'Gave His Life for the Empire': Memory, Memorials, and Identity in the British Empire after the First World War
Abstract
This dissertation examines the construction of personal memorials after the First World War across the British Empire nations of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, to understand how individuals sought to make their own memorial to remember their loved one killed in the conflict. In comparison to other studies on the construction of national or other community memorials, this dissertation explores how individuals accepted or rejected dominant discourses in creating their own memorials that spoke to how they remembered the war. It is based on a large database of more than 2,000 private memorials to individuals that were erected in the nations being examined. National registries of war memorials created by museums, archives, and government agencies were mined to create the database.
The construction of personal memorials also revealed cultural influences that impacted the design of the memorials. The Empire governments’ decision to create and support the Imperial War Graves Commission that refused to repatriate the bodies and regulated the design of cemeteries and headstones, encouraged individuals to find their own ways of commemorating the war dead to meet their needs. The role of mourning and religion in commemoration reveals that these personal memorials were designed to function as sites for mourning at home and therefore fulfilled the necessary need of a grave site that was inaccessible.
In examining the design, language, and messages of personal memorials, we are able to see that rather than reject the messages of the state about the war, individuals used them to make sense of death of family and friends as a way to give their deaths some meaning. Using the Victorian mourning concept of the ‘good death,’ personal memorials strove to project the image that the soldiers died a good death in religious and secular terms in the use of religious symbols, literary quotations, and nationalist language. Drawing from the Anglican Church, British poets, and imperialist ideology, personal memorials reflected the dominance of British worldviews on commemoration and remembrance of the First World War.