Epilogue: Contribution and Cost

Summary

In 2011, a company specialising in organising London events planned to erect a large marquee and hold a series of banquets and parties, presumably for people working in the City, on the run up to Christmas, in Trinity Square Gardens, Tower Hill, London. On one side of these gardens lies Sir Edwin Lutyens’s memorial to 35,000 fishermen and merchant seamen killed in the Great War, who have no grave but the sea. Behind it is the sunken garden, which records the names of those seafarers who died during the Second World War on Atlantic and Antarctic Convoys, and nearby is a memorial to sailors lost in the more recent Falklands conflict. The idea of using such a place as a site for drinking and entertainment created a degree of controversy and indignation in the press and amongst some sections of the public, and was eventually abandoned. That it was ever mooted tells us something of the way in which the contribution of fishermen and indeed many other non-mainstream seafarers who served in one way or other outside of the mainstream Senior Service has been to such a great extent forgotten. One cannot imagine such plans would ever have even been mooted for somewhere like the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the Commonwealth war grave cemeteries in France, or many other national war memorials.

This collective amnesia when it comes to the role of the fishermen and other groups was not initially evident. Immediately after the war and in the first years which followed, the crucial role that the fishermen played was often acknowledged by key figures in the country's political and military establishment. Moreover, a small number of books highlighting their activities in the Great War were published, which told much of the scale and scope of their contribution. The new navy known as the Auxiliary Patrol had been created very quickly: in no more than a few months at the beginning of the war. It also was dispersed and disbanded very rapidly after the return of peace. Few fishermen of the day later put pen to paper to reflect on their wartime experiences.