We have four war memorials here on site at Christ Church, all of them very different, three from the First War and one from the Second, three military and one civilian.  What I want to do in this talk is to put them into their historical context, and talk about the communities that created them.

Memorials remembering campaigns and battles and the peace that followed have been around a long time. They usually commemorate the leaders and the generals. There are examples in many parish churches, particularly those relating to stately homes, and in cathedrals. The best examples, of course, are in St Paul’s Cathedral.

In the years following the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 the purpose of war memorials changed. They came to remember all those who had fought, and to list their names. The attitude to the common soldier was changing from one of scorn – the Duke of Wellington famously remarked that the raw material of his soldiers was ‘the scum of the earth’  - to one of thankfulness, thankfulness for the sacrifices that had been made in the nation’s name.

The change of attitude was marked in poetry. Thomas Hardy wrote his poem Drummer Hodge in 1898. The poem remembers the name of the drummer boy  ‘Hodge’ killed in the Boer War– this had never been done before. It was a changing attitude that shaped our war memorials of the First World War and ever after. The soldiers, seamen and airmen had names, and the war memorials would forever remember them.

The First World War was on a scale unknown to communities in the United Kingdom. There was a mass call to arms, the creation of a volunteer army where before soldiering was for professionals, miss-fits and adventurers. Conscription followed, when the supply of volunteers slowed. The First World War was a laboratory of modern science – by the end it was highly mechanized and used modern industry and chemistry to supply it. Most of the war, after initial skirmishes until the Battle of Amiens, was a campaign of attrition and trench warfare. Battles, though slow-moving, were on an impossibly grand scale, with many fronts and flanks. The losses were on a scale that no-one could have expected 1.3m French, 2m Germans, 720,000 British with 61,000 Canadians, 60,000 Australians and 18,000 New Zealanders, 53,000 from the United States and many from the British Empire’s colonies.

When the war began it was expected that the bodies of the officers would be expatriated to their home communities, even if this couldn’t be done for the private soldier. The sheer scale of the various campaigns quickly defeated this aspiration. A military policy of non-repatriation of war dead was strictly enforced from the spring of 1915 onward, and the  Imperial War Graves Commissioned was created in 1917 with the purpose of marking the graves of the fallen at or near the place where they fell. 

Families,  informed that their loved one was missing or dead had no body to bury, and this drove the development of the War Memorial as we know it.  What came first were ‘soldiers monuments’ in private homes. These were collections of things sent home from the front, along with items of uniform. My great grandfather’s ceremonial helmet was kept as a soldier’s monument in the family home long after he had died of polio in Alexandria.  The next development were the street shrines.  Poor street communities clubbed together to create rolls of honour, with photographs, flags and flowers in the street. This practice was criticised in the broadsheet press for being ritualistic and Roman Catholic in nature – only when Queen Mary visited one of these street shrines in Palace Road Hackney, and the Lord Mayor spoke out to support these memorials,  did the criticism stop and the newspapers relent.

Related to the street shrines were the works memorials. We will all be familiar with the memorials at our railway stations and round the back of the HSBC HQ at Canary Wharf. Factories and corporations had the in- house draughtsmen to create war memorials with ease.  Paper memorials are the earliest memorials we have, and they have often lasted very well. We are privileged here to have a Roll of Honour from Westwoods, the iron and steel fabrication company. Related to the work places memorials are the parchment ones that are seen inside churches. Christ Church has a parchment memorial from St John’s Church which came here when the parishes were amalgamated.

It’s worth saying at this point that there were many different routes which local and national remembrance took at this time. The British copied the French to have a cenotaph or empty tomb at their processions through Whitehall to celebrate Victory in 1919. The Cenotaph was originally to be saluted by the passing troops. Another development was the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres. On the gateway are the names of those who have no identifiable grave, who have been swallowed up by the mud and the shelling of warfare. And then of course there is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey.  Great care was taken to preserve the unknown identity of the soldier so that he could represent all soldiers, sailors and airmen, who like him are known only  to God. The Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) dedicated its effort creating cemeteries where individuals could be remembered by name, regiment and regimental number, but they also care for war graves of the many who died from their wounds and are commemorated in churchyards and cemeteries up and down the land. There are very precise regulations about what sort of memorials the War Grave Commission provides based on the number of graves. The East London cemetery and crematorium has a good example of a War Graves Commission memorial. Many memorials were symbolic, most of them using Christian symbols. There were also utilitarian memorials like public halls and hospitals.

When communities like ours met to remember and to pray for the men who had gone from the community to fight they often used war-memorials from the Second Boer War. These had been set up after victory in that campaign in 1902, so they were still fresh and relevant in people’s memory.  These memorials were often in secluded places, allowing people to be on their own and to reflect quietly. When war memorials for the First World War were designed and planned for they were usually constructed in very public places. The sacrifice had been that of the whole nation, the whole community, and war memorials were a very public statement of the fact.

The designs of war memorials were often based on what the soldiers themselves had seen abroad. Our war memorial at Christ Church is a copy of the wayside calvaires or Calvaries that they would have seen as they marched through northern France and Belgium. These were set up as navigation marks and for prayer, often in wild, uninhabited places.  Public or civic war memorials like ours, and like the one at St Lukes came quite late, and were being erected in 1921 – 22. Where there had been a particularly keen response to the recruiting campaign, a war memorial might have been commissioned by the Government, but mostly they were created with public subscriptions and a local committee was formed to decide the design and the strategy to raise the funds.  There seems to have been some help with the inscriptions that might be suitable for war memorials – it our case the front of our memorial has the same inscription as that on a Hillingdon civic memorial, and several others,  a fact that I discovered by Googling the words we could see, trying to rediscover the ones we couldn’t.

I said that the inclusion of names was what was new the early twentieth century. If one couldn’t have the physical presence of the loved one, then the name took its place. It was usual to trace or to kiss the name of father or son or uncle. My great uncle John is remembered at Tower hill in the memorial that runs alongside the road. I always trace out his name when I am passing and think about the young man whose death at sea so deeply affected my mother’s mother.

I said at the beginning that we have one World War 2 Memorial and that it is a civilian one. The Island History Trust created a comprehensive list of those who died in enemy action in the Isle of Dogs. This is a very unusual memorial, and we have had it carefully bound and cased. It sits in the Lady Chapel of Christ Church and it reminds us what all war memorials do, that it is not only the individual’s sacrifice that needs to be remembered, it is also the families that saw them off and lived on without them. In the Second World War these families themselves became targets of total war.