First published 22 October 2020
This topic has already been partially covered by my previous review which covered writing on the way in which remembrance was affected by the war - some authors, such as Cannadine, Eksteins and Hynes suggest that the war was a 'watershed moment' in remembrance as the First World War had a significant impact on attitudes to death. Other authors, such as Gregory, Winter, Vance and King believed there was continuation of traditonal rituals in marking the losses of the war, although their form and meaning did change during the inter-war period.
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| Image from Amazon.co.uk |
I
have been particularly taken by Pat Jalland's examination of the ways
in which the upper classes were able to marshall significant resources
to seek information about the deaths of their sons, compared to the
working classes, who were more often left with only a notification that
their loved one was missing. The wealthy were also able to commemorate
their sons with individual memorials alongside the collective community
memorials. In some cases men who had been deemed missing were not
included in the lists of names inscribed on community memorials -
apocryphal stories note mothers asking for their sons not to be included
as they held hopes that their boys might yet return. Jalland relates
the experience of several upper class families who were able to discover
more about their officer sons, and in one case this led to the
discovery of the bodies of men of other ranks whose possessions or a
photograph of the mass grave were later supplied to their grieving
families. This, she says, provided a degree of comfort for them, which
was generally not the case.
This made me think about examples in Barnsley. I am aware that familes often had to wait for months, if not years, to hear whether their missing son was officially dead, or that proof had been found of his death. The retreat of the Germans to their fortified lines in early 1917 led to the discovery of the fate of a number of Barnsley men who had fallen during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, other had to wait until the battlefield clearances after the war. There are a significant number of individual memorials to the sons of the professional classes in our churches, and yet I can also think of hundreds of examples of working class men who fell in the war who are remembered on family gravestones in our churchyards and cemeteries.
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| Wooden Battlefield Cross (with thanks to Barnsley Archives) |
Some families were sent photographs of their son's grave - there is at least one example in Barnsley Archives (see right) - which must have been greatly treasured. Others had large framed photographs of their sons which had pride of place over the mantlepiece for many years. Some families mounted and framed their son's medals and bronze commemorative plaques (also known as 'dead man's pennies) and displayed them too. I am aware of one case in the borough of a wooden cross being returned home to the family after the permanent gravestone was installed, but this was an officer son. I believe the family had to stand the cost of the delivery of the cross. There is a good website, 'Returned From the Front', which covers this subject.
A
few families were able to visit the battlefields and cemeteries after
the war and organised visits were available, sometimes through
charitable organisations. Most, however, had only a name on a war
memorial to visit, which had to stand in place of a grave. It was a
matter of great surprise for the volunteers of the Barnsley War
Memorials Project to discover that 698 of the 3790 Barnsley Borough
war-time fatalities were NOT remembered on a memorial in the borough.
Subsequently we discovered that some of these men were remembered on
memorials in other towns, maybe the homes of the men's parents or
widows, but for others we can only assume that there is some truth in
the stories about mothers not wanting to see their son's names on their
local memorials or that, sadly, these men had no-one left in the area to
put their names forward for inclusion. The Somme Centenary Artwork
(erected in front of the Town Hall in 2016 and now in Churchfields
Gardens in Barnsley town centre) which named 300 men lost on the first
day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916) was the first physical,
public commemoration of 48 Barnsley men killed on that day.
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| From the Barnsley Chronicle 15 February 1919 (with thanks to Barnsley Archives) |
Remember that having a name included on a community memorial was not an automatic process - it required the war memorial commitee to seek out names and appeal to the families in the area to notify them of their losses. I have seen a number of advertisments in the Barnsley Chronicle asking for names (see left for an example from St John's church in the Barebones area of the town). In some cases additional plaques were added when names were notified too late for inclusion on the inital lists. The ability of the wealthier families in our area to have their (usually) officer sons individually commemorated has led to some men being remembered on up to eight different memorials.
Once
I begin the formal research stage of my thesis I think it will be
interesting to investigate the differences in commemoration between
classes as much as I can. Jalland was fortunate to find collections of
personal letters on which to base her work - I am aware that there are
very few of these in our local archives. There are one or two published
memoirs which give examples of family commemorative practices - but
mainly I think I will be relying on the evidence of the physical
memorials in our borough.
References:
Barnsley Archives, http://www.experience-barnsley.com/archives-and-discovery-centre
Returned from the Front, http://thereturned.co.uk
Cannadine, D. ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain' in Whaley, J. (ed.) Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981), pp. 187-242.
Eksteins, M. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Mariner Books, 2000 [1989])
Gregory, A. The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919-1946 (Oxford: Berg, 1994)
Hynes, S. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992 [1990])
Jalland, P. Death in War and Peace: A History of Loss & Grief in England, 1914-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
King, A. Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1998)
Vance, J. F. Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997)
Winter, J. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 [1995])