Britishness and Commemoration: National Memorials to the First World War in Britain and Ireland

Jenny Macleod

doi:10.1177/0022009413493940

Abstract

The 1917 call for a national memorial to the First World War led to the establishment of the Imperial War Museum in London. It also inspired Scottish, Welsh and Irish national memorials. No English national memorial was ever proposed; instead the Cenotaph and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier were conceived as imperial memorials. The new statelet of Northern Ireland did not commemorate its overall war effort within its own territory. This article surveys the organization, location and design of the Scottish, Welsh and Irish national war memorials to the First World War. It examines some aspects of the complex set of relationships between the local, regional, national and imperial layers of identity that are inherent in Britishness. In doing so it reveals the confused and contested nature of national identity in the United Kingdom at the close of the First World War.

Highlights

The 1917 call for a national memorial to the First World War led to the establishment of the Imperial War Museum in London
No English national memorial was ever proposed; instead the Cenotaph and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier were conceived as imperial memorials
This article surveys the organization, location and design of the Scottish, Welsh and Irish national war memorials to the First World War. It examines some aspects of the complex set of relationships between the local, regional, national and imperial layers of identity that are inherent in Britishness

Summary

10 In addition to Mosse’s 1979 article and Fallen Soldiers

Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford 1990), important early works in this area are P. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London, 1990), K.S. Inglis, ‘War Memorials: Ten Questions for Historians’, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, (1992), 5–21; and J.M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge 1995). The following important contributions to the subsequent debate have appeared in this journal: a 2004 special edition, see J. Bourke, ‘Introduction: ‘‘Remembering’’ War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39(4) (2004), 473–85 and these review articles: C. Moriarty, ‘The Material Culture of Great War Remembrance’, Journal of Contemporary History, 34 (1999), 653– 62; S. Bodies and Memories of Two World Wars’, Journal of Contemporary History, 42 (2007), 377–85 Beyond Discourse? Bodies and Memories of Two World Wars’, Journal of Contemporary History, 42 (2007), 377–85

11 Choosing Scotland’s Future: A National Conversation

43 Executive committee

Findings

73 Other committee members not mentioned in this summary