Few people alive today have any memory of the First World War. Yet from August this year no one in the UK will be able to avoid its commemoration. Organisations across the country are feverishly planning centenary events, and communities are busy building new war memorials or refurbishing and rededicating existing ones.
David Cameron has pledged to spend over £55 million on ‘a truly national commemoration’ that ‘like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, says something about who we are as a people’. This appropriation of First World War memory to enhance patriotic national narratives has been both celebrated and criticised and has once again raised questions regarding the role of military commemoration within contemporary society.
The expectation to commemorate and memorialise both past and present conflicts has become so normalised it is easy to forget that it has not always been viewed in this way. There has never been a clear consensus about what a memorial actually stands for and despite widely-held beliefs, they have not always been thought of as highly relevant.
My research examines the whole development of war memorialisation and commemoration of the common soldier from its beginnings in the mid-19th century through to the present, in the UK, France and the US. By taking this wider temporal approach, I am able to chart the changing attitudes towards commemoration and I am especially interested in what happens as the conflict begins to pass from living memory. In particular, I examine why we choose to commemorate past wars many years after the conflict and how we engage with memorials once the names listed on them have faded from memory.
It is often suggested that war memorials have less relevance as time passes from the events they commemorate, but throughout the course of my research I have discovered that this is not the case. Memorials and their associated ceremonies do have relevance and meaning to individuals today – sometimes more so than when they were first constructed – but this relevance and meaning has changed significantly over time.
Preparations for the commemoration of the First World War began during the conflict itself, with many keen to mark the loss of those who had made the ultimate sacrifice for King and country. High numbers of volunteer forces and huge casualty rates resulted in memorial construction on an unprecedented scale. Many understood that for those who had lost loved ones, given the decision not to repatriate the bodies of the dead, a war memorial provided a surrogate graveside at which to mourn and a focus for their grief. Yet few believed that such monuments would have any form of longevity past the generation that had experienced the war first hand.
In Birmingham, Sir Whitworth Wallis, Director of the Municipal Art Gallery, writing in 1917 pessimistically predicted that any attempts at lasting remembrance were ‘vain hopes’ and that ‘a few distinguished generals... will be recalled from time to time, but the millions of the rank and file will cease to be remembered’.
We might like to imagine communities coming together to sacrifice their last pennies to build the most fitting tribute to their fallen heroes, but this was not always the case. In fact memorialisation was often dominated by local politics, and communities frequently struggled to collect sufficient contributions to feed the grandiose memorial ambitions suggested by town and parish councillors.
The post-war depression meant that more mundane concerns often bypassed the lofty ideals of grand-scale commemoration. During the 1930s it was no secret that among the working classes, and particularly among ex-servicemen who had failed to find work upon their return, many saw widespread commemoration and memorialisation as wrongly prioritising the dead above the needs of the living. Mass Observation Archives demonstrate that the hypocrisy of commemorating the ‘war to end all wars’ while simultaneously preparing for a second conflict was not lost on the masses.
For many younger respondents, it was not even this hypocrisy or a political motivation which drove their lack of interest, it was simply the feeling that it was not relevant to them personally and so was not something with which they could be involved. When the Daily Herald ran a newspaper article in 1937 asking its readers if they thought the Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph was irrelevant and should be abolished, 68 per cent of respondents agreed that it should. Yet when I questioned individuals regarding whether or not Remembrance Day was still relevant within contemporary society, only 17 per cent felt this was the case, and more than half of these felt this was a bad thing.
Clearly our attitudes towards commemoration change significantly over time and it is only by taking a wider temporal approach that such changes can be seen. Today, remembrance of the First World War is obviously thriving and there is now an entire industry based around its memory and the remembrance of its dead. While we might like to see this as a continuation of a long history of remembrance, or a return to the post-First World War sentiment, it should be remembered that this is not in fact true to the historical record. Commemoration and memorialisation are not static but constantly changing and this is what makes them such fascinating topics of study.
During the inter-war period, attitudes towards commemoration were openly debated, and many questioned what exactly it was that war memorials stood for and exactly how they should be used. Our attitudes towards commemoration vary significantly from country to country and change throughout time as they react and respond to current political and social contexts. By taking a comparative approach, it is possible to demonstrate that memorialisation is a far more complex phenomenon than a single national perspective might suggest.
The UK’s forthcoming centenary events should not be viewed in isolation but should be seen as part of a continually evolving process of commemoration and memorialisation; one which will be approached differently by each of the participating nations.
Emma Login is a research fellow in the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology.