Lest We Forget: Remembrance & Commemoration

'Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.' These words, spoken at war memorials across the United Kingdom and around the world on 11 November every year, encapsulate how we commemorate our war dead. Lest We Forget looks at how we remember not only those who died in battle, but also those whose memory is important to us in other ways. This wide-ranging review considers such topics as Holocaust Memorial Day, the Hillsborough Disaster, memories of the Spanish Civil War, the genocide in Rwanda, Diana, Princess of Wales and the role of the Cenotaph and the National Memorial Arboretum. With an endorsement from The Royal British Legion, which celebrates its 90th anniversary in 2011, this is a timely study, and is relevant not only to people in the United Kingdom, but recognises the universal need to remember.

1130000740
Lest We Forget: Remembrance & Commemoration

'Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.' These words, spoken at war memorials across the United Kingdom and around the world on 11 November every year, encapsulate how we commemorate our war dead. Lest We Forget looks at how we remember not only those who died in battle, but also those whose memory is important to us in other ways. This wide-ranging review considers such topics as Holocaust Memorial Day, the Hillsborough Disaster, memories of the Spanish Civil War, the genocide in Rwanda, Diana, Princess of Wales and the role of the Cenotaph and the National Memorial Arboretum. With an endorsement from The Royal British Legion, which celebrates its 90th anniversary in 2011, this is a timely study, and is relevant not only to people in the United Kingdom, but recognises the universal need to remember.

19.49 In Stock
Lest We Forget: Remembrance & Commemoration

Lest We Forget: Remembrance & Commemoration

Lest We Forget: Remembrance & Commemoration

Lest We Forget: Remembrance & Commemoration

eBook

$19.49 

Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers

LEND ME® See Details

Overview

'Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.' These words, spoken at war memorials across the United Kingdom and around the world on 11 November every year, encapsulate how we commemorate our war dead. Lest We Forget looks at how we remember not only those who died in battle, but also those whose memory is important to us in other ways. This wide-ranging review considers such topics as Holocaust Memorial Day, the Hillsborough Disaster, memories of the Spanish Civil War, the genocide in Rwanda, Diana, Princess of Wales and the role of the Cenotaph and the National Memorial Arboretum. With an endorsement from The Royal British Legion, which celebrates its 90th anniversary in 2011, this is a timely study, and is relevant not only to people in the United Kingdom, but recognises the universal need to remember.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780752473345
Publisher: The History Press
Publication date: 06/01/2011
Sold by: INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS
Format: eBook
Pages: 224
File size: 518 KB
Age Range: 18 Years

Read an Excerpt

Lest We Forget

Remembrance & Commemoration


By Maggie Andrews, Charles Bagot Jewitt, Nigel Hunt

The History Press

Copyright © 2011 Maggie Andrews, Charles Bagot Jewitt & Nigel Hunt
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-7334-5


CHAPTER 1

REMEMBERING THE DEAD, FORGIVING THE ENEMY:

The Royal Engineers & the Commemoration of the Second Boer War

Dr Peter Donaldson


The unveiling of the Royal Engineers' memorial arch to the fallen of the Second Boer War at the corps' headquarters at Brompton Barracks, Chatham, on 26 July 1905 was greeted with all the pomp and circumstance that one would expect of such an important national ritual in Edwardian England. With the king in attendance to perform the official dedication, the Chatham News vividly captured the sense of collective pride that singled the day out as a patriotic carnival: 'Flags! Flags! Flags! Flags here, flags there, flags everywhere – nothing but flags of all colours, all sizes and all descriptions, the whole combining to make a bright display.'

Yet such nationalistic unanimity masked the difficulties that the corps' memorial committee had faced as it had attempted to construct a memory site in honour of the 431 Royal Engineers who had died in the war. Although the scheme had been instigated by no less a person than Lord Kitchener, himself a Royal Engineer and latterly commander-in-chief of the British forces in South Africa, the memory of the war and the nature of the proposal were sufficiently contentious to negate the deference that seniority would normally command.

In May 1902, Kitchener, who had been commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1871, had written to the commandant of the corps at Chatham, Sir T. Fraser, with the offer of 'four bronze statues of Boers and four bas-reliefs for use in a war memorial to the fallen'. For good measure he had enclosed a detailed sketch of his proposal. Unsurprisingly, Fraser had been quick to accept the offer and a memorial committee meeting in October 1902, chaired by Sir Robert Harrison, the Inspector General of Fortifications, unanimously agreed to press ahead with the plan.

However, notwithstanding this official seal of approval from the senior commanders, the scheme soon ran into trouble. The Boer statues and bas-reliefs had originally been intended as the focal points for a monument in honour of Paul Kruger, the former President of the Transvaal. The pieces had been embargoed at the outbreak of war and eventually donated to Kitchener who, as we have seen above, subsequently offered them to the Royal Engineers' memorial committee. Although, in many ways, Kitchener's offer can be securely sited in the classic tradition of the triumphal, the contentious symbolism of the statuary must have rung some alarm bells even with the original memorial committee members.

Indeed, the committee's appreciation of the sensitive nature of the proposal can be discerned from their immediate response. Despite insisting that the pieces should be viewed as 'impersonal' and 'works of art', they nevertheless decided that a bas-relief depicting the peace conference at McNeill's farm after the British army's ignominious defeat at the Battle of Majuba Hill in the First Boer War was a step too far, and should be replaced by a 'plaque recording Lord Kitchener's gift of the bronzes'. This nod towards conciliation would, however, prove to be far less than was going to be necessary to stem the tide of criticism that the committee would eventually face over the inclusion of such controversial images.

For many in Britain, and certainly for a sizeable proportion of those who had fought in the war, anti-Boer feeling, which was an inevitable consequence of the brutality of the conflict for British combatants and which had been fuelled domestically by the 'yellow press', sat uneasily with the assimilation of the Boer Republics into a federated British South Africa by the Treaty of Vereeniging. It could, therefore, hardly have come as a surprise to the memorial committee that, when details of the proposed scheme were announced in the corps' magazine, it was quickly swamped by a flood of complaints. It was, however, only when Field Marshal Sir John Simmons, former Inspector-General of Fortifications from 1875–80 and Governor of Malta until his retirement in 1888, put his weight behind the opposition that the committee eventually caved in and resolved 'to defer any further action until a General Meeting of the corps can be held'.

Although nearly all those present at the corps' general meeting on 6 June 1903 were in agreement that the original plans of the memorial committee to accept the Boer statues and bas-reliefs should be rescinded, there were still heated exchanges when it came to providing a rationale for this decision. Major M. Hildebrand, a retired Royal Engineers officer, clearly articulated the view that consideration of Boer sensibilities had to take precedence when it came to commemorating the war. In a letter sent to the editor of the Royal Engineers' journal and read out at the meeting, he made plain that pressing ahead with the original plan would, in his view, 'cause the keenest feeling of resentment amongst our new fellow subjects'.

Major-General Sir Elliott Wood, who had served as engineer-in-chief during the war and was a member of the original memorial committee, was quick to voice his support for this line of reasoning. Having been responsible for drawing up the original sketch-plan of Kitchener's scheme, he was clearly keen to distance himself from what had turned out to be a contentious and manifestly unpopular proposal. The choice of design was, he insisted, 'a very important question ... for it might become more than a corps' matter; it might go beyond this and affect the army and perhaps the country generally, if we were to give offence to our new fellow subjects'.

For two retired senior officers, however, the memory of the human cost of the recent fighting was still too fresh for consideration of such political niceties to take priority. Arguing that it was first important 'to clear up our own views before we consider those of other people', Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Grant urged those assembled to 'remember that it was through what we hold to be [the Boers'] mistaken views and their mistaken actions that we lost the officers and men to whom we wish to erect the memorial'. General Sir James Browne, a former colonel commandant of the corps, was prepared to go one step further when apportioning blame. In a letter read out at the meeting on his behalf, he maintained that to use such 'undesirable images would be a monument to bad taste, never to be effaced', for the statues 'were made to honour Mr. Kruger, the man of all others in this world responsible for the deaths of those we wish to honour'.

An interesting argument to bolster further the case against the original proposal was presented by Sir Thomas Gallway, who had recently succeeded Sir Richard Harrison as Inspector-General of Fortifications. Insisting that the minutes should record his 'strong protest' against Kitchener's scheme on the grounds that the statues 'represent an armed enemy', Gallway raised the moral stakes by arguing that, before any decision could be reached, the meeting must first 'consider the feelings of the relatives of our gallant dead'. Major J. Winn, a member of the original war memorial committee, although differing on the nature of the views held by the bereaved, was still equally adamant that they merited special consideration. His attitude had, he said, 'hardened' against using the statues as the result of a letter he had recently received from the father of one of the fallen: 'He thought that, if the Boers would consider it to be a bad thing for the figures to be used, it ought not to be done. Knowing that this man lost a son in the war, I feel more strongly that his views should carry weight on the subject.'

With no one able or willing to speak out in support of the original plan, the meeting unanimously resolved to elect a new committee with instructions to start the process afresh. The threat of any further dissent was subsequently averted by devolving the question of form to the professional care of an established architect, Ingress Bell. His decision to opt for a triumphal arch, to mirror the Crimean Arch erected at the corps' headquarters in Brompton in the 1860s, was reassuringly uncontroversial and the project proceeded to completion without further hitches. The Boer statues were relegated to a far-flung corner of the parade ground in Brompton Barracks to ensure the memorial should remain unsullied by any symbolic association.

An interesting footnote to this contentious issue occurred fifteen years after the unveiling of the memorial arch. A decision by the South African government to proceed, somewhat belatedly, with the construction of the Kruger memorial in Pretoria once again brought the political significance of the Boer statues into high relief. In December 1920, General Jan Smuts, the South African Prime Minister and former Boer guerrilla commander, approached his old adversary Alfred Milner, the Secretary of State for the colonies, requesting the return of the statues. Before Milner could accede to the request, he first had to seek permission from the Royal Engineers, who retained ownership of two of the statues, and Kitchener's son, who had removed the other two figures to the Kitchener residence in Broome Park. Having received no objection from either party, in March 1921 the statues were returned for, in Milner's words, 'political reasons as an act of goodwill'. All four statues can now be found adorning the plinth of the Kruger memorial in Church Square, Pretoria.

CHAPTER 2

THE MEMORIALISATION OF GALLIPOLI AND THE DARDANELLES 1915:

History & Meaning

Dr Bob Bushaway


Unscathed, exulting in the amber light, We left behind the immemorial Cape.

'The Sentinel', Geoffrey Dearmer (1918)

The process of establishing a landscape of memory in the systematic memorialisation of the battlefields of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles – the scene of bitter fighting and trench warfare in 1915 – has been continuous since military and naval operations ended. At the southern tip of the European Peninsula, forming part of the Turkish province of Canakkale, known to the Entente powers during the First World War as Gallipoli, is the European bank to the narrow seaway of the Dardanelles which links the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and has long been seen as the strategic key to the control of the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea approaches to Asia. Both the early memorials and the cemeteries of the dead were made where the soldiers fought and died across a field of conflict whose dimensions were considerably constrained by the conditions of fixed field fortifications and static warfare. Since 1915, and in marked contrast to other First World War battlefields in Europe, both the victors and the defeated have striven to memorialise the area. Undoubtedly a tactical, operational and strategic defeat for the Entente powers, and a clear local victory for the Ottoman Empire under the control of the group of revolutionary army officers known as the 'Young Turks', with the help of their German allies, by November 1918 the Ottoman Empire had been defeated. The first wave of memorialisation took place between 1919 and 1925 – the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the land campaign. On returning to the peninsula, initially as an army of occupation, the victorious Allies created their own landscape of memory. In the words of T.J. Pemberton, who recorded their work: 'Before the war had come to an end the Governments of the Empire had decided that the name of every man and woman who had made the supreme sacrifice on the battlefields and oceans of the world for Britain's cause should be commemorated in a lasting monument.'

The Ottoman sultanate was overthrown, the original Treaty of Sevres (1919) was rejected and, after the Greek-Turkish War, was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), and the new Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October 1923 with its capital at Ankara and Mustafa Kemal as the Republic's first president.

Pemberton recorded at the time that 'The Turks, whose dead lie in Gallipoli soil in equal numbers to their erstwhile enemies, have made no attempt whatever to mark their places of burial'. He comments that in only one place, at the Nek, was there evidence of Turkish memorialisation in the form of 'a pyramidal block of concrete, surmounted by five live shells and standing only some fifteen feet in height'. He continues: 'The Turks raised no other memorial to their dead. Here and there are to be found Turkish cemeteries, but they are not marked nor intended to be remembered.'

In 1922 the Greek army was defeated in the Greek-Turkish War. The Greek agricultural population was removed to Thrace, Salonika and Athens to be replaced steadily by Turkish communities. Turkish memorialisation, partly in reflection of the national secular characteristics of the new Republic and partly to glorify the achievements of Mustafa Kemal (Kemal Ataturk), whose own deeds in no small way brought about the victory at Gallipoli and the birth of the modern Turkish Republic, marks the first phase of Turkish commemoration. Since then, successive phases of Turkish memorialisation have emphasised the role of Turkey's armed forces in defending both Turkish sovereignty under the secular constitution of 1923, and the neutrality of the Dardanelles in the latter period as a NATO ally during the years of the Cold War. As a result, the landscape of memory has been given new and different meanings relating to Turkish independence rarely accessible to non-Turkish visitors. Meaning is not fixed and although reconciliation has become an overarching and symbolic meaning for the transformed landscape, each period and the initial allied stage reveals contested meanings which continue into the twenty-first century.

The imperatives of the national, democratic, secular and socialist new Republic of Turkey are proclaimed as much by the Turkish memorialisation of Gallipoli as through the nationwide cult of Kemal Ataturk, which has so far defined modern Turkey and its post-Ottoman national sovereignty. Between November 1919 and Pemberton's account in 1928, the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission had constructed an intricate landscape consisting of thirty-one cemeteries containing over 19,000 graves. The majority of these cemeteries were designed by Sir John Burnet. Headstones take the form of plaques raised at an angle from the ground and large cemeteries include the Great Stone of Remembrance and the Cross cut into a flat stone as part of the embankment. Six memorials to the missing, on which were carved the names of over 27,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen for whom there was no known grave on the peninsula, were erected at Cape Helles, together with separate memorials to the missing in the Anzac area at Lone Pine (Australia) and at Twelve Tree Copse, Chunuk Bair and at Hill Sixty (New Zealand). A separate cemetery and ossuary were erected by the French at Morto Bay to commemorate their forces during the campaign, and was inaugurated on 9 June 1930.

The Entente mythos for Gallipoli and the Dardanelles in 1915 is a narrative of close-run events ending in ultimate defeat. Numerous accounts in the English language historiography, beginning with the Report of the Dardanelles Commission to Parliament in 1917, have concluded that the campaign was boldly conceived and bravely executed, resulting in a narrow but honourable defeat. The Turkish mythos links the victory to the formation of the modern Republic, in which a successful defence of the Turkish homeland from amphibious assault, conducted through the skill of Turkish and German leadership and the bravery of Turkish forces drawn from across the entire Ottoman Empire, had resulted in a new beginning for the Republic of Turkey, captured by Mustafa Kemal's words: 'Peace at home, peace in the world. 'Turkish memorialisation at Gallipoli therefore faces the future rather than the past.

Between the birth of the Republic in 1923 and the death of Ataturk in 1938, the landscape of the peninsula was laid out with a series of pedagogic plaques which marked the decisive points where the landings or the subsequent thrusts inland were blocked by Turkish troops. Ataturk's presence on the peninsula in 1915 was also marked by a series of dramatic statues of the president at different points in the campaign. Conscious of the need for reconciliation and recognising the nationalist aspirations of Australia and New Zealand during the 1930s, Ataturk wrote a message to Australian mothers, which is now widely proclaimed at different places in the landscape:

Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives ... are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace ... You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now ying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Lest We Forget by Maggie Andrews, Charles Bagot Jewitt, Nigel Hunt. Copyright © 2011 Maggie Andrews, Charles Bagot Jewitt & Nigel Hunt. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews