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Memorials to the First World War can be found in villages and towns all over Britain.
No other conflict has been marked by the dedication of so many statues, plaques, stained glass windows or gardens.
What made the memory of this war so different from all the others?
Monuments of battle traditionally celebrated great victories or significant military figures.
In contrast, monuments commemorating the First World War tend to honour ordinary soldiers and the majority includes names without rank.
Teesside WWI memorials
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They have been created from a different impulse; one of loss rather than victory.
The first memorials were makeshift shrines erected to mark the departure of men to the front.
As the war progressed, communities sought more permanent monuments for those who would not return.
The construction of memorials in Britain gained greater significance after 1915 when the War Office decided to ban the repatriation of the war dead.
The battlefields of industrial conflict would not easily yield the bodies of the dead and poorer families did not have the means to bring their relatives home.
As a result, Fabian Ware of the Red Cross recommended that those who had fought together should remain united and equal in death.
Consequently, war memorials fulfilled an important function for the bereaved back in Britain.
Many thousands of men went missing on the battlefield and their bodies were never found.
With no body to bury there could be no funeral and no headstone. Instead names were listed on monuments and plaques in market squares, schools and churches.
Community memorials provided focus for grief and a ritual of public mourning.
For families, being able to see and touch a name on the local war memorial retrieved the dead from anonymity and provided public recognition of loss. Unveiling ceremonies provided an important emotional outlet for the bereft.
The presence of church, community and political leaders at these ceremonies also helped to promote social cohesion.
Local memorials were often the product of community effort and local subscription.
Many towns considered building utilitarian memorials such as schools, hospitals or village halls but these required ongoing funding so practical considerations favoured the construction of a single monument.
House-to-house collections raised funds from hard-pressed families in the harsh economic environment of the 1920s.
In Middlesbrough, the difficulty of raising money for the memorial effectively gave control of its design to Sir Arthur Dorman who gifted the land. Dorman favoured a replica of the Cenotaph in London and this was unveiled on the Linthorpe Road in November 1922.
The Cenotaph at Whitehall was originally intended as a temporary focus for Peace Day ceremonies in 1919.
Its name comes from the Greek for ‘empty tomb’ and it effectively provided a vessel for the diverse emotions which attended the ending of the war.
Initially intended as a temporary structure, the Cenotaph was recast in Portland stone, and contains the dedication ‘The Glorious Dead’.
As a national representation of heroic sacrifice, this tribute became a way to channel the grief and anger of the population towards unity.
By providing a unifying image of the nation’s gratitude to the dead it displaced some of the criticism of the war and its leaders.
The importance of symbolic representations of death was even more powerfully demonstrated by the interment of the Unknown Soldier in November 1920. The soldier (another was buried in Paris on the same day) represented all the men whose bodies were never recovered.
The arrival of his coffin in Dover was attended by a large and emotional crowd, and over one million people visited the tomb within a week of the coffin’s arrival at Westminster Abbey.
The Unknown Soldier became an abstract symbol of sacrifice for the nation and reinforced a sense of patriotic duty.
First World War memorials performed a vital function in helping some members of the population to make sense of the war and in affirming the necessity of the sacrifice for the nation.
For others, a public memorial could not appease their private grief and they felt anger at the pretence that their son or husband had died for a purpose. The idea that the dead were universally heroic or glorious also made it difficult for some to connect to public commemorations and they felt detached from the abstract representations of those who had died.
So, First World War memorials populate the landscape as symbols of community, patronage, politics and profound loss.
As with all memorials they are acts of defiance against death that attempt to make the dead immortal: ‘Lest We Forget’.
At the heart of the evocation to remember is, of course, the acknowledgement that we probably will not. And indeed many of these memorials to the First World War have slipped from visibility; we pass by them so regularly we no longer see them.
Yet each one tells a story of a community or a committee that tried to tell a story of the war.
Why were there no separate memorials dedicated to the Second World War?
Why do these early 20th century statues and obelisks represent all subsequent wars, with panels and plaques added to acknowledge those who died later?
Perhaps because they represent the ultimate sacrifice to the nation and further expressions of this sacrifice seemed unnecessary.
Or perhaps because artistic tastes changed and the kind of statuary that commemorated war fell out of fashion.
However, it is also possible to argue that adding the names of those who died in 1939-45 to the monuments of the First World War was a mark of failure.
The message of these memorials, ‘Never Again’, had not been heeded. It is the great irony of these monuments that they are places around which people gather not to reflect on peace but to acknowledge the continuing history of Britain at war.
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