The Importance of British First World War Memorials
Created | Updated Dec 8, 2008
There can be no doubt about the impact of the First World War on the people of Britain and around the world. The sheer number of war memorials erected in all corners of the globe attest to that. All of these memorials have many things in common, however, there are some interesting differences. The lack of First World War memorials in the former USSR is significant, for example, although their profusion and yet similarity of purpose to British memorials for the Second World War
is also inteteresting. Equally telling is fact that Australian and Canadian war memorials have much more of a tendency to record the names of all who fought, rather than merely those who died.Yet at the same time, War Memorials are something that, in the UK at least, have faded into the background over time; they are part of the landscape yet barely noticed by the majority of people except, perhaps, on Remembrance Day. What this article looks at, then, is the circumstances surrounding the erection of war memorials in Britain, the form of the monuments themselves and the rituals that were carried out around them. The aim is to examine not just what they and the rituals they inspire can tell us about contemporary attitudes to warfare and the First World War in particular, but also how the emotions and the values they stand for have changed over time and been shaped by subsequent events.