In The Name of The Fallen: Legitimising The Great War in East Kent

In the Name of the Fallen: Legitimising the Great War in East Kent

peter donaldson

Towards the end of Robert Graves’ rather fanciful autobiographical novel, Goodbye To All That, he recounts a scene when, in the early 1920s, he was called upon to speak at the unveiling of the parish war memorial for Islip, the small Oxfordshire village where he and his young family lived for a brief spell in the immediate aftermath of the war. Ever one to buck prevailing social trends, Graves chose to disregard the rector’s advice as to what constituted a suitable text for the occasion. Thus, we are informed that, ‘instead of Rupert Brooke on the glorious dead, I read some of the more painful poems by Sassoon and Wilfred Owen about men dying from gas-poisoning, and about buttocks of corpses bulging from the mud. I also suggested that the men who had died … were not particularly virtuous or particularly wicked, but just average soldiers’.¹ Not for Graves then the fallen as a sanitised collective, but rather ordinary men recalled through poetry with a focus on personal experience and individual death.

This tension between the individual and the collective, between the private and public commemoration of the war dead, though rarely expressed in such eloquent terms, underscored unveiling ceremonies across the country in the years following the Armistice. Over the past two decades, with the literature on memory and the Great War experiencing a dramatic boom, the subtle interplay between personal grief and civic celebration at rituals of remembrance has increasingly become the focus for scholarly attention. In particular, growing interest has been shown in the ways in which communities attempted to crystallise the past through the formation of memory sites. As Alan Borg has noted, the wave of memorial construction in the immediate aftermath of the cessation of hostilities represented one of the greatest spontaneous public-sponsored building projects in history.² At the heart of these civic lieux de memoire, and one of the key rituals of the memorialisation process as a whole, was the collection and dedication of the names of the fallen.

Thomas Laqueur has argued that, with the repatriation of bodies denied, the nameplates on war memorials came to act as surrogate graves upon which the bereaved imposed intensely personal narratives and where ‘meaning was neither defined nor definable’.³ The war memorial was, in effect, a black canvas where ‘each of the living was free to remember as he or she chose’.⁴ Yet, by way of contrast, Catherine Moriarty has stressed that, although ‘public remembrance was dependent on private memory, … its ultimate objective was to mould and control the latter as a specific stabilised narrative’.⁵ Hence, by intertwining the names of the fallen with a monument’s iconography, by encasing individual experiences in the didacticism of a collective ritual, personal recollections were subsumed by a communal act of remembrance where the focus was on the legitimation of a conflict that had cost so many lives.

This paper, through a detailed study of three east Kent communities at civic level, will seek to explore the tension that underpinned these communal sites of mourning. As will be seen, it was through the formal compilation of the names of the fallen that the local populace would become most involved in the memorialisation of their war dead and, for many, it was this ritual above any other that provided some cathartic release from their overwhelming sense of loss and imbued the memory site with a personal significance. Yet, though the list of names of the dead rooted a memorial in the locality and acted as a trigger for private memories, they also imbued the remembrance site with collective meaning and enabled those in authority to sanctify the deaths of so many citizens and, in so doing, justify the waging of the war in which they had died. By uncovering the role that the citizens of Canterbury, Dover and Folkestone played in the ritual of naming, the opportunities that were presented for inclusion and the devices that resulted in exclusion, this paper will explore the extent to which participation by the bereaved was encouraged but exploited in order to enhance a memorial’s didactic capacity and provide an acceptable and accepted ‘official’ interpretation of the war.

Despite the importance attached to the recording of the fallen’s names by both the civil authorities and the public at large in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the practice of preserving the memory of all ranks and not just those with a commission was, nonetheless, a relatively recent development. As both Bob Bushaway and Ken Inglis have shown, it was only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the incorporation of volunteer battalions in the South African War, that a tentative move towards democratisation in remembrance took off.⁶ Indeed, such was the novelty of the change in approach that the president of the Canterbury War Memorial Committee, Dean H. Wace, felt it necessary at a fund-raising gala in 1922 to provide those present with a detailed explanation of the thinking that underpinned it:

British wars had hitherto been conducted by professional armies composed of men who had deliberately chosen the army as the profession of their lives. But in this great emergency, citizens who had never had experience of anything but the quiet pursuits of peace, who had not been qualified in any degree for the physical exertions of war, men who had been engaged in ordinary business, and whose families depended upon their work and their presence, all these were suddenly called upon to offer themselves, ‘their souls and their bodies’, as a living sacrifice. The value, moreover, of their gift depended on the thoroughness with which it was made, on their being willing to spend the last drop of blood, and the last ounce of strength, in the duties to which their commanders called them. These, my friends, in the last resort were the most indispensable of the elements which were required by our leaders, and we may even say, by God Himself, if the victory was to be gained. The greatest thing for which we have to thank God, and which we should remember with supreme thankfulness, is that the men were there. Here in Canterbury, as throughout the land, there were men who came forward at once, and others who readily answered the call of conscription, for the salvation of their country and the world from violence and tyranny. These men, my friends, should be commemorated no less than their leaders. They should be as much in our hearts as those whose names are in all our mouths.⁷

Thus, with ordinary citizens having been required, for the first time, to make the ultimate sacrifice in the service of the state, so those surviving were obliged to honour the memory of this supreme act of citizenship and pay homage to the fallen’s sense of civic duty. However, although the list of the names of the dead rooted a memorial in the locality and acted as a trigger for private memories, they also, as Moriarty has noted, ‘provided evidence of the scale of local loss and therefore of the community’s pride in the extent of its sacrifice’.⁸

Naming had been established as a central component of the rites of remembrance from relatively early on in the war. With the repatriation of bodies prohibited in April 1915, and with casualties mounting as the Somme offensive ground on throughout 1916, so the appearance of street shrines and Rolls of Honour became increasingly common as com-munities looked to articulate their feelings of pride and loss.⁹ By 1917 Lord Plymouth, the chairman of the Local War Museum Association, having petitioned Folkestone Borough Council to adopt his War Museum scheme ‘in order to preserve the record of the patriotism and heroism of local inhabitants and the part they have played in the titanic struggle’, could confidently expect the positive response he received from the port’s mayor to be replicated throughout Britain.¹⁰ Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the war, listing the names of the fallen was considered to be so integral to the commemorative process that even those who opposed a purely monumental approach to remembrance invariably qualified their objections by emphasising their support for the recording of the dead. The editor of the Kentish Observer in Canterbury, a vigorous proponent of utilitarian commemoration, felt obliged to begin an editorial on the subject of local war memorials with a qualification, stating that:

We would like to express the opinion that though big sums should not be spent on monuments alone, it is right and proper of course to record in some public form the names of the heroes of a particular town, village or district who gave their lives for King and Country.¹¹

Alderman Anderson, whose utilitarian scheme for a bandstand in the Dane John Gardens the Observer was urging the civic authorities to adopt, was equally keen to place the names of the fallen at the heart of his project. In outlining at length his scheme in the letters columns of the Observers’ rival, the Kent Gazette, he was at pains to point out that, ‘tablets might be fixed with the names of the dead inscribed thereon in the tower at the entrance. There for all time, the names of those who fell would be prominently before the eyes of the public’.¹²

In Folkestone, Canterbury and Dover then there was universal agreement that the civic Roll of Honour should act as the focal point of any memorialisation scheme. Although the debates over form in all three boroughs were both heated and protracted, the resolutions to name the dead were, in all three cases, passed at the first opportunity and without dissent. Indeed, such was the commitment of the members of the memorial committees to fulfilling this aspect of their plans that any proposal which sought to relegate the lists of names to a subordinate role was doomed to failure from the outset. In particular, pressure to abandon the inclusion of names on both financial and aesthetic grounds often came from the professional experts hired to guide and advise the committees. In Folkestone, J.A. Colton, the assessor appointed by the Royal Society of British Sculptors to oversee the selection process for the town’s memorial, urged the committee to have a separate Book of Remembrance by laying stress on the prohibitive cost of engraving names and noting that such a course of action would be ‘to the advantage of the memorial from the artistic standpoint’.¹³ Similarly, the Canterbury Memorial Committee was informed by Sir Beresford Pite, the architect commissioned to oversee and design the construction of the city’s memorial, that over £200 could be saved if the names of the fallen were placed ‘in a printed and bound book with copies deposited in the civic records’.¹⁴ As in Folkestone, practical considerations were once again buttressed by aesthetic implications, with Pite, albeit in a most delicate manner, attempting to pull artistic rank by concluding his advice with the observation that,

The warden of St. Augustine’s had mentioned to him that he was worried that the ‘artistic effect’ of contrast between the stonework of the base and the actual memorial might be lost by the addition of the bronze nameplate...With this point of view I venture to agree. Pardon my suggesting it as interesting.¹⁵

Yet, the decision of both memorial committees to push ahead with their original plans in the face of this expert advice underlines the primacy of naming in the commemorative rituals. Canterbury’s mayor and chair of the Memorial Committee, Captain H. James, in an extraordinary meeting to discuss Pite’s recommendations noted that they had ‘pledged to put the names on the memorial’,¹⁶ while Major Compton, at a similar session of the Folkestone Committee, asked his fellow members, ‘Are we not commemorating the names of the Folkestone men who have fallen?’.¹⁷ In these two responses can be found, at least in part, an explanation for the determination of the civic authorities to persevere with the inclusion of names. As Compton’s rhetorical question highlighted, committee members were well aware that it was only by engraving names on a memorial that the site became rooted in the locality and its validity as a genuinely communal totem could be underlined. They were also aware, as James’s interjection makes clear, that there was a weight of public expectation on their shoulders and that if they were to fulfil their duties and, more importantly, to be seen to be fulfilling their duties, they had to first and foremost publicly celebrate the achievements and sacrifices of their communities’ citizen-soldiers.

Indeed, the centrality of the naming of the dead in the civic ritual of commemoration can be seen in both the meticulous steps taken by the local memorial sub-committees to guarantee the accurate and comprehensive compilation of civic Rolls of Honour and in the eagerness of the bereaved to ensure the inclusion of their loved ones in the lists of the fallen. For Ken Inglis, the very acts of collecting and collating the names were, of themselves, key remembrance rituals in which the bonds of locality were forefronted.¹⁸ Thus, although by 1922 the War Office had completed a roll of all British Empire combatants who had died in the Great War with the express aim of meeting ‘the demand for information from those responsible for the erection of local and other public memorials’, the authorities in Canterbury, Folkestone and Dover all eschewed the national and instead resorted to local networks to facilitate the naming process.¹⁹ The three municipalities all followed similar, relatively formalised approaches with, in the first instance, the town clerks issuing requests to the local schools, businesses, parish churches, regimental headquarters and charitable and voluntary associations asking for the names of the dead connected with the borough. Having drawn up preliminary lists, pro-formas were then sent to relatives asking for further particulars, including the cause of death and the deceased’s connection with the borough. Finally, the lists of names were made public and appeals made for any corrections or additions. Thus, the process remained firmly rooted in the community

For the wider community generally, and the bereaved particularly, naming was, undoubtedly, the central component of the memorialisation process and was the ritual to which most importance was attached. Though precise motives may have varied, all were united in their insistence on public naming, for with the cathartic rituals of funerary rites unavailable, the formalised procedure of submitting a loved one’s name for inclusion became an alternative method of paying homage. As such, it became all important to the bereaved that individuality should not become swamped by the collective. Thus, Mrs Emily Weaver, responding to a call for the names of the fallen from S. Topliss, the secretary of Canterbury’s War Memorial Committee, was determined to record the full details of her son’s career. Although only asked to provide information on the deceased’s connections with the city, she could not resist informing Topliss that:

her late son made the Great Sacrifice on 1 September 1917 in France near Larch Wood ... He joined in May 1916, left England in September 1916 and was killed on 1 September 1917. He was entitled to the British General War Service Medal and the Victory Medal.²⁰

For Mrs Weaver, the inclusion of such particulars could not only help to emphasise her late son’s right to have his name included on the city’s war memorial but could also help to mitigate her grief by having his achievements, and the pride she felt in them, publicly acknowledged.

This combination of anguish and pride, the intensity of personal loss being alleviated by the comfort of community recognition, also clearly underscored the frequent demands from the bereaved for precision in the details recorded. Mr. W.H. Grace informed S.G. Hills, the committee member responsible for the compilation of names in Folkestone, that his son had not been a private but a ‘boy mechanic and had passed all his exams, for which we have certificates’.²¹ Although such a correction was undoubtedly motivated, at least in part, by paternal pride, there was also a need to ensure that the service of the dead was recorded faithfully for posterity. Indeed, when Mrs Gamburn informed Hills that her husband had been listed as a Sergeant when, in fact, ‘at the time of his death he was Acting-Sergeant but his proper rank was Private and all his papers came through as such’, she was as much motivated by pride in the achievement of a loved one as Mr Grace.²² There were no gradations in the fulfilment of duty; all were to be equally honoured; and so it was the living’s last remaining responsibility to the dead to ensure that the memorialisation of the services performed was exact. More prosaically there was the additional concern that with such vast numbers involved any slight error in the information recorded could lead to confusion over the precise identity of the individual being commemorated. To this end, it was not uncommon for relatives to ask for the full names of their dead to be recorded. Thus, a war memorial, though a communal memory site, was also a focus for private grief and, as such, recalled the deaths of individuals, of fathers, of husbands, of sons, as much as it commemorated the collective sacrifice of a community.

Yet, notwithstanding this desire to differentiate the individual from the collective, for many of the bereaved having a loved one publicly remembered as one of the ‘Glorious Dead’ was a strong motivational factor. To have a lost relative subsumed within what George Mosse has termed the ‘cult of the fallen’ was to have him endowed with heroic qualities and to have his death transformed from what might otherwise have seemed a tragic and senseless waste into a meaningful and legitimate sacrifice.²³ This notion of honour by association was of especial concern for Mrs H. Duncan of Folkestone who was unable to find her son, Corporal C.E. Duncan, on the list of the fallen published in the local paper. She was understandably anxious for, as she informed S. G. Hills, ‘he had a brother, A.J. Duncan who is duly inscribed on the memorial and we should feel it very much if his name was not recorded among the rest of the heroes’.²⁴ Similar sentiments underpinned last minute bids for inclusion on Canterbury’s roll of honour by Mrs Jackson for her husband Private Edward Jackson and Mr Smith for his son Corporal Albert Smith. Employing the high rhetoric which punctuates so much of the correspondence from the bereaved to Memorial Committee members, Mrs Jackson advised S. Topliss, the Secretary of the committee, that she ‘should very much like Edward to be with the list of brave boys that gave their lives for King and Country’, while Mr Smith was equally insistent that his son’s name be included in ‘the list of fallen heroes … who sacrificed their lives in the great cause of freedom’.²⁵ Interestingly, Mr. Smith’s son was not, in fact, eligible for inclusion on the Canterbury memorial. Having been born and bred in Folkestone, his connection to the city was limited to a temporary stay during which time he enlisted in the army.²⁶ However, Smith’s eagerness to have his son’s name included in Canterbury’s list of the fallen, despite the tenuous nature of the claim, underlines the importance which many of the bereaved attached to such collective commemoration.²⁷

An unusual bid for inclusion, and one which further highlights the extent to which public recognition was thought to assuage personal grief and validate private memory, was made by Walter Holyoak, the pastor of Salem Baptist Church in Dover. Holyoak presented an appeal to the Dover War Memorial Committee on behalf of Mrs Jenner whose husband, George, had been an engineer on board the P&O liner SS Egypt which, in 1922, had collided with a French cargo steamer off Ushant. In a widely reported act of self-sacrifice George Jenner had given up his life-belt to the save the life of a female passenger. Holyoak recognised that, as his death had occurred after the war, he probably would not qualify for inclusion but put forward the suggestion that as he had died ‘in such heroic circumstances’ a separate plaque in his honour could be built abutting the memorial.²⁸ Although Holyoak’s request was refused, it is nonetheless interesting to note the assumption that underpinned it. Those inscribed on the town’s memorial had made the supreme sacrifice in the Great War that others might live; though the timing of Jenner’s death excluded him from their number, the circumstances surrounding it made him their equal. In fact, in all three boroughs the authorities were keen to restrict the roll of honour to combatants whose deaths could be directly attributed to the war. Thus, for the bereaved, having a loved one included on the list of names inscribed on a war memorial not only offered the opportunity to honour publicly the dead but also, by imbuing the fallen with the virtues and qualities of a breed apart, provided solace through the comfort of a heroic meta-narrative.

Undoubtedly, in all three boroughs, the compilation of the lists of names of the war dead was viewed as a pivotal component in the memorialisation process by both civic officials and the public generally. Yet, though meticulous in the logistics of collection, the committee members of Folkestone, Dover and Canterbury appeared to attach much less importance to the public celebration of its fallen citizens. In Canterbury, with financial difficulties threatening to delay the completion of the project, the Committee had no qualms in unanimously resolving to go ahead with the construction of the memorial without the bronze nameplates, contenting themselves instead with the vague ‘understanding that the tablets of names will be added when the further funds required for that purpose have been subscribed’.²⁹ Moreover, the suggestion by the distinguished local Baptist minister, J. Edward Harlow, that, in the interim, ‘The names of the local war heroes, clearly written in alphabetical order, should appear in a glass-protected frame on the wall of a building for all the world to see’, was studiously ignored.³⁰

The subsequent conduct of the Memorial Committee, as it strove to fulfil its promise to affix the nameplates, did little to dispel the sense that the completion of the project was now of limited interest. In December 1921 enquiries were made about the possibility of finding a cheaper method of engraving the names onto the memorial and, despite Pite’s insistence that it was not possible ‘to carve directly on stone as it would not be clear enough nor enduring’, a meeting of the Memorial Committee was still held the following month to appraise the various alternatives.³¹ However, it proved impossible to resolve the matter ‘because of the small attendance at the Committee’.³² Clearly, for many, the claim of civic duty had long since run its course. Indeed, in November 1922, at a Friendly Societies’ dance to raise the final few pounds needed to cover the cost of the nameplates, the mayor, Mr. Wright Hunt, articulated the exasperation that no doubt many of his colleagues felt at the perpetuation of this final phase of the scheme. Unable to mask the feeling that sacred duty had been replaced by administrative drudgery, he undiplomatically told those present that, ‘He was sure they would all be glad when the War Memorial was finished as it had been hanging about for a matter of four or five years’.³³

The day set aside to honour the completion of the city’s commemorative scheme further underlined the secondary importance which the Canterbury Committee attached to naming. Although the ceremony was held ‘in the presence of several thousand citizens’, there was a distinct lack of civic pageantry.³⁴ In stark contrast to the elaborate rituals surrounding the unveiling of the memorial a year earlier, the formalities for the affixing of the nameplates were kept to a minimum, with the ceremony being a mere adjunct to the annual Remembrance Day service in the Cathedral.

Equally dilatory approaches were adopted in Folkestone and Dover. In both boroughs, as a result of the Memorial Committees imposing unnecessarily tight deadlines, the compilation of the names of the fallen could not been completed in time for the unveiling ceremonies and, hence, additional nameplates had to be affixed at later dates. Thus, in Folkestone, so protracted were the debates over the form the memorial should take, that the sub-committee tasked with adjudicating on who was and was not eligible to be included in the civic Roll of Honour was given only a week to carry out its work and met only once. Unsurprisingly such an unrealistic time limit for such a complicated and sensitive issue resulted in a series of errors and omissions. Meanwhile, in Dover, the calendar for local elections was allowed to dictate the timing of events. The port’s mayor in 1924, R.J. Barwick, was keen to have the town’s memorial unveiled before his tenure of office expired on the 9 November and so asked for the ceremony to be brought forward from the proposed date of 16 November. Despite R. Goulden, the sculptor commissioned with task of designing the monument, insisting that he ‘cannot rush the work and it is probably best not to fix the date of the unveiling before 11 November’, it was resolved to hold the ceremony on 5 November.³⁵ Inevitably, the restrictions which this artificially created deadline imposed proved too great and names were still being sent in long after the memorial had been unveiled. The resultant request to Goulden that an additional nameplate be attached to the monument did not, unsurprisingly, elicit a sympathetic response. In a strongly worded letter to the secretary of the Memorial Committee, he began by pointing out that an extra plaque would affect the ‘artistic integrity of the monument … detracting from the carefully studied unity and completeness of the design’, and concluded with the cutting observation that it would also ‘suggest a lack of careful planning in the first place’.³⁶ Nonetheless, in October 1925, almost a year after the official unveiling, an additional panel, on which were engraved the names of fifty of Dover’s war dead, was affixed to the monument.

For the civic authorities in Folkestone, Canterbury and Dover, the ritual of naming the fallen was simply a means to an end. Collectively the names of the fallen invested a memorial with significant power as a civic totem. Indeed, in all three boroughs the alphabetical listing of the dead ensured that citizenship took priority over military service. Hence, the committees’ interests in the individuals whose names they gathered lay not in their personal military records or their lives on a private, familial level but rather in their role as representatives of the community. Encouraging participation helped to promote inclusion and heighten the public’s identification with the rituals and symbolism that surrounded the memorials. As this sense of communal ownership was intensified through the naming rituals, so these memory sites became even more potent symbols for civic leaders to exploit as they moulded and appropriated their didactic capacities at the unveiling ceremonies. By employing rhetoric in which the emphasis fell on the camaraderie and shared values of the fallen, the dignitaries who presided over unveiling ceremonies attempted to make sense of widespread personal grief by imposing a collective meaning on individual loss. Thus, in his unveiling address at Dover, Sir Roger Keyes assured the assembled crowd that, ‘All that was achieved in France was through comradeship, self-sacrifice and devotion to duty’.³⁷ Similarly, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, concerned that those present at the unveiling of the Canterbury memorial might ‘misinterpret the example of the fallen’, set out in unequivocal terms the lesson of the past: ‘It was a triumph of the spirit of comradeship, of that service of unity in effort, and of common endeavour for one great overriding cause’.³⁸ For those attending the unveiling of the Folkestone memorial on the Leas, the precise nature of this great overriding cause was clearly articulated by the town’s mayor, Sir Stephen Penfold. ‘It was’, he stated, ‘the cause of civilisation, for the fallen had died trying to defeat a ruthless and despotic militarism which threatened to engulf the world’.³⁹ The message of comfort for the bereaved was, therefore, two-fold; their loved ones had sacrificed their lives in a collective cause and that cause had made the difference between freedom and subjugation.

Although solace was undoubtedly provided by legitimising the cause for which the dead had fought, it was also a common rhetorical device at unveiling ceremonies to remove the fallen from their contemporary context and relocate them in the narrative flow of England’s glorious past. Haig was quick to locate Canterbury’s fallen of 1914-18 in the county’s long history of service to the state: ‘Certainly you have a right to be proud of these men. On whatever field they fought the Buffs well maintained the reputation that was first earned at Blenheim and has gloriously been continued to our own day’.⁴⁰ In a similar vein, the mayor of Folkestone in 1922, E.J. Bishop, in accepting the memorial on behalf of the town, seamlessly linked the past with the present, placing the glory of the recent conflict and the heroism of the war dead alongside their predecessors from a time when the town had once again, purportedly, played a key role in the defence of the nation:

The municipal council ever remembers that it represents glorious traditions, stretching back to distant centuries. It remembers that, in the spacious yet troublous days of Queen Elizabeth, Folkestone was closely associated with the confederation of the coastal towns known as the Cinque Ports in the defence of the country, and realise with pride that the same great personal qualities of the men of those times which raised the town to a position of power and influence still exists, that the men of our day have lived up to the traditions of the past and that they are worthy of their forbears.⁴¹

Adopting a similar tone, the editor of the Folkestone Express was also aware of the connection between the town’s traditions and its recent history; ‘Folkestone took a great part in the war, and its sons in the fields proved they were no mean representatives of a borough with an historic past’.⁴² By emphasizing the continuum of history, by viewing the dead of the Great War as the natural heirs to Raleigh’s navy or Marlborough’s army, not only was civic pride being extolled but so too were the bonds of tradition, the ties of a common past. Just as the fighting men in the past had died for the greater good, so too was a similar purpose being ascribed to the otherwise seemingly meaningless losses of recent years. Indeed, by placing the Great War dead in this continuum of English martial tradition, the sacrifices could be overlain with a sense of timelessness. The qualities displayed by the fallen could be seen as part of an essential British make-up, their experiences simply another chapter in the Island’s story. Far from viewing the war years as what Samuel Hynes has called a gap in history, public officials tasked with coordinating and directing public remembrance were keen to reaffirm rather than reject historical continuity.⁴³ Thus, the war years, and by extension the losses incurred, were given shape and purpose by being carefully incorporated into the nation’s narrative tradition.

It was undoubtedly the case that in all three boroughs examined for this survey public participation in the civic ritual of constructing a war memorial was not only encouraged, but was even considered essential to the overall success of a commemorative project. Yet, paradoxically, by placing such an emphasis on the importance of collective involvement, the Memorial Committees in Folkestone, Canterbury and Dover merely underlined the superficiality of the community’s role in the memorialisation process. Although the rhetoric suggested otherwise, in all three boroughs little practical attention was paid to the communal rite of naming. In both Folkestone and Dover, as a result of the Committees’ dilatory approaches, the compilation of the names of the fallen had not been completed in time for the unveiling ceremonies and, hence, additional nameplates had to be affixed at later dates, while in Canterbury the controlling officials were content to unveil the city’s memorial before sufficient funds were available to complete the nameplates. Thus, although the moves to construct memorials in honour of the dead of the First World War did, undeniably, match the heartfelt need of the wider community to mark the deaths of their loved ones, local remembrance sites, far from being the embodiment of spontaneous outpourings of collective grief, were instead the products of a carefully orchestrated attempts by the established auth-orities to mould and direct the memory of the fallen.

endnotes

¹ R. Graves, 1929, Goodbye To All That (London), p. 260.

² A. Borg, 1991, War Memorials: from Antiquity to the Present (London).

³ T. Laqueur, 1994, ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’, in John Gillis, ed., Commemorations: the Politics of National Identity (Princeton), p. 164.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ C. Moriarty, 1997, ‘Private Grief and Public Remembrance: British First World War Memorials’, in M. Evans and K. Lunn, eds, War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford), p. 125.

⁶ R. Bushaway, 1992, ‘Name upon Name: the Great War and Remembrance’, in R. Porter, ed., Myths of the English (Cambridge), pp. 136-167; K. Inglis, 1992, ‘The Homecoming: the War Memorial Movement in Cambridge, England’, Journal of Contemporary History, 27, 4, 583-603. Bushaway has noted that the desire to list all the names of the fallen arose with the concept of a volunteer army. Thus, in earlier conflicts, with a regular army in operation, only acts of valour by individuals were commemorated. However, Inglis has viewed the democratisation of naming as having its origins in the Imperial wars of the nineteenth century. Army reforms which enhanced the regional character of regiments combined with the presence of volunteer battalions in South Africa, resulted in a desire for civic as well as regimental memorials.

⁷ Kentish Observer, 28 September 1922.

⁸ C. Moriarty, ‘Private Grief and Public Remembrance’, pp. 125-130.

⁹ M. Connelly, 2002, The Great War: Memory and Ritual (Bury St Edmunds), p. 13.

¹⁰ Dover, East Kent Archives (EKA), FoCM/5/1, Earl of Plymouth to the mayor of Folkestone, 10 May 1917.

¹¹ Kentish Observer, 30 January 1919.

¹² Kent Gazette and Canterbury Press, 14 June 1919.

¹³ Dover, EKA FoAC/6/1, Folkestone War Memorial Committee, minutes, 9 Oct. 1920.

¹⁴ Canterbury, Canterbury Cathedral Archives (CCA), CCW15/2, B. Pite to S. Topliss, 17 Dec. 1921.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Canterbury, CCA, CCW/15/2, Canterbury War Memorial Committee, minutes, 28 Dec. 1921.

¹⁷ Folkestone Express, 3 November 1920.

¹⁸ K. Inglis, ‘The Homecoming’, 590-595.

¹⁹ Dover Express, 31 March 1922.

²⁰ Canterbury, CCA, CCW15/2, Emily Weaver to S. Topliss, Jan. 1921.

²¹ Dover, EKA, FoAc/6/2, Mr. Grace to S.G. Hills, 14 Nov. 1921.

²² Ibid., Mrs. Gamburn to S.G. Hills, 13 Nov. 1921.

²³ G. Mosse, 1990, Fallen Soldiers (Oxford), Ch 5.

²⁴ Dover, EKA, FoAc/6/4, Mrs Duncan to S.G. Hills, 30 Nov. 1922.

²⁵ Canterbury, CCA, CCW15/2, Jackson to Topliss and Smith to Topliss, both undated.

²⁶ Smith’s name appears on the borough memorial in Folkestone.

²⁷ Mrs Smith was by no means alone in advancing such an insubstantial claim. Mrs Burnap, whose son was born in Chartham and had enlisted in Dover, and whose name already appeared on the village memorial in Petham, was, nonetheless, keen to have his name included among the list of Canterbury’s war dead. Her request was refused on the grounds that he had never lived in the city. Canterbury, CCA, CCW15/2, Mrs Burnap to S. Topliss, undated.

²⁸ Dover, EKA, DoCA17/1/51, Mr Holyoak to R. Knocker, 17 May 1924.

²⁹ Canterbury, CCA, CCW15/2, Canterbury War Memorial Committee, minutes, 27 June 1921.

³⁰ Kent Gazette and Canterbury Press, 15 October 1921.

³¹ Canterbury, CCA, CCW15/2, B. Pite to S. Topliss, 17 Dec. 1921.

³² Ibid., Canterbury War Memorial Committee, minutes, 25 Jan. 1922.

³³ Kent Gazette and Canterbury Press, 11 November 1922.

³⁴ Kentish Observer, 16 Nov. 1922. By way of contrast, the Kent Gazette anticipated the importance that the unveiling of the nameplates would have for the community at large. Announcing the affixing of the nameplates, it observed that, ‘the unveiling of the names of those citizens who fell in the Great War will give to the handsome monument erected on the site of the Old Butter Market, close to Christ Church Gateway, a distinctive personal touch’. Kent Gazette and Canterbury Press, 14 October 1922.

³⁵ Dover, EKA, DoCA17/1/56, R. Goulden to R. Knocker, 4 Sep. 1924. In fact the Committee originally brought the unveiling ceremony forward to 29 October but as this coincided with the date fixed for the general election it was decided to postpone the ceremony until 5 November as, in the words of Dover’s MP, J.J. Astor, ‘polling day was not the correct (calm) atmosphere’. Ibid., J.J. Astor to R. Knocker, 16 Oct. 1924.

³⁶ Dover, EKA, DoCA17/1/56, R. Goulden to R. Knocker 5 Dec 1924.

³⁷ Dover Express, 7 November 1924.

³⁸ Kentish Observer, 13 October 1921.

³⁹ Folkestone Express 11 September 1921.

⁴⁰ Kentish Observer, 13 October 1921.

⁴¹ Ibid., 9 December 1922.

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ S. Hynes, 1990, A War Imagined: the First World War and English Culture (London), pp. ix-xii.

Fig. 1 The unveiling of Canterbury’s war memorial in the Butter Market.

Fig. 2 The Runic Cross in Canterbury.

Fig. 3 The unveiling of the Folkestone war memorial on the Leas.

Fig. 4 The unveiling of the Dover war memorial outside the Maison Dieu.