Not all ‘war memorials’ are stone and bronze monuments. In the aftermath of the Great War there was a lively debate about what might constitute a ‘war memorial’ and what particular design might be appropriate. The conventional war memorial, as we have seen, is a public monument, perhaps a statue of a soldier, a cross, or an obelisk. Celtic crosses were popular in what is now the Republic, and may be found in Bray (Co. Wicklow), Sligo, Nenagh (Co. Tipperary), Castlebellingham and Drogheda (both Co. Louth). There are rather fewer in Northern Ireland, Limavady (Co. Londonderry) and Hillsborough (Co. Down) being two examples. Soldiers in various poses are common in the North: fighting (Bushmills, Co. Antrim), ‘at the ready’ with bayonet fixed (Dromore, Co. Down), cheering (a very rare pose, but it can be found in Banbridge, Co. Down), in mourning, with rifle reversed (Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh), with a flag (Dungannon, Co. Tyrone), or just standing, sometimes in a relaxed pose (Ballywalter, Co. Down). Then there are angels, as in Portadown and Lurgan (Co. Armagh) or Derry City (which also has a soldier and a sailor), and symbolical female figures, as in Portrush (Co. Londonderry) and on the Bangor (Co. Down) memorial. Other kinds of symbolical memorials include cenotaphs (Belfast, Cookstown (Co. Tyrone) and Newry (Co. Down)), obelisks, as in Ballycastle and Newtownabbey (Co. Antrim), Donaghadee and Kilkeel (Co. Down), clocks (Waringstown and Rathfriland (Co. Down)), a curious Celtic Romanesque structure in Port Laoise (Co. Laois) and a handsome stone lion in Newcastle (Co. Down).

But there are other types of memorial, and they reflect a sometimes very passionate debate about what was most suitable as a memorial. Many people thought that a memorial should not just be a symbolic monument, but should have some practical use, either as a building of some sort, or, perhaps, as scholarships or other support for the families of the fallen.

In Ireland a number of practical schemes were proposed.2 Technical colleges or ‘institutes’ of various sorts were quite popular: they were suggested in a number of places and built in Limavady and Newry. In both places a symbolic memorial was subsequently erected: a Celtic cross in Limavady, and a loose copy of the Whitehall cenotaph in Newry. Some localities combined symbolism with a practical benefit. War memorial parks, with monuments, were established in Ballymena and Ballyclare (Co. Antrim), where a children’s playground was specially included when the park was dedicated in November 1930. War memorial halls were erected in Coagh (Co. Tyrone) and Waringstown (Co. Down), and in Cavan a new operating theatre for the County Infirmary was built. On Eden Quay in Dublin is a substantial ‘Seamen’s Institute’ (now used by the Salvation Army), put up as ‘A tribute to the war service of seamen 1914-1919’. It included a special memorial hall for the mail steamer RMS Leinster, torpedoed off Dublin Bay in October 1918 with the loss of five hundred lives.

Churches and institutions often erected ‘war memorial’ halls and other buildings. Portora Royal School in Enniskillen put up memorial swimming baths and Trinity College, Dublin, built a new reading room for the College library. The largest practical memorial was the Presbyterian War Memorial Hostel in Belfast, opened in 1926 to commemorate the 26,000 Irish Presbyterians who had served in the war. The hostel provided residential accommodation for 200 young men and women and protect them from the terrors and temptations of the big city. Times change, and by the end of the twentieth century the hostel had been closed and the Presbyterian War Memorial Committee now funds a home for senior citizens. But the money raised is still providing a practical benefit.

The majority of war memorials, however, are symbolic and their particular location in cities, towns and villages itself symbolises the high importance of what they commemorate. The first place to look for a war memorial is in the centre of any place. The most outstanding of all the Irish municipal war memorials, that in Derry, stands at the centre of the Diamond, plumb in the middle of the old city. The cenotaph in Belfast is right next to the City Hall. The same applies to smaller places. The Portrush (Co. Londonderry) war memorial is outside the old town hall, as are those in Newry and Newcastle (Co. Down). Seaside memorials are often in a prominent place along the seafront, for example, Portstewart (Co. Londonderry), Groomsport and Donaghadee (Co. Down).

Sometimes the locating of a war memorial prompted local discussion. The original idea in Bangor (Co. Down) was to have the memorial in Main Street, but this was rejected on the grounds that it might be a ‘traffic hazard’, and the imposing memorial was eventually erected in Ward Park. Several central Dublin sites were proposed for the Irish National War Memorial – College Green, Merrion Square and Parnell Square, among others – before a less prominent location at Islandbridge was chosen. In Sligo the memorial was scheduled to be placed in a central site outside the Ulster Bank in Stephen Street by the bridge across the river Garavogue. Because it was directly over a water main the site was deemed unsuitable and the memorial was put up on the edge of the city, at what is now the junction of Mail Coach Road and Pearse (formerly Albert) Road. Clearly the technology of monument construction has improved over the years, for on the original site now stand a large bronze statue of W. B. Yeats.

Other memorials have been moved. The Larne memorial was originally outside the Laharna Hotel (which is long since closed, though the building remains) and near the Stranraer ferry terminal, where it would have been seen by thousands of travellers passing by. Apparently a traffic hazard, it was moved some years ago to Inver Park, where motorists on the elevated section of the road to Belfast can get a fleeting glimpse of it as they speed by. In Omagh, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers’ Boer War memorial was moved in February 1964, apparently for the same reason, from outside the Court House in High Street to the by-pass by the river.

There are memorials whose locations are doubly significant. In Kilrea (Co. Londonderry) there is a handsome obelisk, centrally situated in the middle of the Diamond. It is over an old well, which, it is said, before the war had been a ‘contested space’ where Protestant and Catholic youths would meet to challenge each other and even fight. By placing the memorial there it was hoped to defuse this tradition. The memorial in Drogheda (Co. Louth) is on the Dublin road, rising away from the town centre on the south bank of the River Boyne. This is not a central location, but it is almost equidistant between the old army barracks and the railway station. One explanation of its precise location is that every soldier who joined up in Drogheda would have passed that point on his way to the battle front. The question of location arose wherever in the world war memorials were being erected, and the stories of memorials, for example throughout the British Empire, parallel those of Irish monuments. The location of the war memorial in Palmerston North in New Zealand was so hotly debated that one joker suggested the memorial should be put on wheels to please everybody.3

Many, but not all, war memorials include lists of the dead and some also include those who served. Names were omitted for several reasons. There might have been rather too many names, as in the case of Belfast, where over 40,000 men joined up and over 4,000 perished. Sometimes the effort to collect and record the names was undermined by delays in erecting the memorials themselves. The County Antrim memorial at the Knockagh overlooking Carrickfergus was not completed until the late 1930s, as was the Newry memorial. Another factor was expense. Carving names, or using bronze lettering, was not cheap, and in some places there was just not the money to include names on the memorial. In Nenagh (Co. Tipperary), for example, there was scarcely enough money to put up the memorial, let alone add any names.

The arrangement of the names, however, does vary from place to place. First was the question of whether everyone who served, as well as those who fell, should be included. As already noted with Belfast, one consideration was numbers, and it was hardly practical to name all 40,000 on the city memorial. There was a debate in some places in Great Britain as to whether some distinction should be made between volunteers and conscripts. Certainly those who had gone willingly should be commemorated, but why, argued some, should those who were forced to go? From the beginning of 1916 compulsory military service was applied in England, Scotland and Wales, and although it was threatened in Ireland (with dire political consequences) it was never introduced here. This is the reason why some Irish war memorials say ‘In grateful memory to the following men who willingly served…’ No English memorial can say willingly if it includes everyone who served during the war. In general, big places, with lots of names to record only listed the dead, while smaller places frequently included all those who served as well.

Then there was the matter of what information should be included with the names, and how they should be arranged. Some memorials include the branch of the services (regiment, ship etc), with rank and decorations; some just list names. The admirable principle of the Imperial War Graves Commission of equal treatment of all, whatever rank they might have been, was not always followed in domestic war memorials, where officers were often given priority in death, as they had enjoyed in life. In Groomsport, for instance, the four men who were killed were listed in alphabetical order, but those who served and survived were carefully arranged in order of rank. In neighbouring Donaghadee, the names are solely in alphabetical order, with a separate section only for the men from ‘Millisle District’. But why, one wonders, were the Donaghadee men treated more equally than the Groomsport ones? In Stewartstown (Co. Tyrone) the names are given in rank order, but also arranged by unit. Here most of the men served with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (the local regiment), but there were other Irish regiments, such as the Connaught Rangers and the Royal Irish Fusiliers, as well as one man who served with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. The Ballycastle memorial divides the men into units, but lists them strictly by alphabetical order within each section.

Almost all the names on these war memorials are those of men, but there are a few women’s names to be found. There are two hundred men and two nurses named on the Dungannon war memorial, which, very unusually, is dedicated ‘In memory of the soldiers and nurses of Dungannon who gave their lives for freedom and humanity in the Great War’. There is one memorial exclusively dedicated to nurses, which stands in St Anne’s Church of Ireland Cathedral in Donegall Street, Belfast. This lists eighteen sisters and staff nurses of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service who lost their lives in the war. Women, of course, were much more likely to be bereaved than to lose their lives themselves. Pictures of Remembrance Services in the 1920s are often dominated by the widows, mothers and orphans of the dead. Women frequently took a major part in raising money for war memorials, a fact specifically noted on the Clogher (Co. Tyrone) memorial, which states that it had been ‘erected by fellow countrymen and women’. Women are represented, too, in the City of Derry Guildhall where there is a magnificent series of stained-glass windows commemorating all the Irish Divisions and infantry regiments which fought in the war. If you look closely, you will read that ‘these windows were erected by the Women Voluntary Warworkers in Londonderry in proud and affectionate remembrance of the men and women of this city who, responding to the call of King & Empire, served or made the supreme sacrifice during the Great War 1914-1918’.

Some memorials give slightly different dates than might be expected for the First World War. Most say 1914-1918, but some say 1914-1919. When the war ended on 11 November 1918, it was technically just an ‘armistice’, that is to say, a temporary cessation of hostilities. But the war with Germany did not formally end until the peace treaty was signed in June 1919, thus, for some, the First World War was actually ‘1914-19’. The peace treaty with Turkey was not finally signed until 1923, but no memorials say ‘The Great War, 1914-23’!

The inscriptions on the memorials are worth studying as well, for they can well give us an insight into why (or why people thought) all those many thousands of Irish people died in the First World War. In Ballywalter, Comber and Newtownards (all Co. Down) they died for ‘King and Country’; it was just ‘Country’ in Bray (Co. Wicklow). Sometimes the inscriptions are in Latin. ‘Pro Deo et Patria’ (For God and Country) says the Belfast Cenotaph, while in Bangor it says; Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – ‘sweet and proper it is to die for one’s country – a sentiment which might raise a few eyebrows today. In Castlebellingham the men died for ‘Ireland’ and in Cork ‘for the freedom of small nations’. There are only a few ideals: in Ballycastle it is ‘freedom and justice’; in Downpatrick (Co. Down) they died for ‘others’; and in Lisburn (Co. Antrim) and Portadown (Co. Armagh) they died ‘that we might live’. The most common inscriptions, however, omit any specific object: most of the men appear not to have died for any specific reason, that is to say, they simply ‘died’, or ‘laid down their lives’, or ‘made the supreme sacrifice’. It is worth thinking about why there might have been this vagueness about the actual purpose of the war when people were putting up memorials in 1920s.

Lurgan is one of the places where there was a difference of opinion about what the war memorial should be. Early in 1919 the Lurgan Technical School management committee proposed building a new technical school as a memorial, a strikingly opportunistic suggestion, since if a new school were actually necessary, then it would have been proper for the cost to be met out of existing public funds. The local branch of the Irish federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers – one of a number of ex-service organisations which existed before the British Legion emerged as the biggest group – suggested a public swimming pool, an idea which was taken up by the local Winders’ and Weavers’ Union. Another suggestion was a cottage hospital. After a public meeting in mid-April 1919, however, it was announced that the memorial would be a monument in the Mall. A war memorial committee was formed and began raising the estimated sum required of £3,000. But then, for whatever reason, the whole scheme ground to a halt, and in May 1921 it was announced that (amazingly) subscriptions were being returned ‘owing to a lack of agreement’ on the design the memorial should take.

In 1923 the question of a Lurgan memorial was revived at a public meeting, and it was decided to try again. There was quite a lot of embarrassment that Lurgan had not yet done anything to honour its dead, while other places, even the little local village of Dollingstown, had got on with it. Indeed, at the dedication of the Dollingstown memorial in July 1923, the absence of any memorial, or even any plans for one, in Lurgan was particularly remarked upon. Local pride, therefore, evidently played a part in the eventual construction of the memorial. By this stage another difficulty had been overcome, as the great majority of local opinion had swung behind the idea of a purely symbolic memorial. One person who had previously supported the idea of a cottage hospital had now changed his mind. ‘While the other schemes were admirable,’ he said, ‘a public monument would be to everyone’s favour, as it would be a constant reminder of the sacrifices of the fallen’.4

Over the next twelve months or so, £2,300 was raised for the memorial fund, and a sculptor based in London, Mr L. S. Merrifield, was appointed to design the monument. Merrifield came up with an idea for a small ‘temple’, which would be surmounted with a life-sized figure of a soldier. The temple was to be hexagonal (six-sided) and contain a central pillar on which would be inscribed the names of the fallen. The war memorial committee rejected the idea of a soldier and asked for a ‘winged figure of Victory’ to be substituted. Merrifield obliged with a female figure, holding aloft a palm frond in her right hand. Having rejected the soldier, the memorial committee now found the Victory figure too peaceable, and asked Merrifield if he could put a sword in her right hand, with a circular laurel wreath in her left. The artist, perhaps tired of the successive changes-of-mind, dug his heels in and stuck with Victory as he had originally envisaged.5

In the programme for the unveiling of the memorial (on 23 May 1928) Merrifield described his design as follows:

The Temple is surmounted by a life size winged figure in bronze representing the spirit of Victorious Peace alighting on the earth, her head crowned with bays, her right hand holding aloft a palm branch, while the left is extended in token of blessing.

Although the figure is evidently an angel, the use of bays and the palm branch is a reference to Classical Greek and Roman tradition. The bay tree, laurus nobilis, was the tree of the god Apollo, and believed to be a protection against thunder and lightning. Bay laves were used in Roman times to mark victory, and there was a custom of crowning victorious generals with bays. Palms were used in the ancient world as a symbol of resolution overcoming calamity, and in Rome victorious Gladiators were given a branch of a palm tree. There is, too, a Christian link, with Palm Sunday, and the use of palm fronds to mark Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. As with war memorials, here you can find art, history, Classical symbolism and Christian tradition all combined.

The wording on the memorial also reflects the sorts of debates already noted about inscriptions. Keeping with democratic ideas of equal treatment, it was decided that the list of names of the fallen would be in strict alphabetical order, without either rank or regiment. But notions of hierarchy were evidently hard to put away altogether as it was also proposed that the overall inscription should read: ‘In grateful memory of the officers [my emphasis] and men of Lurgan and district’. In the end, however, the democrats prevailed and the final wording was settled simply as: ‘In grateful memory of the Men of Lurgan’.

In the 1920s and after, although in fact more Catholic Irishmen served (and died) in the British services during the First World War than Protestants, commemoration and remembrance ceremonies, especially in the newly-established Northern Ireland, became quite distinctly Protestant and Unionist. One of the interesting aspects about Lurgan is that a special effort was made to ensure that the names of Catholics were included on the memorial. Catholic ex-servicemen in Lurgan, moreover, were rather quicker off the mark in the matter of memorials than the official war memorial committees. In November 1924 a ‘magnificent marble altar rail’ was erected in the parish church, St Peter’s, by Lurgan Catholic ex-servicemen ‘in memory of their fallen comrades’.6 But this memorial no longer exists. As a result of liturgical changes following Vatican II, the altar rail was subsequently removed.

The names on the Lurgan memorial can themselves be researched, though the absence of regimental names or other identifying details can make this quite time-consuming. The best place to start is the extraordinary Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) website (address given below), which aims to list all British Commonwealth service personnel who died in the World Wars and some other conflicts. On the memorial there are, for example, three men named Hobbs: ‘A., D. and R’. Using the CWGC site reveals that these were Andrew, David and Robert Hobbs, all of whom died on the terrible first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916. All three were in the same unit, the 9th battalion of the Royal Irish Fusiliers (part of the 36th (Ulster) Division). We also learn that David and Robert’s regimental numbers were 14305 and 14302. Since the numbers were allocated as the men enlisted, it is clear that the two must have joined up together. Andrew, whose regimental number was 14259, evidently joined up a short time before the other two. What the website does not tell us, though, is that Andrew, David and Robert were brothers, literally ‘brothers-in-arms’, who joined up together and died together. A fourth brother, Herbert, also served in the 9th Royal Irish Fusiliers, but, thankfully, he survived, albeit wounded. The CWGC database also provides information about where the dead are buried, or, if they have no known grave, on what monument their names are recorded. All three Hobbs brothers fall into the latter category, and their names are carved on the vast Thiepval ‘Memorial to the Missing’ on the Somme battlefield. The Lurgan war memorial, therefore, is the only real ‘headstone’ they have.

Behind the plain list of names on this memorial (as on others) there are many, many individual stories to be uncovered. Some of these men, for example, had emigrated to Canada, Australia or New Zealand before the war, then come back to Europe (though perhaps not to Lurgan) and now lie forever in France or Belgium. ‘Ruddell, S.’, is Sidford Ruddell, a corporal in the 28th Battalion, Canadian Infantry (Manitoba Regiment), son of Nelson and Hannah Ruddell of Laurel Mount, Lurgan. ‘Leathem, J. B.’ is James Balfour Leathem, a private in the 42nd Battalion Australian Infantry, and ‘son of Joseph and Ellen Leathem, Garlan Avenue, Lurgan’. ‘McMurray, R. H.’, is Sergeant Richard McMurray of the 3rd New Zealand Rifle Brigade, whose parents lived in Lurgan, and who died in August 1918, almost within sight of the war’s end. Most of this information comes from the CWGC website, but for British Empire troops, it can be supplemented by searching databases in Canada and Australia (see below for details).

Another useful source is a publication called Soldiers Died in the Great War 1914-1919, which was first published just after the First World War (in 80 parts, by regiment or other equivalent formation), listing everyone who had died in British Army formations. For every entry, it aimed to include the person’s place of birth, as well as that of enlistment; regimental number; rank; cause of death (‘killed in action’ or ‘died of wounds’); and location of death (such as ‘France and Flanders’ or ‘Gallipoli’). The printed version (illustrated here) is quite difficult to use, as the names are further arranged by battalion, which means that if you need know the regiment (and, ideally, the battalion) a particular person served in to find their entry. Both of these can be discovered from the CWGC database. Recently, however, a version of Soldiers Died in the Great War has been published in CD-ROM, which makes it much easier to use.

Some war memorials are actual books. After the First World War, the collection and careful recording for posterity of the names of men and women who had died (and sometimes also those who had served) was very widespread indeed. Institutions, especially schools and colleges, but also sporting clubs and commercial firms, gathered names together and published them in books, as well as placing them on permanent, fixed memorials. The greatest of these in Ireland is Ireland’s Memorial Records, a magnificent series of eight volumes which lists what it describes as the 49,435 ‘known dead’, ‘being the names of Irishmen who fell in the Great European War, 1914-1918’. From 1919 onwards over £50,000 was raised for an ‘Irish National War Memorial’, which eventually was built at Islandbridge along the River Liffey in what was then the western outskirts of Dublin. In the early 1920s, however, £5,000 was spent on collecting the names of the dead and publishing them in Ireland’s Memorial Records. Only one hundred copies of the set were printed ‘for distribution through the principal libraries of the country’. One of these precious sets is preserved for posterity in the Ulster Historical Foundation library, and there are others in, for example, the National Library of Ireland, and the municipal libraries in Belfast and Dublin.

The volumes themselves are works of art. Their printing, decoration and binding was ‘carried out by Irish artists and workers of the highest reputation and efficiency’. The most remarkable feature of the volumes are the ‘beautiful symbolical borders’ designed by the artist Harry Clarke, best-known for his work in stained glass. Clarke provided a title page and seven page borders, repeated throughout the volumes, which ‘incorporate Celtic and Art deco motifs, battle scenes in silhouette, medals, insignia and religious and mythological, all drawn in pen and ink’.7 The pages contain an unexpected mixture of ‘art’ and modern war, allegorical figures and Celtic-type designs side by side with battleships, tanks, planes and machine guns.

Ireland’s Memorial Records contains much useful information for the family historian: name, army regimental number; rank, unit, date and circumstances of death (usually ‘killed in action’ or ‘died of wounds’), and, in many cases, place of birth. Investigation of this last information reveals that many of the men included in the volume were not born in Ireland, nor were they apparently of Irish extraction. What the compilers did was to include every man who died while serving with an Irish unit, whether he himself was ‘Irish’ or not. The majority of those who served in the First World War, served in infantry formations. The Irish units were the Irish Guards, which recruited from all over the island, and eight other Irish infantry regiments of the line, which (theoretically at least) recruited from specific areas in Ireland. There is a list of these at the end showing the regimental areas. During the First World War, however, because of shortfalls in recruiting in Ireland many non-Irishmen were drafted into the battalions. But these men find their place alongside ‘native’ Irishmen’ in Ireland’s Memorial Records. In addition, the compilers included anyone serving in a non-Irish formation (including the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force) who appeared to have some Irish link. So the 50,000 or so (which is often cited as the ‘official’ number of Ireland’s First World War dead) in Ireland’s Memorial Records includes many who are not strictly ‘Irish’. Among the records, too, are those of Irish-born men serving with British Empire forces, such as the Canadian Army or ‘ANZAC’, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The actual number of ‘Irish war dead’, therefore, is probably closer to 30,000 than 50,000.

In recent years some edited lists of local war dead have been published. Robert Thompson has prepared two fascinating and useful volumes: Bushmills Heroes, 1914-1918 and Ballymoney Heroes, 1914-1918. The Bushmills volume contains details of 96 men, arranged chronologically, while the Ballymoney one has over 300 names. Both are very well illustrated and give thumbnail sketches of the individuals concerned. Thompson was prompted to prepare the Ballymoney list when he discovered that there were no names at all on the Ballymoney war memorial. A similar reason lies behind the preparation of an important listing of Newry’s War Dead, prepared by Colin Moffett. This impressive volume lists 373 individuals from the Newry area who died in both world wars, and, unlike most conventional war memorials, includes merchant mariners and civilian casualties, as well as service personnel. Newry’s War Dead is, in fact, an admirable model for any locality to follow.

1. A useful introduction to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which includes an outline guide to its cemeteries and memorials in T. A. Edwin Gibson & G. Kingsley Ward, Courage Remembered (London, 1989).
2. Irish war memorials are discussed in my essay, ‘The Great War in modern Irish memory’, in T.G. Fraser & Keith Jeffery, Men, Women and War (Dublin, 1993), pp 136-57, and my book, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000).
3. See the marvellous book on New Zealand: Chris Maclean & Jock Phillips, The Sorrow and the Pride: New Zealand War Memorials (Wellington, 1990).
4. Lurgan Mail, 28 July 1923. I am grateful to my former student, Mr Aidan Barry, for researching the Lurgan war memorial for me.
5. The story of the Lurgan memorial can be followed in the war memorial committee minutes preserved in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI, LA 51/16AB/2).
6. Lurgan Mail, 22 Nov. 1924.
7. Quotations from Irish National War Memorial, Ireland’s Memorial Records (Dublin, 1923), and Nicola Gordon Bowe, The Life and Work of Harry Clarke (Dublin, 1989).

Questions to ask: Where is the memorial? Is the placing of particular importance? Has it always been in the same place? If not, why was it moved?

Sources of information: old maps; the local council; ex-servicemen; the local British Legion.

Questions to ask: What size is the memorial? What materials is it made of? Is it a figure, and, if so, what sort of figure: a soldier, a symbolic angel, or what? If a soldier, is he in a particular uniform, and what stance is he in? If another kind of symbolic figure, is it an angel, or a symbol of ‘Victory’, or something else? What other details can you see: swords, crosses, palm fronds, wreaths, etc? What might they represent? Sometimes there are bronze plaques with illustrations: what do they show? Is there any indication who designed the memorial?

Sources of information: site visit; use your eyes! Sometimes the base of a statue is signed by the sculptor; occasionally there is a plaque naming the designer.

Questions to ask: what is the main inscription? Does it include both World Wars? What dates does it give for the First World War (1914-18 or 1914-19), and why should 1919 be given? Does it give any hint why the men died? Is it in English, or Latin, or any other language? (There is at least one Irish war memorial with an inscription in Irish.) Is the inscription a quotation from some famous author?

Sources of information: site visit (again); check inscriptions in a Dictionary of Quotations (some give translations of Latin phrases).

Questions to ask: how are the names arranged—alphabetically, by rank, by unit, or a combination of these? Have medals (such as the Victoria Cross (VC) or Military Cross (MC)) been noted? What does the arrangement of the names say about social attitudes of the time and place? Are there any women? What more can you find out about the people named?

Sources of information: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, and other sources mentioned below (‘Some sources for military family history’), are good for further information about individuals.

Questions to ask: who organised the designing and funding of the memorial? What did it cost? When was it put up and unveiled? Who attended the unveiling? What sorts of speeches were made at the dedication, and at annual Remembrance services? Sources of information: local newspapers are generally very good for this sort of thing (Local Studies Libraries often have microfilm copies of old newspapers). A good way to find out when a memorial was erected is to look at reports of the annual Armistice Day (11 November) ceremonies from 1919 onwards. Sooner or later you will come across a mention of the ‘new’ war memorial. If you are lucky, it will have been dedicated on or near Armistice Day, otherwise you may have to work backwards from that date. For Northern Ireland memorials you can also check reports of services on 1 July, the anniversary of the battle of the Somme, which should help further to narrow down the date of the memorial. There was a weekly magazine called the Irish Builder which in the 1920s regularly reported progress on and the erection of war memorials. The minutes of some war memorial committees have survived in the Local Authority records kept at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

Once you have worked on the history of one memorial, you can begin to do the same for memorials in neighbouring towns and villages. Then you can compare and contrast them. Why did different places choose to commemorate their war dead in different ways?