Dr Megan Wang (née Kelleher)

With discourse around commemoration always being at the forefront of discussions, particularly in anniversary years, I wanted to highlight some of the different ways that British commemoration occurred. While today we often think of the war memorials that take inspiration from Classical designs, when these monuments were being constructed in the 1920s there were other ways of commemorating that were popular.

To provide a very brief overview of war memorials, there has been a significant evolution over the last century regarding what makes a war memorial. The importance of the names being visible has increased in popularity, and with a growth in interest in Genealogy through shows like Who Do You Think You Are and platforms like Ancestry descendants may question precisely why their relative is not named on the memorial they expected to find them on. Moreover, there have been questions about the absence of names through those who survived; indeed, in some Thankful Villages there have been war memorials erected in recent times to name those who survived conflicts and came home.

In recent years, there has been a move to traditional war memorials and, in some cases, memorials have been redesigned to fit this more traditional style. But it cannot be forgotten that after the First World War sometimes war memorials were more utilitarian in their function; these could include scholarships, sports pavilions and other public spaces designed to remember the dead and support those left behind. These are much more practical in nature, and are arguably a product of the time, as they were primarily designed to help the bereaved within their communities and provide opportunities for the children who had lost parents in conflict.

I am fascinated by the phenomenon of utilitarian memorials, and am keen to learn more about at what point they began to shift out of the public consciousness – was it as the first generation affected by the First World War began to die out? If you have any reading recommendations, please do let me know!