MEMORIAL TEXT NARRATIVES in BRITAIN C.1890-1930
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MEMORIAL TEXT NARRATIVES IN BRITAIN c.1890-1930 by SONIA LETITIA BATTEN A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Medieval and Modern History School of Historical Studies The University of Birmingham March 2011 ABSTRACT This thesis seeks to explore the memorial texts that developed as a result of the First World War, composed primarily by those whose sons, husbands and fathers had died between 1914 and 1918. Visitors to the military cemeteries of the First World War are interested to read the inscriptions left by the bereaved at the foot of individual headstones, yet this aspect of post-war commemoration is still largely unexplored. This thesis seeks to explore these responses: by considering the process through which the bereaved were permitted to select inscriptions, the sources from which they derived consolation, and the narratives that they pursued throughout the post-war period to 1930. Parallel to these permanent headstone inscriptions are considered the ephemeral commemoration of the newspaper in memoriam column, a source of material that has received scant attention but which promises a rich glimpse into the conventions of early-twentieth-century mourning – conventions which are still resonant almost a century after the First World War broke out. To contextualise post- war responses, the thesis introduces commemorative practices used to remember those who died in the South African War and in the sinking of the Titanic, many of which were used again in the aftermath of 1918. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following individuals and members of the following institutions for their help and advice. Any errors within the text remain mine alone. Dr. J.M. Bourne, University of Birmingham; Dr. R. Bushaway, University of Birmingham; staff and members of the Centre for First World War Studies, University of Birmingham; staff at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Maidenhead; staff at the Imperial War Museum, London; staff at Birmingham Central Library; staff at Southampton Central Library; staff at the Nantgarw Collection Centre, National Museums and Galleries of Wales. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their steadfast forbearance and encouragement. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 COMMEMORATIVE LANGUAGES 1890-1914 .............................. 21 A language of realism .............................................................................................. 30 A language of idealism ............................................................................................. 44 Epitaphic language ................................................................................................... 53 CHAPTER 2 NAMING NAMES AND BURYING BODIES .................................. 60 The memorial landscape of West Flanders .............................................................. 60 Names and bodies in British memorials ................................................................... 85 CHAPTER 3 THE ISSUE OF HIERARCHY IN MEMORIAL TEXTS .................. 94 Choosing a personal inscription ............................................................................... 97 The in memoriam tradition ..................................................................................... 108 Voices, identities and hierarchies ........................................................................... 116 CHAPTER 4 SOURCE AND SENTIMENT ........................................................... 135 The significance of the written word...................................................................... 136 The influence of Christianity ................................................................................. 140 Traditional and contemporary literature ................................................................. 150 CHAPTER 5 CONSTRUCTED REALITIES .......................................................... 160 „We salute, honour and remember you‟: the wartime narrative ............................. 162 „We miss you our son‟: the bereavement narrative ................................................ 180 „When Death comes it does not mean we forget‟: the confluence of the two narratives ............................................................................................................ 187 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................... 192 APPENDIX REGISTER ENTRIES AND PERSONAL INSCRIPTIONS ............ 199 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................... 228 INTRODUCTION Harris wanted to get out at Hampton Church, to go and see Mrs Thomas’s tomb. ‘Who is Mrs Thomas?’ I asked. ‘How should I know?’ replied Harris. ‘She’s a lady that’s got a funny tomb, and I want to see it.’ I objected. I don’t know whether it is that I am built wrong, but I never did seem to hanker after tombstones myself. I know that the proper thing to do, when you get to a village or town, is to rush off and enjoy the graves; but it is a recreation that I always deny myself. I take no interest in creeping round dim and chilly churches behind wheezy old men, and reading epitaphs. Not even the sight of a bit of cracked brass let into a stone affords me what I call real happiness. I shock respectable sextons by the imperturbability that I am able to assume before exciting inscriptions, and by my lack of enthusiasm for the local family history, while my ill-concealed anxiety to get outside wounds their feelings. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat1 Playing it for laughs is not how we now conceive the Victorians‟ usual attitude to death. Born in 1859, Jerome K. Jerome was undoubtedly a „Victorian‟, yet by the time of his death in 1927 he had witnessed significant changes in the way in which British society approached the subjects of death, bereavement, grief and mourning. He had lived with, and probably accepted, highly-ritualised codes relating to death and its aftermath, as demonstrated by the pervasive paraphernalia of Victorian mourning, the rise of the etiquette manual and an anxiety over visible respectability.2 He had seen the Evangelical emphasis on „good‟ and „bad‟ deaths; lived in a period of pronounced demographic change, increased urbanisation and fluctuating mortality rates; and witnessed the shift in accepted methods of disposal – first within the garden cemetery movement and then in the legalisation and increasing use of cremation. His 1 Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 63. 2 Jerome experienced the death of both his parents in 1872, when he was 13. 1 whimsical account of Harris, George and „J.‟ (to say nothing of the dog), travelling up the Thames from London to Oxford, was first published in 1889. John Wolffe argues that Jerome was writing during a decade of change. He presses the point that whereas in 1861 public reaction to Prince Albert‟s death „lacked a commensurate ceremonial and ritual focus‟, by the 1880s the situation had changed completely. The commemoration of Albert in stone and marble, notably in Sir George Gilbert Scott‟s Hyde Park memorial unveiled in the early 1870s, helped this transition.3 The treatment of Mrs Thomas and her tomb covers no more than a few pages, but it suggests many of the concerns Victorians shared about death. It alludes to the disposal of the dead; the design of both whole cemeteries and individual graves; the practice of visiting cemeteries; social attempts at incorporating theology into accepted responses to bereavement; and the establishment of frameworks and standards of „proper‟ behaviour surrounding bereavement. In popular terms the Victorians‟ obsession with death has become as accepted as our own apparent enthusiasm to obscure it.4 We all „know‟ that Queen Victoria never came out of mourning for Albert; that a complex web of mourning rituals commanded strict observance throughout society; and that the working-classes prioritised the dead over the living by saving for funerals – but not for weddings. We should as comfortably accept these 3 John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 274-75. 4 In his book The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral Since 1450, Julian Litten recalls purchasing a batch of Art Deco mourning cads in 1987 and records the sales assistant’s reaction: ‘anything to do with death is morbid’. Litten notes that ‘*m+any people erect fences whenever conversation turns towards death, heaven and eternity, manoeuvring the discussion towards lighter topics’. See Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral Since 1450 (London: Robert Hale, 2002), p. 1. My own experience echoes Litten’s. Interested enquiries about this research (when framed as ‘the commemoration of the First World War’) become slightly horrified reactions when framed as ‘the responses of the bereaved to the deaths of their sons during and after the war’. 2 statements at face value as we should glean our understanding of warfare on the Western Front from Blackadder Goes Forth. The escapades of Blackadder and company tell us much about the evolution (and intransience) of attitudes towards the war, but reveal little of the complexities of the situations depicted.5 All those unsmiling images of Queen Victoria („a kind of Crape Deity‟) are