Introduction

Summary

The memory of the Great War, as a subject for academic investigation, is now receiving a great deal of attention. The genre is relatively new, but almost as much work is now being done in this area as on aspects of the military and political conduct of the conflict itself. The most recent works of historians such as Jay Winter, Adrian Gregory and Alex King have attempted to show the massive public response to the war in the years that followed its conclusion. They have demonstrated that the memory of the war was constructed by official attempts to orchestrate remembrance andby genuine popular inspira- tion. Jay Winter's work, for example, has stressed the roles of both institutional religion andthe strictly uncanonical practice of spiritualism as ways in which ordinary people sought to come to terms with bereavement and loss. Though these were seemingly unreconcilable developments the result was the same - an intensified sensation of communion with the dead. Both Winter and Gregory have also shown that the effect of the various forms of commemoration was usually to allow grief to flow but at the same time to buttress a socially conservative message. Memorialisation tended to stress that the men had not died in vain, that it was the duty of the living to con- tinue to make sacrifices in order to be worthy of the dead. In the troubled times of the twenties andthirties this was a powerful way of maintaining the continuity andquiescence of British society. Thus, whatever the intention of the forms of remembrance, the overwhelming result was to stimulate and maintain a desire to remember and revere the dead.

The aim of this book is to place these conclusions within a particular, and indeed peculiar, locality. Both Winter and Gregory use a broad brush covering the entire nation, andin Winter's case the empire andEurope too. It is the intention here to test the established thinking on the memory and commemoration of the Great War in Britain by looking in detail at a geographically homogeneous but socially andeconomically diverse location - the City, East London and metropolitan Essex. The intensive nature of this study has allowed for an extremely detailed investigation into how memorials were planned and funded, how Armistice Day rituals developed and how those rituals changed during the twenties and thirties.