View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Northumbria Research Link Northumbria Research Link Citation: Foster, Ann-Marie (2019) The Ephemera of Remembrance in the Wake of War and Disaster, c.1899–1939. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University. This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/41204/ Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. 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Foster PhD 2019 The Ephemera of Remembrance in the Wake of War and Disaster, c.1899–1939 Ann-Marie Foster A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Research undertaken in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Social Science May 2019 Abstract In the wake of war and disaster families wanted to mourn their dead. Public memorials to those who died in the First World War were influenced by governmental, local, and elite agents. The families of the dead participated in wider Remembrance Day initiatives, but they found memorial agency in the construction of grief on a private, familial, level. While historians of the First World War have acknowledged the importance of family memorial practices, none have yet tackled the subject in a sustained study. This split between public and private, between individuals and the nation state, is where this doctoral study of family memorialisation lies. After the First World War, families did not have access to a body, had little authority over how their loved one’s grave looked, and were not allowed to shape memorial services on Remembrance Sunday. So too, the families of those who lost a loved one in a mining disaster were given limited autonomy over burial practices. Therefore, the experiences of those who lost a loved one in the war are compared to those who had been bereaved through a mining disaster in order to contextualise wartime loss. Behind closed doors and in liminal spaces, families enacted memorial agency over the dead and attempted to provide points of memory to remember them by. This thesis focuses on the small, the ephemeral, and the physical to access this hidden world of family mourning in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 - Mining Family Memories 12 Chapter 2 - Mining Disasters and the First World War: a case for 28 comparison Chapter 3 - Intimate Grief 53 Chapter 4 - Posting Grief 86 Chapter 5 - Grief in the Press 106 Chapter 6 - Empathetic Ephemera 125 Chapter 7 - Mass Ephemera and the Construction of Remembrance 143 Conclusion 179 Bibliography 185 Abbreviations BL: British Library BM: Beamish Museum BPC: Beamish People’s Collection Bod: Bodleian Library CWGC: Commonwealth War Graves DCRO: Durham County Record Office DGA: Dumfries and Galloway Archives DLIC: Durham Light Infantry Collection DPM: Devil’s Porridge Museum GA: Glamorgan Archives GwA: Gwent Archives IWGC: Imperial War Graves Commission IWM: Imperial War Museum JJCol: John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera MO: Mass Observation Archive NA: Northumberland Archives NeA: Newham Archives NCMM: National Coal Mining Museum NMM: National Mining Museum NRM: National Railway Museum PCW: People’s Collection Wales RBA: Richard Burton Archives StF: St Fagans National Museum of History SWCC: South Wales Coalfield Collection WA: Whitehaven Archive Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to offer my thanks to my supervisors, Dr James McConnel and Dr Jenny Macleod, who have made meetings a joy (thank you for holding them in museums so often) and have provided shrewd and constructive criticism throughout. I could not have wished for a more supportive supervisory team. I hope I have turned you both into committed ephemerists. This research would not have been possible without the support of my funders, the AHRC Heritage Consortium, for which I thank them. The l’Historial de la Grande Guerre provided generous support which greatly aided the final stages of this thesis and for which I am very grateful. The Society for the Study of Labour History funded a foray into Wales which has greatly enriched this thesis. The Royal Historical Society and the Northumbria Graduate School were kind enough to fund attendance at conferences where some of the material presented here was tested. Thanks to everyone who agreed to be interviewed, and to Harry Taylor, George Nairn, and Alastair Fraser who offered their private collections. My thanks also go to the U3A Washington and Wessington Group for the early support given. Many thanks to the museum and archival staff who have given up much of their time to help facilitate this research: this thesis would not have been possible without your extensive knowledge of the collections used and I am very grateful to you all for sharing this with me. I also wish to offer my thanks to my friends, family, and A.C. who all made the process far nicer than it otherwise would have been. I am very grateful to Sarah McManamon and Rowan Thompson who gave their time and proof reading skills freely. Any errors which remain are mine alone. I wish to apologise to my partner, for we now own far more books than we did three years ago and, I am afraid, that the next time we move they will also have to move with us: best get the box tape ready. Declaration I declare that the work contained in this thesis has not been submitted for any other award and that it is all my own work. I also confirm that this work fully acknowledges opinions, ideas and contributions from the work of others. Any ethical clearance for the research presented in this thesis has been approved. Approval has been sought and granted by the University Ethics Committee on 25.08.2016. I declare that the word count of this thesis is 73,181 words. Name: Ann-Marie Foster Introduction The centenary of the First World War in Britain highlighted, in a rather stark way, the split between public and private memorial practices relating to the conflict which have been present over the last one hundred years. There was an extreme interest in family histories of the war throughout the centenary, and at the start of the four year period historians of the First World War predicated that family memories of the conflict would fuel British national engagement with wider public centenary initiatives.1 The importance of family narratives of war was recognised by national and international institutions through the creation of initiatives such as the Imperial War Museum’s ‘Lives of the First World War’ and Europeana 1914–1918.2 These online platforms of remembrance have revealed a plethora of objects and ephemera which still remain in family archives and form the spine of many people’s First World War memorial practices. These family objects have the potential to contain a deep emotional resonance for their custodians.3 This was reflected in public broadcasts, and in the lead up to the 2018 Armistice Day celebrations, BBC radio programmes such as the Today Show featured family objects which individual members of the public used to remember their dead.4 Yet, nationally, the 2018 Remembrance Sunday was characterised by a mass memorial service at the Cenotaph, a service in Westminster Abbey, and memorialisation initiatives such as Pages of the Sea. While the centenary period has heavily focused on collecting family memorial objects, on Armistice Day itself, they were largely absent from national commemorations. This split between public and private began in the interwar period, and during the 1920s and 1930s public memorialisation on a set day was similarly characteristic of national remembrance initiatives. Yet there was also an ongoing undercurrent of family memorialisation practices, separate to these set days of national remembrance, which utilised objects and ephemera to mediate the grief felt by the bereaved. Behind closed doors and in liminal spaces, families enacted memorial agency over the dead and attempted to provide 1 As Keith Jeffery suggested in 2015, it was to be ‘the compelling fascination of the micro-stories of the conflict, the communal memories and family narratives, [which will] continue to sustain the extraordinary public interest in the war [and the latter] will see the country through to 2018 without being crippled by commemoration fatigue.’ See Keith Jeffery, ‘Commemoration in the United Kingdom: A multitude of memories’, Australian Journal of Political Science 50:3 (2015), p. 566. 2 Bart Ziino, ‘Introduction: Remembering the First World War Today’, in Bart Ziino (ed.), Remembering the First World War (London, 2015), p. 9; also see James Wallis, ‘‘Great-grandfather, what did you do in the Great War?’ The phenomenon of conducting First World War family history research’, in Bart Ziino (ed.), Remembering the First World War (London, 2015), pp. 31–34. 3 For example, the archaeologist John Schofield considers that retaining this kind of physical object is a type of ‘social commemoration’ as ‘the object stands for a family member I never met’.