12) and of cemeteries in specific battle areas had already begun. Architects had been appointed – Edwin Lutyens, Reginald Blomfield and Herbert Baker – along with Rudyard Kipling and Adrian Hill, together established the language, architecture and landscape of remembrance which became the ubiquitous symbols for post-war British society : the white headstones (figure 13), the Stone of Remembrance, and the Cross of Sacrifice within a landscaped garden. The Stone of Remembrance was conceived by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the Cross of Sacrifice by Sir Reginald Blomfield.

The language of remembrance was based on the notion of sacrifice, not on the patriotic virtues of duty and service, and the rituals of remembrance ensured that rolls of honour and war memorials were made sacred. The origin of the theme of sacrifice – evident in much literature of the Great War, such as Sassoon's The Redeemer (1915), Owen's At a Calvary near Ancre (1917), Kipling's Gethsemane (1914-1918) and Hodgson's Before Action (1916) can be found in the inability the bereaved felt to comprehend a more immediate political or military justification for their loss.

On battlefield sites and at the cemeteries laid out by the Imperial War Graves Commission, memorials to the missing were erected, sites for these being selected in France and Belgium, together with other sites in Italy, Gallipoli, Salonica, Palestine, Egypt and Mesopotamia. These memorials to the missing were the only national battlefield memorials and the dedication of these memorials and sites provided another thread of continuity for remembrance during the period between the two world wars. The Tyne Cot cemetery (figure 14) in Belgium – the largest Commonwealth cemetery on the Western Front – and the Menin Gate, Ypres's memorial to the missing were dedicated in 1927. The Arras memorial and Lutyens's huge memorial at Thiepval (figure 15) on the Somme were unveiled in 1932. The last major war memorial, also designed by Lutyens, at Villers-Brettoneux, was unveiled in July 1938. Most town and parish memorials were unveiled – as St Luke's was – in the early 1920s. Each unveiling or dedication provided a further opportunity to reinforce the notion of sacrifice for the good of the nation. The dead were commemorated without triumphalism or patriotic fervour, but with reference to the equality of sacrifice and the hope of world peace. This was a deliberate construction of remembrance.

Remembrance retained its power throughout the inter-war period, as was demonstrated by the fact that the rituals became a focus for protest, particularly when attempts to disrupt the two-minute silence were made. War memorials were referred to as "peace memorials". 5 The attempt to take over remembrance as an exclusive language of peace was, however, specifically resisted by those who wished to see the sacrifice of the dead in terms of a victory and salvation of the world. The national model for remembrance, its language, content and form, was replicated in hundreds of towns and villages throughout Britain in the inter-war years. These rituals had many functions. The first function for those who stood before the local war memorials, viewed the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior or queued to place wreaths at the foot of the Cenotaph, was mourning. To these people it was an act of remembrance. That the dead had given their life for the living, and therefore, the living should not dishonour the sacrifice of the dead, leading better lives as a result, was a moral theme which the language of remembrance sought to articulate. The better world which had been paid for by the blood of the dead, should begin with each individual.

The emergence of a language of remembrance had the effect of enshrining and enhancing the experience of the war, removing it from the sphere of normal political and social debate, and elevating it to a level of spiritual significance from where its memory for peacetime British society was of a supranational, special and sacred quality. In this language of remembrance, the notion of sacrifice transcended notions of patriotism and duty as a justification for British losses during the war.

Armistice Day became a point of reference for British society as the festivities of victory gave way to the sombre mood in which the sacrifice of the dead was renewed, and to which Crown, state and Church did reverence. The rituals of remembrance defined what was to be remembered in Britain after the Great War. It is the sacrifice that is remembered.

1 War Graves of the Empire, reprinted from the special number of The Times, 10 November 1928, p.10.
2 ibid., p. 14.
3 Inglis, K. S. 'The Homecoming : The War Memorial Movement in Cambridge, England' in Journal of Contemporary History (Sage, London) volume 27 (1992), p.598.
4 Eastwood, T. J., St Luke's Cheltenham : 1854 – 1954 (Cheltenham, 1954), p.15.
5 Mee, Arthur London (London, 1937), pp. 417, 785, 805, 834.

Winter, Jay Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning : The Great War in European Cultural History (Canto, Cambridge : 1993). This title is available from Amazon US or Amazon UK.

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Other useful titles are George Mosse's Fallen Soldiers and John R Gillis's Commemorations : The Politics of National Identity both available from Amazon UK.

(This essay has been written by Michθle Fry, 1999 and it is copyright.)

http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/warmems.htm