Dr Megan Wang (née Kelleher)

After the First World War, the then-Imperial War Graves Commission were still a fledgling organisation. In its formative years, it experienced a great deal of resistance to its commemorative style, which led to the organisation’s work being debated in the House of Commons in 1920. However, by the outbreak of the Second World War it can be argued that its work was more accepted by the general public; in this blog, I hope to share a brief overview of some of the ways in which Second World War commemoration differs from First World War commemoration in the United Kingdom.

In the time I have been researching the commemoration of Second World War dead, one of the main things that strikes me is the fact that the Commission began to created organised spaces within pre-existing cemeteries once the Second World War broke out. This is arguably a lesson from the First World War commemoration, where war dead were often buried by their families if they died in the United Kingdom, and were therefore scattered throughout the cemeteries and churchyards across the British Isles. This creates a really interesting juxtaposition of commemorations within a site; there may be war dead scattered throughout the site from the Great War, but due to the close proximity of the Second World War dead within a war graves plot the First World War dead may be omitted from a pilgrimage or spotted by chance. Perhaps, too, because the war graves plots are similar to the “expected” representation of war dead based on the cemeteries abroad it makes these places the focal point of remembrance.

There are also regional cemeteries to visit, which go beyond these being largely a Royal Naval tradition and primarily taking the form of a memorial to the missing as opposed to a war graves cemetery. One of the most well-known are the six RAF regional cemeteries at Bath, Brookwood, Cambridge, Chester, Harrogate and Oxford which largely contain the war dead of the elements of the British Empire Forces who did not have next of kin in the United Kingdom. Through visiting these sites, we can also see the disparities between war dead and commemoration; although these war dead are far from home, because they were buried in a way that was familiar for pilgrims by this time perhaps it is more commonplace for them to see visitors. Indeed, through the wider acceptance of state-sponsored commemoration at this time and the learnings experienced from the challenges of remembering First World War dead, the Commission created sites of memory in the United Kingdom that reflected the expected state-sponsored memorialisation by the outbreak of the Second World War.

These are just my initial thoughts, and I’m sure I’ll come back to these ideas as my own research progresses but I thought I’d log some of the thoughts I have at the early stages of this project. Let me know your own thoughts and reflections!