First World War Commemoration

Tony Baldry Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

The great war resulted in death and carnage on a previously unknown and unimagined scale. Not surprisingly, there was an enormous and justified outpouring of public grief that resulted in a major public arts programme in Britain to design and erect memorials to those who had died, and the Imperial—now Commonwealth—War Graves Commission was founded in 1917. We are fortunate to have two commissioners among our Members—my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson) and the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones).

There are now roughly 36,000 memorials to the dead of the great war in Britain which reflect that unprecedented expression of public grief. What they almost all have in common are the inscriptions of the names of those who died. Those names are essential to the act of remembrance—

“Their name liveth for ever more”.

War memorials are everywhere urging remembrance. Not surprisingly many of the war memorials are in churches or within the curtilage of church buildings.

The centenary years of the great war will hopefully stimulate considerable interest in war memorials and monuments and the histories of the names of those inscribed on those monuments. Clive Aslet, the former editor of Country Life, recently wrote a book called, “War Memorial - the story of one village’s sacrifice from 1914-2003”. It took a typical village—Lydford in Devon—and traced the individual history behind all the names on its war memorial. Clive Aslet has commented:

“What I would really like to do for the Centenary of the First World War in 2014 is to set up a project for each village to find out about its own dead. There is so much you could do and it would be a fantastic national and local resource. This book threw up such a richness of material and it really got me up every morning because I became so utterly absorbed by the story of these people’s lives.”

Other communities are already taking up the challenge. Michael Allbrook and Robert Forsyth have written a history of “A Parish at War”—a military record of three villages in my constituency, Deddington, Clifton and Hempton. They say in the preface to their book:

“When the ‘Deddington’ War Memorial was erected in 1922, it was sufficient for the inscription to be simply a name and an initial. Everybody knew them. Now more information is necessary to tell us about these men of Deddington. You will see that the names include men who had emigrated to Australia Canada and New Zealand and still they volunteered to support the land of their birth.”

As my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland has said, it was Government policy that all those who died overseas would be buried where they died, irrespective of their rank. The graves were located overseas, and back home there was a memorial bearing the names of those who had died. It is difficult now to imagine what it must have been like and the enormous grief when, some few years after the great war, memorials were unveiled with the names of those engraved, the memories of whom were still clear and sharp.

Of course, every community had to design, commission and erect its own war memorial. As early as 1915, a newly formed civic arts association was distributing advice about appropriate ways to remember the dead. In 1919, the Victoria and Albert museum put on a war memorials exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts with the intention of directing groups, communities and committees in the right artistic and architectural direction. As early as 1916, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission made the important decision that no distinction was to be made in the formal nature of the memorials between officers and men lying in the same cemeteries. All were equal in death.

Most of us have heard of Mick Jagger, of Rolling Stones fame, but not so many will have heard of his uncle, Charles Sargeant Jagger, who designed both the Royal Artillery memorial in London’s Hyde park corner and the first world war memorial in Paddington station. Driving around Hyde park, one finds it all too easy to take the Royal Artillery memorial for granted—something that one sees all the time but does not always notice. I hope that during the next four years, we will notice all our war memorials and ensure that by 2018 we learn as much as we can about the lives of the men whose names are inscribed upon them, and that every war memorial is restored and remains kempt—memorials to those who died in the great war protecting and guaranteeing our freedoms.