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TimesBristol

Celebrating our proud history and keeping your memories alive

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More memorialsJust what didhappen to thisone at St Philips?

Pages 3 & 4

Page 8 Poppies:The scarlet flowerof remembrance

This coming Sunday is Remembrance Sunday,and next year will see a massive nationwideprogramme of events to commemorate the 100thanniversary of the outbreak of the First World War.

This week, we are devoting the whole of BristolTimes to these two themes, with articles on someof Bristol’s war memorials, the origin of the poppyas a symbol of remembrance, and a look at what isplanned locally for 2014 – and how you and yourfamily can participate.

Page 5 Laughterfrom the trencheswith Ole Bill!

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2 Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013 3Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

IT is a boiling hot Sunday afternoon in June1932, and 50,000 people are packed into thecentre of Bristol. They have come to wit-ness the unveiling of a memorial to the6,000 Bristolians killed in the Great War.

It’s nearly 14 years since Armistice Day, buttime has not blunted the crowd’s emotions.Before the day is out there are 250 cases offainting – some caused by the heat, but others bythe tension of the occasion.

Among the spectators are the many mothers,wives, sisters and daughters of those killed. Butone woman in particular has a special con-nection to the cenotaph – she designed it.

The winners of the competition for this sig-nificant work, universally (then and now) de-scribed as Messrs Heathman & Blacker are, infact, Mr Harry Heathman and Miss EvelineBlacker – one of the earliest female architects inthe country, and Bristol’s first.

By 1932 it was rather late in the day to beputting up a war memorial – Bristol was almostthe last city in the country to do so.

A small committee was set up soon afterhostilities ceased in 1918, but nothing mater-ialised, and it wasn’t until 1925 that planningstarted again. In many places the question ofwhat sort of memorial should be erected washotly debated.

In Bristol it soon became clear that not enoughmoney was going to be raised to build homes orhospitals for veterans or the dependents ofthose killed. So the Bristol War Memorial Com-mittee decided to concentrate on a symbolicmonument, and started to look for a site.

A number were suggested, including theDowns, the Horsefair, and Old Market, but all,for various reasons, were considered unsuit-able. Three were given close consideration:College Green in front of Bristol Cathedral; theTramways Centre, which was then used for theannual Remembrance Services; and the north-ern end of Colston Avenue where the RiverFrome had been covered over in 1893.

Throughout the late 1920s questions of‘wh e re ? ’ and ‘wh at ? ’ continued to be brought upin both the Council House and letters to thepress. But, in November 1929, the committeedefinitely concluded that, probably owing to thelength of time that had elapsed since the end ofthe war, large sums were not going to be forth-coming from the Bristol public.

By now, numerous memorials had been con-structed in various districts of the city, as wellas in schools, offices, and factories, and theremust have been a feeling that this memorial wastoo late.

In June 1930, the committee presented itsreport to the council. It recommended ColstonAvenue as fulfilling the requirements of prox-imity to the city centre, easy access, and havingthe space to host the annual Remembrance Days e r v i c e.

The area was a bit of a mess at the time, but itwas hoped that placing the memorial therewould lead to its transformation. The reportwas approved, and the council agreed to bear

the cost of clearing and preparing the site.At this point, the campaign was taken up by

the Bristol Times and Mirror and the BristolEvening Times and Echo. They raised justunder £1,700 from readers and, in January 1931,a competition for local architects was launchedin the Bristol Evening Times, “it being theexpress wish of the Bristol War Memorial Com-mittee and of the people of Bristol themselvesthat a Bristol architect should design the me-morial”.

George Lawrence, the partner of architect SirGeorge Oatley, best known for his design of theWills Memorial Building, was appointed as-sessor. Lawrence short-listed three entries fromthe 18 received and at the end of May they werepublished in the Bristol Evening Times and puton display at the art gallery in Queen’s Road forthe public to vote on.

Charles Roy Beecroft was placed third, Ad-rian E Powell second, and the people of Bristolchose Eveline and Harry’s design as the one tohonour their “sons and daughters who gavetheir lives in the Great War”.

All three designs were influenced by architectEdwin Lutyens’ cenotaph – an empty tomb ormonument erected in honour of a deceasedperson whose body is elsewhere – in Whitehallin London.

This had been unveiled in 1920, and a ceno-taph subsequently became quite a commonchoice in many towns and cities. This wasbecause it has no particular religious or otherassociation, but commemorates all the fallen,irrespective of creed, rank, or sex.

Lawrence might have decided, in view of theamount of time that had passed, that the designshould not be controversial. Figurative sculp-

ture could have been too divisive, or evenshocking, for a general memorial. An abstractdesign had less potential to be so, but could alsobe more powerful.

Heathman and Blacker’s cenotaph, faced withPortland Stone, is just over six metres high andstands on a single step on a wide base of threesteps, with four rectangular blocks at thecorners. On each main face is a large stonelaurel wreath over a bronze sword, which wereoriginally gilded. Just above the base of themonument, a frieze, carved with 12 circularreliefs of regimental insignia, runs around allfour sides, and on each short side are bronzecasts of Bristol’s coat of arms. On top is asarcophagus with consoles at each end, andfasces (a bound bundle of rods symbolisingstrength through unity) lying on each side.

On the south side, a bronze plaque with twodownward-pointing torches is inscribed withlines from the hymn, O Valiant Hearts. Thehy m n’s patriotic and chivalric words were writ-ten by John Stanhope Arkwright, and publishedin a collection called The Supreme Sacrifice andOther Poems in Time of War in 1919.

The Reverend Charles Harris set them tomusic and, although Gustav Holst and VaughanWilliams subsequently composed different set-tings, Harris’ music remains the favourite forremembrance services around the countryevery November.

The unveiling ceremony of the Bristol ceno-taph commenced at 3.30pm on June 26, 1932,with the singing of this hymn.

However, perhaps the words on the north faceof the cenotaph were of more significance in1932, by which time Adolf Hitler, who wasconsiderably affected by his and Germany’sexperiences in the Great War and its aftermath,had begun his rise to power.

Two years earlier, Alderman Robert Lyne, ofthe council’s War Memorial Committee, haddefended memorials against the accusation thatthey glorified war. He wrote that “the men whodied and who were remembered by the me-morial had died that mankind might learn tolive at peace”.

The British Legion asked to use Lyne’s wordson the cenotaph, and he later wrote that he wasproud that they “may live after me”.

In Roman capitals on a bronze plaque, there-fore, is: “SACRED TO THE MEMORY / OFB R I S T O L’S SONS AND / DAUGHTERS, WHOMADE / THE SUPREME SACRIFICE.” Andbelow, in smaller capitals: “THEY DIED THATMANKIND MAY LEARN TO LIVE INP E AC E . ”

Seven years later, world conflict eruptedagain and sadly the cenotaph, or “Bristol’sStone of Memories”, as the Bristol Evening Postcalled it, would also become a memorial to thosethousands of Bristolians killed in the SecondWorld War.

� Dr Sarah Whittingham is writing a bookabout Eveline Dew Blacker (1884-1956) of Clif-ton, and would be pleased to hear from anyonewho has information about Eveline’s life orwork. Email: s a ra h . wh i t t i n g h a m 1 @btinter net.com. For more on Dr Whittingham’swork, see w w w. s a ra h wh i t t i n g h a m . c o. u k .

Nowadays, the cenotaph in Bristol’s city centre is oneof the principal focuses of Remembrance events. Yetours was almost the last major civic monument to bebuilt in Britain. Dr Sarah Whittingham tells the story ofhow it was finally built after seemingly endless delays.

� The Bishop of Bristol looks on as Field Marshal Sir William Birdwood unveils the memorial(Bristol Record Office Reference No 17563). Left, how an illustrator for the newly founded BristolEvening Post saw it. The spirit of a dead Tommy looks on as the monument is dedicated

A MONUMENTALACHIEVEMENT

The wording on the bronze plaque

Sacred to the memory of Bristol’s sons and daughters, whomade the supreme sacrifice. They died that mankind may learnto live in peace.

“

City is full of permanent remindersof the sacrifices made by BristoliansEugene Byrne looks at the stories behind some of Bristol’s other war memorials

BRISTOL was late in building its maincivic war memorial, much later thanmost other UK cities. But, by the time itwas unveiled, there were alreadyplenty of other memorials in com-

munities, schools and workplaces around thec i t y.

An estimated 55,000 Bristolians, from en-thusiastic early volunteers to reluctant laterconscripts, had served in the armed forces inthe First World War. The overwhelming ma-jority of these had been in the army, and mosthad been in the trenches at some point.

The precise number of Bristol’s dead is un-clear, even today, mostly because manymen signed up, or were drafted, in differentplaces to where they had been born, or werel iv i n g .

There were several army units which werestrongly identified with a particular town orcity. For example, the 12th battalion of theGloucester Regiment, known as “Bristol’sOwn”, was made up almost entirely of earlyBristol volunteers. This was only one of anumber of infantry and artillery units whichwere strongly Bristolian.

But many Bristol men served in units whichhad no Bristol connections at all. Several hun-dred who volunteered in Bristol in the first daysof the war were sent, believe it or not, to an Irishregiment – the Leinsters.

It may be that research in the coming yearswill finally be able to pin down the exactnumber of Bristolians who lost their lives.

What we do know is that of all the men in theforces, just over one in ten never returned.Those serving in infantry and field artilleryunits ran a higher risk of death, or seriousi n j u r y.

The single most dangerous job on the WesternFront was that of a junior commissioned officer,a lieutenant or subaltern, in the infantry.

As soon as the war ended, Bristolians starteddiscussing the best way of remembering thedead. As across the rest of the country, therewere two schools of thought.

One group thought there should be monu-ments to serve as a permanent reminder of thesacrifices that had been made.

The opposing view was that monuments werea waste of money. The dead were best re-membered, they said, with things that would beof use to the living.

Many communities in Britain still have vil-lage halls built to commemorate the dead of theFirst World War. A few places built hospitals,some of which still survive; there’s a goodexample in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, fori n s t a n c e.

Bristol had some of these “utilitarian” p ro -jects. The best-known is, of course, the Me-morial Stadium, built to commemorate thoseBristol rugby enthusiasts who had been lost inthe war.

Bristol’s Homoeopathic Hospital is arguablyanother, although this was built in memory of asingle war loss. Captain Bruce Melville Willswas killed in 1915 and his father, Walter MelvilleWills (part of the Wills tobacco dynasty) coveredthe entire £130,000 cost of the hospital, whichwas opened by Princess Helena Victoria on May20, 1925.

For the most part, though, the dead wereremembered with memorials, most of whichsurvive to this day.

Here are the stories behind just a few of them.Bear in mind that these are just some of thelarger memorials in the Bristol area.

If your local one has not been included, andyou know a little about its background story,please write in and tell us about it.

Arnos Vale CemeteryB r i t a i n’s military medical services were ex-

tremely efficient during the war. There is onefamous story of a local woman in 1914 who flatlyrefused to believe that her husband was in aBristol hospital because there simply hadn’tbeen enough time for him to join his regiment,travel to France, get wounded and be broughtback again.

The chances of survival for men wounded onthe Western Front were excellent if they couldbe got to a hospital back in England. Bristol hadseveral war hospitals, some of which set stand-ards which were widely copied elsewhere.

Nonetheless, given the sheer scale of cas-ualties, many men did die in Bristol between1914 and 1919, of complications arising fromwounds, from surgery, and from infections,notably the flu epidemic of 1918-19.

Many of these men – whose numbers includedCanadians, Australians, New Zealanders andSouth Africans as well as Britons – were buriedat Arnos Vale.

At the war’s end, the Bristol branch of the RedCross raised the money for a memorial at a partof the cemetery known as “Soldiers’ Cor ner”.

This large and dignified monument, abov e,was unveiled by the Duchess of Beaufort onFriday, October 21, 1921. The attending dig-nitaries included the Lord Mayor and Sheriff ofBristol and representatives of the military andvarious voluntary organisations as well as arepresentative from the Australian High Com-mission.

There is a guided tour of Arnos Vale’s wargraves led by Charles Booth, on SaturdayNovember 9, at 1.30pm. Tickets £5 (no con-cessions), available from the cemetery gift shop,or by calling 0117 971 9117 extn 214. Seewww.ar nosvale.org.uk.

Downend Scout memorialAt the corner of Wester-

leigh and Badminton Roadsin Downend is one of themost unusual memorials inBritain, one of only a handfulerected in memory of formerlocal boy scouts who died inthe First World War.

When it was unveiled onSunday, April 18, 1920, it wasthe first of its kind in thecountry. It was made by alocal mason named Dawson.

The first name on the me-morial is that of PhilipAlexander, who was curate of Downend churchin 1909 when he was founder and first Scout-master of the Downend troop.

The Reverend Alexander died aboard thecruiser HMS Hampshire when she was sunk by

a mine when carrying General Kitchener on adiplomatic mission to Russia in 1916. Six otherlocal scouts are named on the monument.

The money for the memorial was raised in asingle day by women volunteers organised bythe wife of Downend’s new Scoutmaster.

Fishponds ParkThe memorial in Fish-

ponds Park is one of themost striking in the west ofEngland. Paid for by theresidents of Fishponds – itcost £615 – it was cast by afirm named Humphriesand Oakes and made from alife model posing at theirLawrence Hill studio.

The figure of a British/Dominion infantrymanappears to be going throughthe motions of cheering vic-tory, but with no real en-thusiasm. He has a gaunt, hollow face and thethousand-yard stare of someone who’s seen toom u ch .

It was unveiled in a ceremony attended by theLord Mayor and Lt Col Daniel Burges VC onMarch 19, 1921.

Clifton CollegeThe memorial gate, abov e, at the college was

designed by Charles Holden, a man whose namehas been much in the local news recently onaccount of the Cathedral School’s controversialplans to put its new Free School in the CentralLibrary, which was also designed by Holden.

During the First World War, he served withthe London Ambulance Column and later be-came one of the Imperial War Graves Com-m i s s i o n’s principal architects, designingcemeteries and cemetery buildings in Belgiumand France.

His gatehouse for Clifton College is a me-morial to the former members of the school whohad been killed in the war.

The memorial arch, or “Mem Arch” as Cliftonpupils call it, was unveiled by Clifton College

old boy Field Marshal Earl Haig in July, 1922.It is inscribed with the names of 578 Old

Cliftonians who had been killed in the war. Itnow also serves as a memorial for those killed inthe Second World War as well.

Also present at the ceremony were the LordMayor, the Master of the Society of MerchantVenturers and several other prominent cit-izens, as well as several Old Cliftonians, in-cluding Sir Henry Newbolt, author of thefamous poem Vitaï Lampada.

It also featured verse by Newbolt, inscribedby Eric Gill:

From the great marshal to the last recruit,These, Clifton, were thy Self, they Spirit in

Deed,The flower of Chivalry, thy fallen fruit,And thine immortal Seed.The gatehouse is a Grade II listed building.

Pupils passing under it are supposed to do sobareheaded and not put their hands in theirp o cke t s.

Stoke BishopThe memorial at Stoke

Bishop was dedicated bythe Bishop of Bristol at aceremony on Sunday, May16, 1920, attended by severalhundred people.

The memorial, made ofStancliffe stone fromDerbyshire, originallycommemorated 38 menfrom the community whohad been killed in the GreatWar. If you look at it care-fully, you’ll see that almosthalf of the men listed heldjunior officers’ ranks. This was a reflection notsimply of the social make-up of Stoke Bishop,but also of the extremely high casualty ratesamong junior infantry officers.

The names of local men who died in theSecond World War were added later, along withthose of a soldier killed in Palestine in the late1940s, and another who fell in the Korean War.

S h i re h a m pto nThe war memorial at

Shirehampton was un-veiled on September 4,1921, by Brigadier-Generalthe Hon C.G. Bruce. TheYork stone monument cost£460 and was designed byErnest Newton R.A. Theland was donated by locallandowner Philip NapierMiles, who had also chairedthe memorial committee.

CONTINUED OVER THE PAGE

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2 Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013 3Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

IT is a boiling hot Sunday afternoon in June1932, and 50,000 people are packed into thecentre of Bristol. They have come to wit-ness the unveiling of a memorial to the6,000 Bristolians killed in the Great War.

It’s nearly 14 years since Armistice Day, buttime has not blunted the crowd’s emotions.Before the day is out there are 250 cases offainting – some caused by the heat, but others bythe tension of the occasion.

Among the spectators are the many mothers,wives, sisters and daughters of those killed. Butone woman in particular has a special con-nection to the cenotaph – she designed it.

The winners of the competition for this sig-nificant work, universally (then and now) de-scribed as Messrs Heathman & Blacker are, infact, Mr Harry Heathman and Miss EvelineBlacker – one of the earliest female architects inthe country, and Bristol’s first.

By 1932 it was rather late in the day to beputting up a war memorial – Bristol was almostthe last city in the country to do so.

A small committee was set up soon afterhostilities ceased in 1918, but nothing mater-ialised, and it wasn’t until 1925 that planningstarted again. In many places the question ofwhat sort of memorial should be erected washotly debated.

In Bristol it soon became clear that not enoughmoney was going to be raised to build homes orhospitals for veterans or the dependents ofthose killed. So the Bristol War Memorial Com-mittee decided to concentrate on a symbolicmonument, and started to look for a site.

A number were suggested, including theDowns, the Horsefair, and Old Market, but all,for various reasons, were considered unsuit-able. Three were given close consideration:College Green in front of Bristol Cathedral; theTramways Centre, which was then used for theannual Remembrance Services; and the north-ern end of Colston Avenue where the RiverFrome had been covered over in 1893.

Throughout the late 1920s questions of‘wh e re ? ’ and ‘wh at ? ’ continued to be brought upin both the Council House and letters to thepress. But, in November 1929, the committeedefinitely concluded that, probably owing to thelength of time that had elapsed since the end ofthe war, large sums were not going to be forth-coming from the Bristol public.

By now, numerous memorials had been con-structed in various districts of the city, as wellas in schools, offices, and factories, and theremust have been a feeling that this memorial wastoo late.

In June 1930, the committee presented itsreport to the council. It recommended ColstonAvenue as fulfilling the requirements of prox-imity to the city centre, easy access, and havingthe space to host the annual Remembrance Days e r v i c e.

The area was a bit of a mess at the time, but itwas hoped that placing the memorial therewould lead to its transformation. The reportwas approved, and the council agreed to bear

the cost of clearing and preparing the site.At this point, the campaign was taken up by

the Bristol Times and Mirror and the BristolEvening Times and Echo. They raised justunder £1,700 from readers and, in January 1931,a competition for local architects was launchedin the Bristol Evening Times, “it being theexpress wish of the Bristol War Memorial Com-mittee and of the people of Bristol themselvesthat a Bristol architect should design the me-morial”.

George Lawrence, the partner of architect SirGeorge Oatley, best known for his design of theWills Memorial Building, was appointed as-sessor. Lawrence short-listed three entries fromthe 18 received and at the end of May they werepublished in the Bristol Evening Times and puton display at the art gallery in Queen’s Road forthe public to vote on.

Charles Roy Beecroft was placed third, Ad-rian E Powell second, and the people of Bristolchose Eveline and Harry’s design as the one tohonour their “sons and daughters who gavetheir lives in the Great War”.

All three designs were influenced by architectEdwin Lutyens’ cenotaph – an empty tomb ormonument erected in honour of a deceasedperson whose body is elsewhere – in Whitehallin London.

This had been unveiled in 1920, and a ceno-taph subsequently became quite a commonchoice in many towns and cities. This wasbecause it has no particular religious or otherassociation, but commemorates all the fallen,irrespective of creed, rank, or sex.

Lawrence might have decided, in view of theamount of time that had passed, that the designshould not be controversial. Figurative sculp-

ture could have been too divisive, or evenshocking, for a general memorial. An abstractdesign had less potential to be so, but could alsobe more powerful.

Heathman and Blacker’s cenotaph, faced withPortland Stone, is just over six metres high andstands on a single step on a wide base of threesteps, with four rectangular blocks at thecorners. On each main face is a large stonelaurel wreath over a bronze sword, which wereoriginally gilded. Just above the base of themonument, a frieze, carved with 12 circularreliefs of regimental insignia, runs around allfour sides, and on each short side are bronzecasts of Bristol’s coat of arms. On top is asarcophagus with consoles at each end, andfasces (a bound bundle of rods symbolisingstrength through unity) lying on each side.

On the south side, a bronze plaque with twodownward-pointing torches is inscribed withlines from the hymn, O Valiant Hearts. Thehy m n’s patriotic and chivalric words were writ-ten by John Stanhope Arkwright, and publishedin a collection called The Supreme Sacrifice andOther Poems in Time of War in 1919.

The Reverend Charles Harris set them tomusic and, although Gustav Holst and VaughanWilliams subsequently composed different set-tings, Harris’ music remains the favourite forremembrance services around the countryevery November.

The unveiling ceremony of the Bristol ceno-taph commenced at 3.30pm on June 26, 1932,with the singing of this hymn.

However, perhaps the words on the north faceof the cenotaph were of more significance in1932, by which time Adolf Hitler, who wasconsiderably affected by his and Germany’sexperiences in the Great War and its aftermath,had begun his rise to power.

Two years earlier, Alderman Robert Lyne, ofthe council’s War Memorial Committee, haddefended memorials against the accusation thatthey glorified war. He wrote that “the men whodied and who were remembered by the me-morial had died that mankind might learn tolive at peace”.

The British Legion asked to use Lyne’s wordson the cenotaph, and he later wrote that he wasproud that they “may live after me”.

In Roman capitals on a bronze plaque, there-fore, is: “SACRED TO THE MEMORY / OFB R I S T O L’S SONS AND / DAUGHTERS, WHOMADE / THE SUPREME SACRIFICE.” Andbelow, in smaller capitals: “THEY DIED THATMANKIND MAY LEARN TO LIVE INP E AC E . ”

Seven years later, world conflict eruptedagain and sadly the cenotaph, or “Bristol’sStone of Memories”, as the Bristol Evening Postcalled it, would also become a memorial to thosethousands of Bristolians killed in the SecondWorld War.

� Dr Sarah Whittingham is writing a bookabout Eveline Dew Blacker (1884-1956) of Clif-ton, and would be pleased to hear from anyonewho has information about Eveline’s life orwork. Email: s a ra h . wh i t t i n g h a m 1 @btinter net.com. For more on Dr Whittingham’swork, see w w w. s a ra h wh i t t i n g h a m . c o. u k .

Nowadays, the cenotaph in Bristol’s city centre is oneof the principal focuses of Remembrance events. Yetours was almost the last major civic monument to bebuilt in Britain. Dr Sarah Whittingham tells the story ofhow it was finally built after seemingly endless delays.

� The Bishop of Bristol looks on as Field Marshal Sir William Birdwood unveils the memorial(Bristol Record Office Reference No 17563). Left, how an illustrator for the newly founded BristolEvening Post saw it. The spirit of a dead Tommy looks on as the monument is dedicated

A MONUMENTALACHIEVEMENT

The wording on the bronze plaque

Sacred to the memory of Bristol’s sons and daughters, whomade the supreme sacrifice. They died that mankind may learnto live in peace.

“

City is full of permanent remindersof the sacrifices made by BristoliansEugene Byrne looks at the stories behind some of Bristol’s other war memorials

BRISTOL was late in building its maincivic war memorial, much later thanmost other UK cities. But, by the time itwas unveiled, there were alreadyplenty of other memorials in com-

munities, schools and workplaces around thec i t y.

An estimated 55,000 Bristolians, from en-thusiastic early volunteers to reluctant laterconscripts, had served in the armed forces inthe First World War. The overwhelming ma-jority of these had been in the army, and mosthad been in the trenches at some point.

The precise number of Bristol’s dead is un-clear, even today, mostly because manymen signed up, or were drafted, in differentplaces to where they had been born, or werel iv i n g .

There were several army units which werestrongly identified with a particular town orcity. For example, the 12th battalion of theGloucester Regiment, known as “Bristol’sOwn”, was made up almost entirely of earlyBristol volunteers. This was only one of anumber of infantry and artillery units whichwere strongly Bristolian.

But many Bristol men served in units whichhad no Bristol connections at all. Several hun-dred who volunteered in Bristol in the first daysof the war were sent, believe it or not, to an Irishregiment – the Leinsters.

It may be that research in the coming yearswill finally be able to pin down the exactnumber of Bristolians who lost their lives.

What we do know is that of all the men in theforces, just over one in ten never returned.Those serving in infantry and field artilleryunits ran a higher risk of death, or seriousi n j u r y.

The single most dangerous job on the WesternFront was that of a junior commissioned officer,a lieutenant or subaltern, in the infantry.

As soon as the war ended, Bristolians starteddiscussing the best way of remembering thedead. As across the rest of the country, therewere two schools of thought.

One group thought there should be monu-ments to serve as a permanent reminder of thesacrifices that had been made.

The opposing view was that monuments werea waste of money. The dead were best re-membered, they said, with things that would beof use to the living.

Many communities in Britain still have vil-lage halls built to commemorate the dead of theFirst World War. A few places built hospitals,some of which still survive; there’s a goodexample in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, fori n s t a n c e.

Bristol had some of these “utilitarian” p ro -jects. The best-known is, of course, the Me-morial Stadium, built to commemorate thoseBristol rugby enthusiasts who had been lost inthe war.

Bristol’s Homoeopathic Hospital is arguablyanother, although this was built in memory of asingle war loss. Captain Bruce Melville Willswas killed in 1915 and his father, Walter MelvilleWills (part of the Wills tobacco dynasty) coveredthe entire £130,000 cost of the hospital, whichwas opened by Princess Helena Victoria on May20, 1925.

For the most part, though, the dead wereremembered with memorials, most of whichsurvive to this day.

Here are the stories behind just a few of them.Bear in mind that these are just some of thelarger memorials in the Bristol area.

If your local one has not been included, andyou know a little about its background story,please write in and tell us about it.

Arnos Vale CemeteryB r i t a i n’s military medical services were ex-

tremely efficient during the war. There is onefamous story of a local woman in 1914 who flatlyrefused to believe that her husband was in aBristol hospital because there simply hadn’tbeen enough time for him to join his regiment,travel to France, get wounded and be broughtback again.

The chances of survival for men wounded onthe Western Front were excellent if they couldbe got to a hospital back in England. Bristol hadseveral war hospitals, some of which set stand-ards which were widely copied elsewhere.

Nonetheless, given the sheer scale of cas-ualties, many men did die in Bristol between1914 and 1919, of complications arising fromwounds, from surgery, and from infections,notably the flu epidemic of 1918-19.

Many of these men – whose numbers includedCanadians, Australians, New Zealanders andSouth Africans as well as Britons – were buriedat Arnos Vale.

At the war’s end, the Bristol branch of the RedCross raised the money for a memorial at a partof the cemetery known as “Soldiers’ Cor ner”.

This large and dignified monument, abov e,was unveiled by the Duchess of Beaufort onFriday, October 21, 1921. The attending dig-nitaries included the Lord Mayor and Sheriff ofBristol and representatives of the military andvarious voluntary organisations as well as arepresentative from the Australian High Com-mission.

There is a guided tour of Arnos Vale’s wargraves led by Charles Booth, on SaturdayNovember 9, at 1.30pm. Tickets £5 (no con-cessions), available from the cemetery gift shop,or by calling 0117 971 9117 extn 214. Seewww.ar nosvale.org.uk.

Downend Scout memorialAt the corner of Wester-

leigh and Badminton Roadsin Downend is one of themost unusual memorials inBritain, one of only a handfulerected in memory of formerlocal boy scouts who died inthe First World War.

When it was unveiled onSunday, April 18, 1920, it wasthe first of its kind in thecountry. It was made by alocal mason named Dawson.

The first name on the me-morial is that of PhilipAlexander, who was curate of Downend churchin 1909 when he was founder and first Scout-master of the Downend troop.

The Reverend Alexander died aboard thecruiser HMS Hampshire when she was sunk by

a mine when carrying General Kitchener on adiplomatic mission to Russia in 1916. Six otherlocal scouts are named on the monument.

The money for the memorial was raised in asingle day by women volunteers organised bythe wife of Downend’s new Scoutmaster.

Fishponds ParkThe memorial in Fish-

ponds Park is one of themost striking in the west ofEngland. Paid for by theresidents of Fishponds – itcost £615 – it was cast by afirm named Humphriesand Oakes and made from alife model posing at theirLawrence Hill studio.

The figure of a British/Dominion infantrymanappears to be going throughthe motions of cheering vic-tory, but with no real en-thusiasm. He has a gaunt, hollow face and thethousand-yard stare of someone who’s seen toom u ch .

It was unveiled in a ceremony attended by theLord Mayor and Lt Col Daniel Burges VC onMarch 19, 1921.

Clifton CollegeThe memorial gate, abov e, at the college was

designed by Charles Holden, a man whose namehas been much in the local news recently onaccount of the Cathedral School’s controversialplans to put its new Free School in the CentralLibrary, which was also designed by Holden.

During the First World War, he served withthe London Ambulance Column and later be-came one of the Imperial War Graves Com-m i s s i o n’s principal architects, designingcemeteries and cemetery buildings in Belgiumand France.

His gatehouse for Clifton College is a me-morial to the former members of the school whohad been killed in the war.

The memorial arch, or “Mem Arch” as Cliftonpupils call it, was unveiled by Clifton College

old boy Field Marshal Earl Haig in July, 1922.It is inscribed with the names of 578 Old

Cliftonians who had been killed in the war. Itnow also serves as a memorial for those killed inthe Second World War as well.

Also present at the ceremony were the LordMayor, the Master of the Society of MerchantVenturers and several other prominent cit-izens, as well as several Old Cliftonians, in-cluding Sir Henry Newbolt, author of thefamous poem Vitaï Lampada.

It also featured verse by Newbolt, inscribedby Eric Gill:

From the great marshal to the last recruit,These, Clifton, were thy Self, they Spirit in

Deed,The flower of Chivalry, thy fallen fruit,And thine immortal Seed.The gatehouse is a Grade II listed building.

Pupils passing under it are supposed to do sobareheaded and not put their hands in theirp o cke t s.

Stoke BishopThe memorial at Stoke

Bishop was dedicated bythe Bishop of Bristol at aceremony on Sunday, May16, 1920, attended by severalhundred people.

The memorial, made ofStancliffe stone fromDerbyshire, originallycommemorated 38 menfrom the community whohad been killed in the GreatWar. If you look at it care-fully, you’ll see that almosthalf of the men listed heldjunior officers’ ranks. This was a reflection notsimply of the social make-up of Stoke Bishop,but also of the extremely high casualty ratesamong junior infantry officers.

The names of local men who died in theSecond World War were added later, along withthose of a soldier killed in Palestine in the late1940s, and another who fell in the Korean War.

S h i re h a m pto nThe war memorial at

Shirehampton was un-veiled on September 4,1921, by Brigadier-Generalthe Hon C.G. Bruce. TheYork stone monument cost£460 and was designed byErnest Newton R.A. Theland was donated by locallandowner Philip NapierMiles, who had also chairedthe memorial committee.

CONTINUED OVER THE PAGE

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4 Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013 5Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

Need a spotof wartimehumour? Well,here’s Ole Bill

Latimer’sDiary

WHAT-HO! Since the rest of thiswe e k ’s BT is devoted to war me-morials, and to the forthcomingcentenary of the First World War, Ithought I’d get in on the act.

Now you might be thinking that a columnwhich about half the time features whimsiesand my second-rate attempts at humour is notan appropriate place to be talking about theGreat War.

Well, I beg to disagree. Bear with me and it’llall come good.

(I hope!)Let’s start with a little story with a local

angle:

Bristol medics discoverBairnsfather originals

The 1/3rd South Midland Divisional FieldAmbulance was a volunteer medical unit fromthe Bristol area, part of the Royal Army MedicalCor ps.

They had been part of the Territorial Forcebefore the war. Their headquarters was at Col-ston Fort, in Kingsdown, and, in the days beforewar, it was declared they had gone off on theirannual summer camp only to be hastily recalledwith a one-word telegram from the War Office:“M o b i l i s e. ”

As Territorials, they were not moved to thefront line right away. Early on in the war thefighting was all done by Britain’s small, pro-fessional army – the “contemptible little army”as the Kaiser allegedly called them (thought h e re ’s no evidence he ever said anything of thekind).

As the professionals were depleted throughdeath and wounds, the Territorials stepped up.The year 1915 would be the year in which they,too, would be sacrificed.

The 1/3rd moved first to Chelmsford to awaittransport to France. Here, they earned earlypraise for dealing with a serious outbreak ofmeningitis in the nearby army camps.

The 1/3rd contained the outbreak and, inApril, 1915, were able to move to France to takeup front line duties as part of the 48th (SouthMidland) Division. The division was made upalmost entirely of former Territorials and in-cluded two infantry battalions as well as en-gineers and artillery men, who came mostly orwholly from Bristol.

Early on, the 1/3rd was based at Plus DouveFarm, just inside the Belgian border, at a placecalled Ploegsteert, but which was known toTommies as “Plug Street”. The area would seesome of the bitterest fighting of the war.

The walls of the farmhouse were decoratedwith humorous cartoons and sketches, whichdelighted the medics. They recognised them asthe work of Bruce Bairnsfather.

Bairnsfather was serving with the SouthWarwickshire Regiment and had been billetedat the farmhouse until a few weeks previously.

What the medics probably didn’t know at thetime was that the author of these humorouspictures was at that moment in hospital suf-fering from hearing loss and shell shock fol-lowing the Second Battle of Ypres.

Bairnsfather recovered and went on to be-come hugely popular with his humorous de-pictions of the war and of military life. His mostfamous creations were Ole Bill, the cur-mudgeonly Tommy of uncertain age, with animmense walrus moustache, and, of course, thesingle cartoon of two Tommies huddling in ashell hole from an artillery barrage, the onesaying to the other, “Well if you knows of a better‘ole, you go to it”.

The Wipers TimesBritish soldiers in the First World War had a

distinctive culture and humour of their own,much of it based on the certain knowledge thatpeople back home had absolutely no idea ofwhat they were going through.

They developed a massive contempt for journ-alists and newspapers. Try this:

Proof That We Are Winning The Warby Belary Helloc

In this article I wish to show plainly that underexisting conditions, everything points to a speedydisintegration of the enemy. We will take first ofall the effect of war on the male population ofGer many.

Firstly, let us take as our figures, 12,000,000 asthe total fighting population of Germany. Ofthese 8,000,000 are killed or being killed, hence wehave 4,000,000 remaining. Of these 1,000,000 arenon-combatants, being in the navy.

Of the 3,000,000 remaining, we can write off2,500,000 as temperamentally unsuitable forfighting, owing to obesity and other ailmentsengendered by a gross mode of living. This leavesus 500,000 as the full strength. Of these 497,250 areknown to be suffering from incurable diseases.This leaves us 2,750. Of these 2,150 are on theeastern front, and of the remaining 600, 584 aregenerals and staff.

Thus we find that there are 16 men on theWestern Front. This number, I maintain, is notenough to give them even a fair chance of res-isting four more big pushes, and hence the col-lapse of the western campaign.

That comes from the Wipers Times, a satiricalnewspaper published intermittently between1916 and 1918 by soldiers of the 12th BattalionSherwood Foresters (Nottingham & DerbyshireRe giment).

The first edition came out in February, 1916,and was produced on an abandoned printingpress just a few hundred yards behind the frontl i n e.

Taking its name from army slang for Ypres,the paper – usually just a single sheet – wasfilled with ironic, and even cynical humour. Ittook digs at staff officers safe behind the lines orthe frequency of what we now call “f r i e n d lyf i re ” i n c i d e n t s.

It also roasted the gung-ho journalists backhome; Hilaire Belloc, for instance, was roundlydetested by many soldiers for his endlesslyoptimistic articles, and that’s him being sat-irised left.

There were also lots of spoof advertise-ments:

DO NOT READ THIS!!! UNLESS YOU HAVEA GIRL AT HOME.

If you have, of course you want to send her asouvenir. WE can supply just the tasty little thingyou want.

Thousands to choose from;GERMAN SHOULDER STRAPS; 1/- each 10/-

a dozenDITTO, BLOODSTAINED; 1/6 each 15/- a

do z enSHELL HOLES, COMPLETE; 50/- eachDUCKBOARDS – ENGLISH; 5/- eachDUCKBOARDS – GERMAN; 10/- eachIRON CROSS; 6d. a grossOUR SPECIALITYBullets carefully fixed in Bibles (for maiden

aunts)

Your local newspaper needsyour heirlooms!

Which brings us – at last – to the point of thisar ticle.

We want drawings and cartoons and ex-amples of humour from among your own familyh e i rl o o m s.

The First World War, it’s been said, was auniquely literary war. For the first time inhistory, almost all the British soldiers takingpart in a major conflict could read and write.

The British army on the Western Front alsooperated an extremely efficient postal service,as it was deemed essential to morale. Soldierswrote a lot of letters home.

At the same time, few men owned a camera.They drew pictures in their letters instead.

H e re ’s one:This is a

member of myown family. Asyou can see,GunnerMackey was am o d e r at e lytalented car-toonist. This ishis self-por-trait fromDecember1915. It’s one ofa number ofcartoons hedrew in a note-book which isstill in the fam-i ly ’s posses-sion.

My bet isthat there arelots of BristolTimes re a d e r sout there who also have letters, drawings andcartoons made by grandfathers andgreat-grandfathers who served in the war.

We want to see them!If you have any letters, postcards, notebooks

etc. from relatives serving in the First WorldWar that have sketches, cartoons or drawingsthem, please scan them, or photograph them,and email them to us.

(Do not send us the originals! You can’t rely onus not to spill tea on them.)

Also tell us a little about your particularrelative – his name, which regiment he servedwith, and what his eventual fate was. If hesurvived the war, what did he do afterwards?

And not just men, either. The womenfolk alsoserved, as nurses, factory workers, tram con-ductors, agricultural workers and loads morebesides. So we’re every bit as interested indrawings by, and of, women as well.

If we get enough of these, we’ll publish themin a big feature next year. If we get largenumbers of them we might even be able toorganise a little exhibition somewhere.

Cheers then!

BRISTOL ’S LOST MEMORIAL

The ceremony began with a service at Shire-hampton parish church and then there was aprocession to the site, headed by the choir,clergy and the Archdeacon of Bristol, who ledthe dedication.

Not surprisingly, given that this was Shire-hampton, many of the 58 men it commemorateswere in the Royal Navy or the merchant service.Only one of the soldiers was an officer.

In 1988, the Bristol Observer i n t e r v i ewe d86-year-old Louie Gough, of Westbury-on-Trym,who had been voluntarily tending the smallgarden around the memorial for 68 years. Whenyounger, she had walked the two miles to thememorial from her previous home in Sea Millspulling a trolley with a lawn mower on it.

Two of the dead named on the memorial wereher brothers, Roy and Nelson Sansum, a Privatein the 6th Battalion the Glosters and a Gunnerin the Royal Field Artillery respectively.

“I’ve looked after the memorial because Iknew every one of the boys named,” she said.

“They all lived near my home in Shirehamp-ton and 13 came from one street.”

“I was tremendously close to all my fivebrothers who fought in the First World War andwas fascinated by the stories they told whenthey came home on leave.”

“Roy and Nelson were marvellous to me andalways looked smart and proud in their uni-for ms,” she said.

Page ParkAt a public meeting in

May 1919, it was decidedthat Staple Hill, Downendand Soundwell should com-memorate their dead insome practical form. A lotof people liked the idea ofa community hall, with alibrary attached. Otherswanted a swimming pool.

Financial reality sooncaught up with them. At theend of four years of war, thecommunity, like the coun-try in general, was short of money. Wages werenot keeping pace with prices and many menwere returning to find that the jobs they had leftwere not always waiting for them.

So a monument, in the form of a graniteobelisk, decorated with bronze mouldings, wascommissioned at a cost of £400 and erected atPage Park. It was dedicated at a ceremony on

Saturday, November 20, 1920, attended by atleast 2,000 people.

The monument originally listed the names of167 men of Staple Hill, Downend and Soundwellkilled in the First World War. The dead of theSecond were added later.

It was unveiled by the area’s great benefactor,Alderman Arthur Page. A successful solicitorand businessman, he had donated the land forthe park to the community and, in later years,paid for several of its facilities.

The wreaths that people laid on the monu-ment, said Alderman Page, would fade away, butthe memorial would stand for all time to remindfuture generations of the brave men whosenames are engraved upon it.

West b u r y- o n -Tr y mThe Westbury-on-Trym

war memorial was un-veiled at 3pm on Sunday,July 11, 1920, at a ceremonyattended by the Lord Mayorof Bristol and the Bishop ofBristol. The proceedingshad started with a paradeto the memorial from Can-ford Park attended by rep-resentatives of the area’sdifferent churches, alongwith a number of differentchurch choirs.

The unveiling ceremonywas notable, however, forone very conspicuous absentee – the Rev Dr H.J.Wilkins, vicar of Westbury-on-Trym.

As in so many other parishes, a committeehad been formed after the war to raise moneyfor a memorial. The Bristol architectural firmJames and Steadman was commissioned todesign it. They proposed an obelisk, and thiswas where the trouble began.

The Rev Dr Wilkins, who was the local vicarfrom 1900 until his death in 1941, objected to thedesign, saying that an obelisk was a “pag an”symbol.

An extremely acrimonious row went on forseveral months, though with the committeemembers and the great majority of the publicranged against the vicar. At one point, RevWilkins denounced the obelisk from the pulpit,leading to one of his choristers walking out ofthe service in protest.

The dispute continued in the local press, withmost people lining up to say the obelisk was asymbol of immortality, and was often used incemetery memorials. Others pointed out that

the Christian cross which Wilkins would havepreferred was also commonly used in manypagan traditions.

Nonconformists and Roman Catholics hadalso contributed towards the £750 cost of themonument and none of them were botheredabout an obelisk. It was pointed out that theargument, entirely of the vicar’s making, was apainful and unworthy disservice to the memoryof those of his parishioners who had lost theirl ive s.

The obelisk was built, and it remains one ofthe more visible memorials in Bristol, locatedright in the centre of Westbury village. Whenunveiled, it featured the names of around 150men who had died in the war.

Names of local dead from the Second WorldWar were added later, as was the large in-scription which features on a lot of war me-morials. It comes from the British 2nd InfantryDivision memorial at Kohima in India, whichcommemorates the battle of Kohima-Imphal in1944, when the Indian/British FourteenthArmy, led by Maj Gen William Slim (born inBristol) inflicted the first major defeat on theJapanese on land during the Second World War.It reads: “When you go home, tell them of us andsay for your tomorrow we gave our today.”

St John’s, CliftonThe church of St John the Evangelist, abov e,

on the corner of Whiteladies and Apsley roadsclosed down in the 1980s and was converted intocommercial premises, but the local communityhave “adopted” the memorial which was un-veiled in the 1920s, and there’s still a remem-brance ceremony at the monument each year.

Pupils at Redland High School have recentlybeen researching some of the names on thememorial with the help of First World Warexpert, David Whithorn.

With this help they have tracked down a few ofthe stories behind some of the names.

For example, EH Lyddon and FC Lyddon werebrothers, who almost certainly came from anarmy family. The first was killed at the firstbattle of Ypres in 1914, while the other died atsecond Ypres battle in 1915.

Another, Private Cyril Llewellen Prewettserved in the Wiltshire Regiment and was killedin August 1917 at the third battle of Ypres(Passchendaele). He has no known grave and iscommemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial inYpres, Belgium. He was aged 25 and married toan “F. H , ” who, after Cyril’s death, married a MrT homas.

� UNVEILED on December 18,1920, with a German artillery gunon top, the memorialcommemorated exactly 100“Marsh” men who died in the war.It should have been for 101, asWilliam Bailey’s details camethrough too late for the bronzetablet.

The gun was removed by the citycouncil in around 1934, when itbecame dilapidated.

Under the heading ... “No MoreWar Memorials Wanted in Bristol”,the Western Daily Press re p o r t e don the deliberations of the Planningand Public Works Committee thatconsidered a petition from the localBritish Legion expressing concernat the loss of the memorial and the

feelings of resentment in thecommunity. The petition asked fora stone cross to be placed on topthe plinth to replace the gun.

The committee’s views included:“People did not want to see the

country studded with morememorials ...”

“People did not want to seememorials everywhere they went...”

“The memorial had been in ac h i l d re n ’s playground, one of thefew in the district. We do not wantto see children playing round ahideous memorial to war...”

How sentiments changed in just14 years! Needless to say, thecommittee did not agree to thep ro p o s a l .

The concrete plinth was probablyremoved during the redevelopmentof the Marsh area in the Fifties andSixties.

The space that the memorialoccupied is still intact today, andthe fate of the bronze tablet iscurrently not known.

Clive Burlton’s story of BristolTommy George Pine, “FromTrenches to Trams”, is published byTangent Books. An exhibitionbased on the book is on display atBristol’s Central Library. Clive willbe giving a talk about George Pineat the Reference Library at 7.30pmon Monday, November 11.Admission is free. Call 0117 9037202 to reserve a place.

Clive Burlton tracks down the story of the war memorial whichonce stood in St Philips, but whose eventual fate is uncertain

The stories behind our city’s war memorialsCONTINUED FROM PAGE 3

� Get in touch: Email Bristol.Times@b-nm.co.uk or write to Bristol Times, BristolPost, Temple Way, Bristol BS2 0BY

� Gunner Mackey: “Mymoustache, the envy of theB t y. ” (battery)

� Bruce Bairnsfather’s trench humour. Thisone’s captioned “Coiffure in the trenches” …“Keep yer ’ead still or I’ll ’ave yer blinkin’ earo ff , ” says Ole Bill as a German shell fliesoverhead. Right, Bruce Bairnsfather’s Ole Bill

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4 Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013 5Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

Need a spotof wartimehumour? Well,here’s Ole Bill

Latimer’sDiary

WHAT-HO! Since the rest of thiswe e k ’s BT is devoted to war me-morials, and to the forthcomingcentenary of the First World War, Ithought I’d get in on the act.

Now you might be thinking that a columnwhich about half the time features whimsiesand my second-rate attempts at humour is notan appropriate place to be talking about theGreat War.

Well, I beg to disagree. Bear with me and it’llall come good.

(I hope!)Let’s start with a little story with a local

angle:

Bristol medics discoverBairnsfather originals

The 1/3rd South Midland Divisional FieldAmbulance was a volunteer medical unit fromthe Bristol area, part of the Royal Army MedicalCor ps.

They had been part of the Territorial Forcebefore the war. Their headquarters was at Col-ston Fort, in Kingsdown, and, in the days beforewar, it was declared they had gone off on theirannual summer camp only to be hastily recalledwith a one-word telegram from the War Office:“M o b i l i s e. ”

As Territorials, they were not moved to thefront line right away. Early on in the war thefighting was all done by Britain’s small, pro-fessional army – the “contemptible little army”as the Kaiser allegedly called them (thought h e re ’s no evidence he ever said anything of thekind).

As the professionals were depleted throughdeath and wounds, the Territorials stepped up.The year 1915 would be the year in which they,too, would be sacrificed.

The 1/3rd moved first to Chelmsford to awaittransport to France. Here, they earned earlypraise for dealing with a serious outbreak ofmeningitis in the nearby army camps.

The 1/3rd contained the outbreak and, inApril, 1915, were able to move to France to takeup front line duties as part of the 48th (SouthMidland) Division. The division was made upalmost entirely of former Territorials and in-cluded two infantry battalions as well as en-gineers and artillery men, who came mostly orwholly from Bristol.

Early on, the 1/3rd was based at Plus DouveFarm, just inside the Belgian border, at a placecalled Ploegsteert, but which was known toTommies as “Plug Street”. The area would seesome of the bitterest fighting of the war.

The walls of the farmhouse were decoratedwith humorous cartoons and sketches, whichdelighted the medics. They recognised them asthe work of Bruce Bairnsfather.

Bairnsfather was serving with the SouthWarwickshire Regiment and had been billetedat the farmhouse until a few weeks previously.

What the medics probably didn’t know at thetime was that the author of these humorouspictures was at that moment in hospital suf-fering from hearing loss and shell shock fol-lowing the Second Battle of Ypres.

Bairnsfather recovered and went on to be-come hugely popular with his humorous de-pictions of the war and of military life. His mostfamous creations were Ole Bill, the cur-mudgeonly Tommy of uncertain age, with animmense walrus moustache, and, of course, thesingle cartoon of two Tommies huddling in ashell hole from an artillery barrage, the onesaying to the other, “Well if you knows of a better‘ole, you go to it”.

The Wipers TimesBritish soldiers in the First World War had a

distinctive culture and humour of their own,much of it based on the certain knowledge thatpeople back home had absolutely no idea ofwhat they were going through.

They developed a massive contempt for journ-alists and newspapers. Try this:

Proof That We Are Winning The Warby Belary Helloc

In this article I wish to show plainly that underexisting conditions, everything points to a speedydisintegration of the enemy. We will take first ofall the effect of war on the male population ofGer many.

Firstly, let us take as our figures, 12,000,000 asthe total fighting population of Germany. Ofthese 8,000,000 are killed or being killed, hence wehave 4,000,000 remaining. Of these 1,000,000 arenon-combatants, being in the navy.

Of the 3,000,000 remaining, we can write off2,500,000 as temperamentally unsuitable forfighting, owing to obesity and other ailmentsengendered by a gross mode of living. This leavesus 500,000 as the full strength. Of these 497,250 areknown to be suffering from incurable diseases.This leaves us 2,750. Of these 2,150 are on theeastern front, and of the remaining 600, 584 aregenerals and staff.

Thus we find that there are 16 men on theWestern Front. This number, I maintain, is notenough to give them even a fair chance of res-isting four more big pushes, and hence the col-lapse of the western campaign.

That comes from the Wipers Times, a satiricalnewspaper published intermittently between1916 and 1918 by soldiers of the 12th BattalionSherwood Foresters (Nottingham & DerbyshireRe giment).

The first edition came out in February, 1916,and was produced on an abandoned printingpress just a few hundred yards behind the frontl i n e.

Taking its name from army slang for Ypres,the paper – usually just a single sheet – wasfilled with ironic, and even cynical humour. Ittook digs at staff officers safe behind the lines orthe frequency of what we now call “f r i e n d lyf i re ” i n c i d e n t s.

It also roasted the gung-ho journalists backhome; Hilaire Belloc, for instance, was roundlydetested by many soldiers for his endlesslyoptimistic articles, and that’s him being sat-irised left.

There were also lots of spoof advertise-ments:

DO NOT READ THIS!!! UNLESS YOU HAVEA GIRL AT HOME.

If you have, of course you want to send her asouvenir. WE can supply just the tasty little thingyou want.

Thousands to choose from;GERMAN SHOULDER STRAPS; 1/- each 10/-

a dozenDITTO, BLOODSTAINED; 1/6 each 15/- a

do z enSHELL HOLES, COMPLETE; 50/- eachDUCKBOARDS – ENGLISH; 5/- eachDUCKBOARDS – GERMAN; 10/- eachIRON CROSS; 6d. a grossOUR SPECIALITYBullets carefully fixed in Bibles (for maiden

aunts)

Your local newspaper needsyour heirlooms!

Which brings us – at last – to the point of thisar ticle.

We want drawings and cartoons and ex-amples of humour from among your own familyh e i rl o o m s.

The First World War, it’s been said, was auniquely literary war. For the first time inhistory, almost all the British soldiers takingpart in a major conflict could read and write.

The British army on the Western Front alsooperated an extremely efficient postal service,as it was deemed essential to morale. Soldierswrote a lot of letters home.

At the same time, few men owned a camera.They drew pictures in their letters instead.

H e re ’s one:This is a

member of myown family. Asyou can see,GunnerMackey was am o d e r at e lytalented car-toonist. This ishis self-por-trait fromDecember1915. It’s one ofa number ofcartoons hedrew in a note-book which isstill in the fam-i ly ’s posses-sion.

My bet isthat there arelots of BristolTimes re a d e r sout there who also have letters, drawings andcartoons made by grandfathers andgreat-grandfathers who served in the war.

We want to see them!If you have any letters, postcards, notebooks

etc. from relatives serving in the First WorldWar that have sketches, cartoons or drawingsthem, please scan them, or photograph them,and email them to us.

(Do not send us the originals! You can’t rely onus not to spill tea on them.)

Also tell us a little about your particularrelative – his name, which regiment he servedwith, and what his eventual fate was. If hesurvived the war, what did he do afterwards?

And not just men, either. The womenfolk alsoserved, as nurses, factory workers, tram con-ductors, agricultural workers and loads morebesides. So we’re every bit as interested indrawings by, and of, women as well.

If we get enough of these, we’ll publish themin a big feature next year. If we get largenumbers of them we might even be able toorganise a little exhibition somewhere.

Cheers then!

BRISTOL ’S LOST MEMORIAL

The ceremony began with a service at Shire-hampton parish church and then there was aprocession to the site, headed by the choir,clergy and the Archdeacon of Bristol, who ledthe dedication.

Not surprisingly, given that this was Shire-hampton, many of the 58 men it commemorateswere in the Royal Navy or the merchant service.Only one of the soldiers was an officer.

In 1988, the Bristol Observer i n t e r v i ewe d86-year-old Louie Gough, of Westbury-on-Trym,who had been voluntarily tending the smallgarden around the memorial for 68 years. Whenyounger, she had walked the two miles to thememorial from her previous home in Sea Millspulling a trolley with a lawn mower on it.

Two of the dead named on the memorial wereher brothers, Roy and Nelson Sansum, a Privatein the 6th Battalion the Glosters and a Gunnerin the Royal Field Artillery respectively.

“I’ve looked after the memorial because Iknew every one of the boys named,” she said.

“They all lived near my home in Shirehamp-ton and 13 came from one street.”

“I was tremendously close to all my fivebrothers who fought in the First World War andwas fascinated by the stories they told whenthey came home on leave.”

“Roy and Nelson were marvellous to me andalways looked smart and proud in their uni-for ms,” she said.

Page ParkAt a public meeting in

May 1919, it was decidedthat Staple Hill, Downendand Soundwell should com-memorate their dead insome practical form. A lotof people liked the idea ofa community hall, with alibrary attached. Otherswanted a swimming pool.

Financial reality sooncaught up with them. At theend of four years of war, thecommunity, like the coun-try in general, was short of money. Wages werenot keeping pace with prices and many menwere returning to find that the jobs they had leftwere not always waiting for them.

So a monument, in the form of a graniteobelisk, decorated with bronze mouldings, wascommissioned at a cost of £400 and erected atPage Park. It was dedicated at a ceremony on

Saturday, November 20, 1920, attended by atleast 2,000 people.

The monument originally listed the names of167 men of Staple Hill, Downend and Soundwellkilled in the First World War. The dead of theSecond were added later.

It was unveiled by the area’s great benefactor,Alderman Arthur Page. A successful solicitorand businessman, he had donated the land forthe park to the community and, in later years,paid for several of its facilities.

The wreaths that people laid on the monu-ment, said Alderman Page, would fade away, butthe memorial would stand for all time to remindfuture generations of the brave men whosenames are engraved upon it.

West b u r y- o n -Tr y mThe Westbury-on-Trym

war memorial was un-veiled at 3pm on Sunday,July 11, 1920, at a ceremonyattended by the Lord Mayorof Bristol and the Bishop ofBristol. The proceedingshad started with a paradeto the memorial from Can-ford Park attended by rep-resentatives of the area’sdifferent churches, alongwith a number of differentchurch choirs.

The unveiling ceremonywas notable, however, forone very conspicuous absentee – the Rev Dr H.J.Wilkins, vicar of Westbury-on-Trym.

As in so many other parishes, a committeehad been formed after the war to raise moneyfor a memorial. The Bristol architectural firmJames and Steadman was commissioned todesign it. They proposed an obelisk, and thiswas where the trouble began.

The Rev Dr Wilkins, who was the local vicarfrom 1900 until his death in 1941, objected to thedesign, saying that an obelisk was a “pag an”symbol.

An extremely acrimonious row went on forseveral months, though with the committeemembers and the great majority of the publicranged against the vicar. At one point, RevWilkins denounced the obelisk from the pulpit,leading to one of his choristers walking out ofthe service in protest.

The dispute continued in the local press, withmost people lining up to say the obelisk was asymbol of immortality, and was often used incemetery memorials. Others pointed out that

the Christian cross which Wilkins would havepreferred was also commonly used in manypagan traditions.

Nonconformists and Roman Catholics hadalso contributed towards the £750 cost of themonument and none of them were botheredabout an obelisk. It was pointed out that theargument, entirely of the vicar’s making, was apainful and unworthy disservice to the memoryof those of his parishioners who had lost theirl ive s.

The obelisk was built, and it remains one ofthe more visible memorials in Bristol, locatedright in the centre of Westbury village. Whenunveiled, it featured the names of around 150men who had died in the war.

Names of local dead from the Second WorldWar were added later, as was the large in-scription which features on a lot of war me-morials. It comes from the British 2nd InfantryDivision memorial at Kohima in India, whichcommemorates the battle of Kohima-Imphal in1944, when the Indian/British FourteenthArmy, led by Maj Gen William Slim (born inBristol) inflicted the first major defeat on theJapanese on land during the Second World War.It reads: “When you go home, tell them of us andsay for your tomorrow we gave our today.”

St John’s, CliftonThe church of St John the Evangelist, abov e,

on the corner of Whiteladies and Apsley roadsclosed down in the 1980s and was converted intocommercial premises, but the local communityhave “adopted” the memorial which was un-veiled in the 1920s, and there’s still a remem-brance ceremony at the monument each year.

Pupils at Redland High School have recentlybeen researching some of the names on thememorial with the help of First World Warexpert, David Whithorn.

With this help they have tracked down a few ofthe stories behind some of the names.

For example, EH Lyddon and FC Lyddon werebrothers, who almost certainly came from anarmy family. The first was killed at the firstbattle of Ypres in 1914, while the other died atsecond Ypres battle in 1915.

Another, Private Cyril Llewellen Prewettserved in the Wiltshire Regiment and was killedin August 1917 at the third battle of Ypres(Passchendaele). He has no known grave and iscommemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial inYpres, Belgium. He was aged 25 and married toan “F. H , ” who, after Cyril’s death, married a MrT homas.

� UNVEILED on December 18,1920, with a German artillery gunon top, the memorialcommemorated exactly 100“Marsh” men who died in the war.It should have been for 101, asWilliam Bailey’s details camethrough too late for the bronzetablet.

The gun was removed by the citycouncil in around 1934, when itbecame dilapidated.

Under the heading ... “No MoreWar Memorials Wanted in Bristol”,the Western Daily Press re p o r t e don the deliberations of the Planningand Public Works Committee thatconsidered a petition from the localBritish Legion expressing concernat the loss of the memorial and the

feelings of resentment in thecommunity. The petition asked fora stone cross to be placed on topthe plinth to replace the gun.

The committee’s views included:“People did not want to see the

country studded with morememorials ...”

“People did not want to seememorials everywhere they went...”

“The memorial had been in ac h i l d re n ’s playground, one of thefew in the district. We do not wantto see children playing round ahideous memorial to war...”

How sentiments changed in just14 years! Needless to say, thecommittee did not agree to thep ro p o s a l .

The concrete plinth was probablyremoved during the redevelopmentof the Marsh area in the Fifties andSixties.

The space that the memorialoccupied is still intact today, andthe fate of the bronze tablet iscurrently not known.

Clive Burlton’s story of BristolTommy George Pine, “FromTrenches to Trams”, is published byTangent Books. An exhibitionbased on the book is on display atBristol’s Central Library. Clive willbe giving a talk about George Pineat the Reference Library at 7.30pmon Monday, November 11.Admission is free. Call 0117 9037202 to reserve a place.

Clive Burlton tracks down the story of the war memorial whichonce stood in St Philips, but whose eventual fate is uncertain

The stories behind our city’s war memorialsCONTINUED FROM PAGE 3

� Get in touch: Email Bristol.Times@b-nm.co.uk or write to Bristol Times, BristolPost, Temple Way, Bristol BS2 0BY

� Gunner Mackey: “Mymoustache, the envy of theB t y. ” (battery)

� Bruce Bairnsfather’s trench humour. Thisone’s captioned “Coiffure in the trenches” …“Keep yer ’ead still or I’ll ’ave yer blinkin’ earo ff , ” says Ole Bill as a German shell fliesoverhead. Right, Bruce Bairnsfather’s Ole Bill

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6 Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013 7Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

LAST June, a charity support-ing local hospitals presentedGeorge Ferguson with a pairof yellow – or golden –trousers. He undertook to

wear them once the appeal hadreached £1 million, and he kept thatpromise on Friday, October 25, 2013.

On the same day, the mayor turneda few heads when he attended thefuneral of veteran heritage cam-paigner Dorothy Brown wearing thesame trousers. Were they, some mur-mured, “the right trousers”?

“Fa n cy, ” others said, “g o i n’ to afuneral in yeller trousers.”

The funeral of the irrepressible, theindomitable Dorothy was held atWoodlands Memorial Gardens.

For many, that venue is near toThornbury, but for the large numberwho gathered to remember and cel-ebrate the tireless activist, it wasthe proximity to ActonCourt, the Poyntz familymansion that DorothyBrown had been in-strumental in sav-ing, that waspar ticularlypoignant.

The funeraldrew togethermany who hadstood besideDorothy as shefought, for ex-ample, for ActonCourt, or to protectthe Gorge when de-velopers wanted to con-struct a hotel there. Severalof the family and friends who spokeduring the service referred to thenumerous battles that the deceasedhad entered into, and some spoke offinding consolation in the fact thatshe was active to the very end. In-deed, she was working on a bookabout walled cities and makingphoto-copies of maps in Redland Lib-rary when she collapsed.

Heather Leeson, of the Bristol CivicSociety, spoke of a campaign againstthe use of part of the Central Libraryas a primary school that Dorothy hadbeen waging. Her cause had broughther into conflict with the red, greenor, on this occasion, yellow-trousered

... AND THEMAYOR WOREYELLOW ...

Is clock just a figment of my imagination?

Picture of the Week

mayor, and, when Heather waved oneof Dorothy’s campaign flyers, therewas a frisson of the sort of engage-ment Dorothy had always been pre-pared for.

In the course of the funeral service,reference was also made to the factthat campaign displays Dorothy hadprepared about the city’s lost or en-

dangered heritage buildings werecurrently hanging on the

walls of John Wesley’sNew Room in the

Horsef air.They will be

there untilNovember 23,and, on the af-ternoon ofNovember 16,they will formthe back-drop to

a networkingevent on Bristol’s

Heritage Build-ings: Relics or

Legacies? that Dorothyhad helped to plan.

She had, in fact, offered tolook after the book stall on the 16thand had donated copies of two of herbooks (Bristol And How It Grew andRediscovering Acton Court And ThePoyntz Family). These will be on saleat the New Room on November 16.

Dorothy will not be present as shehad planned, but Bristol’s city scapeand Acton Court provide evidence ofwhat she fought for and what shea ch i eve d .

Her legacies also include her pub-lished writing, her family, and aboveall, her example as a concerned, per-sistent and informed campaigner.

James Gibbsby email

NEXT year sees the 100th an-niversary of the outbreakof the First World War, andwe are promised a massivenationwide series of talks,

events, TV programmes, plays, ex-hibitions, books, debates and more.

Bristol has a particularly ambi-tious programme to mark the cen-tenary. There will be a majorexhibition at M shed titled Moved byC o n fl i c t , looking at the ways in whichpeople, objects and ideas were movedand changed by the war.

There will be a dedicated Bristol2014 website, with stories, inform-ation and articles about Bristol’s partin the war, along with an online mapand smartphone app showing the loc-ations of some of the wealth of in-teresting, horrific, or just plain oddstories associated with the Bristolarea in the war. This will allow op-portunities for users to add storiesand family legends of their own.

Bristol Festival of Ideas will have anumber of free public talks and de-bates on topics linked to the FirstWorld War. At least three books aredue to be published, and the BBC’sWorld War One at Home project willbe broadcasting stories from aroundthe country and the region about howthe war affected people’s lives on thehome front.

St George’s Bristol and the BristolMusic Trust will be exploringchanges in musical tastes brought

about by the war, while the RoyalWest of England Academy will beputting on an exhibition of war artfrom the First World War to thepresent. Various community organ-isations and churches willalso be put-ting on projects of their own.

Anticipating an upsurge of interestfrom people wanting to find out moreabout ancestors who served in thewar, the Bristol and Avon FamilyHistory Society will be on hand toh e l p.

Much – though not all – of theBristol programme is being co-or-dinated by the Bristol Cultural De-velopment Partnership (BCDP), thesame people who brought you theBrunel 200 celebrations in 2006, andthe BAC 100 events around the cen-tenary of Bristol’s aerospace in-d u s t r y.

Andrew Kelly, director of BCDP,told Bristol Times: “Bristol is likely tohave the largest programme of activ-ity in the country in 2014. We’vealways been keen to commemoratethe First World War – it had a hugeimpact on Bristol, though this is notas well known as the impact of theSecond World War on the city.

“We ’re covering the full range ofactivity, from those who opposed thewar to those that went to fight; fromBristol being a prime centre for warmunitions and fighter planes to beingthe centre of the importation ofhorses to serve; from the home front

to the Western Front; from the citybefore war broke out to whathappened in Bristol afterwards.”

A number of organisations aroundthe area are looking for help from thepublic. Here are just some of theappeals that we know about:

Glenside HospitalM u se u m

The Glenside Hospital Museum,based in the church of what wasBristol’s Victorian asylum, is run-ning a major research project lookingat the period when it was used as amilitary hospital. Known as theBeaufort Hospital during the FirstWorld War, it took in huge numbers ofcasualties. The artist Stanley Spen-cer famously worked there for awhile. The museum project, fundedby the Esmee Fairbairn CollectionsFund, is researching the museum’scollection of First World War post-cards. If you have information aboutwounded soldiers, however small,

maybe about a relative, staff or pa-tient, or even a postcard from theperiod which can be scanned, pleaseemail involvingresidents@ gmail.comor call 07968 869840.

M shedCurators at M shed are looking for

objects and stories for their exhib-ition Moved by Conflict, which will beat M shed from October, 2014, toMarch, 2015.

They are particularly interested inobjects relating to the Bristol Inter-national Exhibition of 1914 (knownas “White City” – see picture caption),the Remount Depot at Shirehampton,the mustard gas factories at Avon-mouth, women’s war work, conscien-tious objectors, suffragettes, Bristol’swar hospitals, and Bristolians whoemigrated prior to the war and soserved with Commonwealth coun-t r i e s.

If you have family stories and ma-terial that you would be willing to

loan or donate, please contact Cath-erine Littlejohns, senior collectionsofficer, public history. EmailC a t h e r i n e . L i t t l e j o h n s @ b r i s t o l . go v. u k ,or call 0117 903 9816 / 0117 352 6953.

M shed is also holding a CollectingDay this coming Sunday for membersof the public to bring in objects, orsimply go along for a chat. It runsfrom 10.30am-4pm and all are verywe l c o m e.

acta C o m m u n i tyTh ea t re

Bristol community theatre com-pany acta is creating a play about thewomen who worked at the mustardgas factories in Bristol in 1918, andare seeking any stories that may havebeen passed down in local families.

The stories will be used as materialfor acta’s Gas Girls, a show whichtells the story of women who workedin the Chittening and Avonmouthfactories, which produced mustardgas and filled shells in North Bristol.There has been little research intothis topic.

“We ’ve already started on researchfrom the National Archives, news-papers, and Bristol Records Office,but we’re looking for any humanstories we can find. Although thepeople who worked at the factory arelong gone, we think there might befamily memories, stories passeddown from generation to generation,that could help us try to understandthe people who worked there,” saidacta artistic director, Neil Beddow.

If you have any information, or areinterested in the topic and wish tojoin acta’s Thursday morning re-search group, please contact RosaliePordes at acta community theatre vaiemail to ro s a l i e @ a c t a - b r i s t o l . c o m .

� If you are involved in any project tomark next year’s centenary, and arelooking for help or information fromour readers, get in touch.

� For news, discussions and inform-ation on some of Bristol’s plansfor 2014, see the Bristol 2014 Facebookpage at w w w. fa c eb o o k . c o m /Bristol2014

Next year sees the 100th anniversary of thestart of the First World War. Eugene Byrne looksat just some of the plans to commemorate thecentenary, and at how you can get involved

� acta’sre s e a rc h e shave turnedup thisphoto of thewomen’sfootballteam fromthe mustardgas factory

� Fighting fit. The 12th Battalion the Gloucestershire Regiment in training at White City, Bristol, late 1914. TheBattalion was made up almost entirely of volunteers from Bristol and quickly became known as ‘Bristol’s Own’. Ittook over the former Bristol International Exhibition site at White City, near Cumberland Basin, to use as itstemporary home.

Get involved –and help markthe centenary

� AS the rest of this week’s BristolTimes has a First World War theme,we thought we’d show you this onewe recently dug out from thearchives down in the bowels of thePost building.

It’s 1917, or possibly 1918, andthe 28-seater Bristol-built number28 bus (Tramways Centre to

Avonmouth) is refuelling onColston Avenue.

Oil and petrol had to be shippedin (much of it via new facilities atPortishead), but coal was easier toget hold of, so a number of vehicleswere converted to run on gas. Thebig bag on the roof of the Number28 is being filled with town gas

piped over from Canons Marsh.Vehicles usually ran perfectly

well on gas, though the engineshad a tendency to backfire.Bristolians who remembered thegas buses always remarked onhow they would frequently let off aseries of frightening bangs – ratherlike machine-gun fire.

�BRISTOL Times reader Colin Elvinssent us this poem a few weeks ago, but wethought we’d save it until now, withRemembrance Sunday coming up. Fourof Mr Elvins’ uncles served in the GreatWar, and two were killed on the Somme.

Can I Forget?

(For all the great survivors of the GreatWa r. )

Can I forgive, can I forget all wars greatsor rows

and hope to build some new tomor-ro w s ?

Can I forget black days and nightsand lay to rest my past deepest frights?Can I forget my hidden fearsand dry my eyes that shed many tears?Can I forget the sickening sightsof much horror that plagued me

through the nights?Can I forget the outstretched handsthat begged for life on blood soaked

lands?Can I forget the cries and wails?No church of prayer see I, nor hear I

b e l l s.Can I forget the bayonets chargeof men that died, the count so large?Can I forget this pain of lifethe pain so great of death so rife?Can I forget the sea of bloodthat ebbed and flowed, like a raging

fl o o d ?Can I forget the hate I felt?A hate I endured that still won’t melt.Can I forgive the enemies’ sor rows?I know not I, until my new tomorrows.

by C P Elvins

�I WAS very interested in yourarticle on “Bristol time” in BristolTimes (October 22). It brought back adistant memory of seeing a clockdisplaying this time, some 10 minutesbehind GMT.

The clock was on a building (longsince demolished) on the left side of

Bath Road just south of Bath RoadBridge, and it never ceased to fas-cinate me, even after I discovered theexplanation for the time lag.

Do other readers remember it, or isit a figment of my imagination?

Rod Shepherdby email

Remembrance poem

�DUNDRY Hill has just beenwritten into the songbooks byBristol singer/songwriter BarryWalsh (right). BBC Radio Bristolpresenter Steve Le Fevre has calledBarry “the new Fred Wedlock” inkeeping Bristol landmarks alive inhis songs, which include Woods ofLeigh (celebrating the Clifton Sus-pension bridge), At The Curzon( C l eve d o n’s 100-year-old cinema),Mendip Hills and the Concordesong Beautiful Days, to mentionjust a few.

Dundry Hill is inspired by the 16brave men of Dundry who gavetheir lives in the Great War of 1914-18, whose names are listed on thememorial stone which stands inthe grounds of St Michael’s Churchin Dundry.

Following suggestions from audi-ences who have been moved by thispoignant song, Barry plans to gift itto Dundry British Legion and Dun-dry parish church for use in theirremembrance services this Novem-b e r.

The song can be viewed on You-Tube – search Dundry Hill andBarry Walsh.

It can also be found on Barry’slatest album Six Colours, which isavailable at Rise Records, Clifton,on iTunes or from Barry directly.

� For further information orto contact Barry, get in touchvia www.facebook.com/thebar r yw alshband

Remembrancesong for Dundry Hill

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6 Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013 7Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

LAST June, a charity support-ing local hospitals presentedGeorge Ferguson with a pairof yellow – or golden –trousers. He undertook to

wear them once the appeal hadreached £1 million, and he kept thatpromise on Friday, October 25, 2013.

On the same day, the mayor turneda few heads when he attended thefuneral of veteran heritage cam-paigner Dorothy Brown wearing thesame trousers. Were they, some mur-mured, “the right trousers”?

“Fa n cy, ” others said, “g o i n’ to afuneral in yeller trousers.”

The funeral of the irrepressible, theindomitable Dorothy was held atWoodlands Memorial Gardens.

For many, that venue is near toThornbury, but for the large numberwho gathered to remember and cel-ebrate the tireless activist, it wasthe proximity to ActonCourt, the Poyntz familymansion that DorothyBrown had been in-strumental in sav-ing, that waspar ticularlypoignant.

The funeraldrew togethermany who hadstood besideDorothy as shefought, for ex-ample, for ActonCourt, or to protectthe Gorge when de-velopers wanted to con-struct a hotel there. Severalof the family and friends who spokeduring the service referred to thenumerous battles that the deceasedhad entered into, and some spoke offinding consolation in the fact thatshe was active to the very end. In-deed, she was working on a bookabout walled cities and makingphoto-copies of maps in Redland Lib-rary when she collapsed.

Heather Leeson, of the Bristol CivicSociety, spoke of a campaign againstthe use of part of the Central Libraryas a primary school that Dorothy hadbeen waging. Her cause had broughther into conflict with the red, greenor, on this occasion, yellow-trousered

... AND THEMAYOR WOREYELLOW ...

Is clock just a figment of my imagination?

Picture of the Week

mayor, and, when Heather waved oneof Dorothy’s campaign flyers, therewas a frisson of the sort of engage-ment Dorothy had always been pre-pared for.

In the course of the funeral service,reference was also made to the factthat campaign displays Dorothy hadprepared about the city’s lost or en-

dangered heritage buildings werecurrently hanging on the

walls of John Wesley’sNew Room in the

Horsef air.They will be

there untilNovember 23,and, on the af-ternoon ofNovember 16,they will formthe back-drop to

a networkingevent on Bristol’s

Heritage Build-ings: Relics or

Legacies? that Dorothyhad helped to plan.

She had, in fact, offered tolook after the book stall on the 16thand had donated copies of two of herbooks (Bristol And How It Grew andRediscovering Acton Court And ThePoyntz Family). These will be on saleat the New Room on November 16.

Dorothy will not be present as shehad planned, but Bristol’s city scapeand Acton Court provide evidence ofwhat she fought for and what shea ch i eve d .

Her legacies also include her pub-lished writing, her family, and aboveall, her example as a concerned, per-sistent and informed campaigner.

James Gibbsby email

NEXT year sees the 100th an-niversary of the outbreakof the First World War, andwe are promised a massivenationwide series of talks,

events, TV programmes, plays, ex-hibitions, books, debates and more.

Bristol has a particularly ambi-tious programme to mark the cen-tenary. There will be a majorexhibition at M shed titled Moved byC o n fl i c t , looking at the ways in whichpeople, objects and ideas were movedand changed by the war.

There will be a dedicated Bristol2014 website, with stories, inform-ation and articles about Bristol’s partin the war, along with an online mapand smartphone app showing the loc-ations of some of the wealth of in-teresting, horrific, or just plain oddstories associated with the Bristolarea in the war. This will allow op-portunities for users to add storiesand family legends of their own.

Bristol Festival of Ideas will have anumber of free public talks and de-bates on topics linked to the FirstWorld War. At least three books aredue to be published, and the BBC’sWorld War One at Home project willbe broadcasting stories from aroundthe country and the region about howthe war affected people’s lives on thehome front.

St George’s Bristol and the BristolMusic Trust will be exploringchanges in musical tastes brought

about by the war, while the RoyalWest of England Academy will beputting on an exhibition of war artfrom the First World War to thepresent. Various community organ-isations and churches willalso be put-ting on projects of their own.

Anticipating an upsurge of interestfrom people wanting to find out moreabout ancestors who served in thewar, the Bristol and Avon FamilyHistory Society will be on hand toh e l p.

Much – though not all – of theBristol programme is being co-or-dinated by the Bristol Cultural De-velopment Partnership (BCDP), thesame people who brought you theBrunel 200 celebrations in 2006, andthe BAC 100 events around the cen-tenary of Bristol’s aerospace in-d u s t r y.

Andrew Kelly, director of BCDP,told Bristol Times: “Bristol is likely tohave the largest programme of activ-ity in the country in 2014. We’vealways been keen to commemoratethe First World War – it had a hugeimpact on Bristol, though this is notas well known as the impact of theSecond World War on the city.

“We ’re covering the full range ofactivity, from those who opposed thewar to those that went to fight; fromBristol being a prime centre for warmunitions and fighter planes to beingthe centre of the importation ofhorses to serve; from the home front

to the Western Front; from the citybefore war broke out to whathappened in Bristol afterwards.”

A number of organisations aroundthe area are looking for help from thepublic. Here are just some of theappeals that we know about:

Glenside HospitalM u se u m

The Glenside Hospital Museum,based in the church of what wasBristol’s Victorian asylum, is run-ning a major research project lookingat the period when it was used as amilitary hospital. Known as theBeaufort Hospital during the FirstWorld War, it took in huge numbers ofcasualties. The artist Stanley Spen-cer famously worked there for awhile. The museum project, fundedby the Esmee Fairbairn CollectionsFund, is researching the museum’scollection of First World War post-cards. If you have information aboutwounded soldiers, however small,

maybe about a relative, staff or pa-tient, or even a postcard from theperiod which can be scanned, pleaseemail involvingresidents@ gmail.comor call 07968 869840.

M shedCurators at M shed are looking for

objects and stories for their exhib-ition Moved by Conflict, which will beat M shed from October, 2014, toMarch, 2015.

They are particularly interested inobjects relating to the Bristol Inter-national Exhibition of 1914 (knownas “White City” – see picture caption),the Remount Depot at Shirehampton,the mustard gas factories at Avon-mouth, women’s war work, conscien-tious objectors, suffragettes, Bristol’swar hospitals, and Bristolians whoemigrated prior to the war and soserved with Commonwealth coun-t r i e s.

If you have family stories and ma-terial that you would be willing to

loan or donate, please contact Cath-erine Littlejohns, senior collectionsofficer, public history. EmailC a t h e r i n e . L i t t l e j o h n s @ b r i s t o l . go v. u k ,or call 0117 903 9816 / 0117 352 6953.

M shed is also holding a CollectingDay this coming Sunday for membersof the public to bring in objects, orsimply go along for a chat. It runsfrom 10.30am-4pm and all are verywe l c o m e.

acta C o m m u n i tyTh ea t re

Bristol community theatre com-pany acta is creating a play about thewomen who worked at the mustardgas factories in Bristol in 1918, andare seeking any stories that may havebeen passed down in local families.

The stories will be used as materialfor acta’s Gas Girls, a show whichtells the story of women who workedin the Chittening and Avonmouthfactories, which produced mustardgas and filled shells in North Bristol.There has been little research intothis topic.

“We ’ve already started on researchfrom the National Archives, news-papers, and Bristol Records Office,but we’re looking for any humanstories we can find. Although thepeople who worked at the factory arelong gone, we think there might befamily memories, stories passeddown from generation to generation,that could help us try to understandthe people who worked there,” saidacta artistic director, Neil Beddow.

If you have any information, or areinterested in the topic and wish tojoin acta’s Thursday morning re-search group, please contact RosaliePordes at acta community theatre vaiemail to ro s a l i e @ a c t a - b r i s t o l . c o m .

� If you are involved in any project tomark next year’s centenary, and arelooking for help or information fromour readers, get in touch.

� For news, discussions and inform-ation on some of Bristol’s plansfor 2014, see the Bristol 2014 Facebookpage at w w w. fa c eb o o k . c o m /Bristol2014

Next year sees the 100th anniversary of thestart of the First World War. Eugene Byrne looksat just some of the plans to commemorate thecentenary, and at how you can get involved

� acta’sre s e a rc h e shave turnedup thisphoto of thewomen’sfootballteam fromthe mustardgas factory

� Fighting fit. The 12th Battalion the Gloucestershire Regiment in training at White City, Bristol, late 1914. TheBattalion was made up almost entirely of volunteers from Bristol and quickly became known as ‘Bristol’s Own’. Ittook over the former Bristol International Exhibition site at White City, near Cumberland Basin, to use as itstemporary home.

Get involved –and help markthe centenary

� AS the rest of this week’s BristolTimes has a First World War theme,we thought we’d show you this onewe recently dug out from thearchives down in the bowels of thePost building.

It’s 1917, or possibly 1918, andthe 28-seater Bristol-built number28 bus (Tramways Centre to

Avonmouth) is refuelling onColston Avenue.

Oil and petrol had to be shippedin (much of it via new facilities atPortishead), but coal was easier toget hold of, so a number of vehicleswere converted to run on gas. Thebig bag on the roof of the Number28 is being filled with town gas

piped over from Canons Marsh.Vehicles usually ran perfectly

well on gas, though the engineshad a tendency to backfire.Bristolians who remembered thegas buses always remarked onhow they would frequently let off aseries of frightening bangs – ratherlike machine-gun fire.

�BRISTOL Times reader Colin Elvinssent us this poem a few weeks ago, but wethought we’d save it until now, withRemembrance Sunday coming up. Fourof Mr Elvins’ uncles served in the GreatWar, and two were killed on the Somme.

Can I Forget?

(For all the great survivors of the GreatWa r. )

Can I forgive, can I forget all wars greatsor rows

and hope to build some new tomor-ro w s ?

Can I forget black days and nightsand lay to rest my past deepest frights?Can I forget my hidden fearsand dry my eyes that shed many tears?Can I forget the sickening sightsof much horror that plagued me

through the nights?Can I forget the outstretched handsthat begged for life on blood soaked

lands?Can I forget the cries and wails?No church of prayer see I, nor hear I

b e l l s.Can I forget the bayonets chargeof men that died, the count so large?Can I forget this pain of lifethe pain so great of death so rife?Can I forget the sea of bloodthat ebbed and flowed, like a raging

fl o o d ?Can I forget the hate I felt?A hate I endured that still won’t melt.Can I forgive the enemies’ sor rows?I know not I, until my new tomorrows.

by C P Elvins

�I WAS very interested in yourarticle on “Bristol time” in BristolTimes (October 22). It brought back adistant memory of seeing a clockdisplaying this time, some 10 minutesbehind GMT.

The clock was on a building (longsince demolished) on the left side of

Bath Road just south of Bath RoadBridge, and it never ceased to fas-cinate me, even after I discovered theexplanation for the time lag.

Do other readers remember it, or isit a figment of my imagination?

Rod Shepherdby email

Remembrance poem

�DUNDRY Hill has just beenwritten into the songbooks byBristol singer/songwriter BarryWalsh (right). BBC Radio Bristolpresenter Steve Le Fevre has calledBarry “the new Fred Wedlock” inkeeping Bristol landmarks alive inhis songs, which include Woods ofLeigh (celebrating the Clifton Sus-pension bridge), At The Curzon( C l eve d o n’s 100-year-old cinema),Mendip Hills and the Concordesong Beautiful Days, to mentionjust a few.

Dundry Hill is inspired by the 16brave men of Dundry who gavetheir lives in the Great War of 1914-18, whose names are listed on thememorial stone which stands inthe grounds of St Michael’s Churchin Dundry.

Following suggestions from audi-ences who have been moved by thispoignant song, Barry plans to gift itto Dundry British Legion and Dun-dry parish church for use in theirremembrance services this Novem-b e r.

The song can be viewed on You-Tube – search Dundry Hill andBarry Walsh.

It can also be found on Barry’slatest album Six Colours, which isavailable at Rise Records, Clifton,on iTunes or from Barry directly.

� For further information orto contact Barry, get in touchvia www.facebook.com/thebar r yw alshband

Remembrancesong for Dundry Hill

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8 Tu e s d a y, November 5, 2013w w w. bristolpost.co.uk

SCARLET FLOWEROF REMEMBRANCEEvery year we commemorate the war dead by wearingpoppies, and laying wreaths of them at monuments. DrNicholas Saunders of Bristol University here explains howit became the symbol of remembrance

DURING the First World War, soldiersexperienced conflicting images of thecrimson poppy and scenes of carnageon the battlefields. Corn poppies wereimagined as the spirits of the dead

rising from the blood-drenched earth – “thr ust-ing from the lips of craters, undaunted by thedesolation, heedless of human fury and stu-p i d i t y, ” as the fighter-pilot Cecil Lewis ob-s e r ve d .

Fred Hodges, a veteran, remembered how“One day I picked a bunch of red field poppiesfrom the old grassy trench and put them in themetal cup attached to my rifle . . . I was acutelyconscious of them growing there in the midst ofall that man-made destruction”.

In a Flanders dugout, Sapper Jack Martinrecorded in his diary that “we have a vase ofsmall marguerites and flaming poppies … T hevase is an old 18-pounder shell case that we havepolished up and made to look very smart”.

It was John McCrae, a Canadian soldier-sur-geon, who crystallised soldiers’ feelings in his1915 poem In Flanders Fields. Crouching at theentrance to his dugout, just outside of Ypres,McCrae gazed on the small battlefield cemeterywhere he had just buried a good friend. Fromhis grief he conjured the poem, immortalisingthe poppy in his opening stanza, In Flandersfields the poppies blow, Between the crosses, rowon row.

The poem became a touchstone of emotion forthe war generation, striking a chord with sol-diers and public alike. Reprinted many times, itwas used to raise money and morale for the waref fort.

In Flanders Fields established the cornpoppy as the symbolic flower of the Great War,but did not guarantee its post-war emergence asan international symbol of commemoration.This final transformation took place in NewYork in the days leading up to the Armistice ofNovember 11, 1918.

It was here that Moina Michael, an unas-suming middle-aged school teacher, had whatshe called a spiritual conversion.

Moina chanced upon McCrae’s poem in amagazine. She imagined the voices of the deadon the Western Front calling on her to convertthe scarlet flower into a sacred emblem of theirsacrifice. She pledged her soul, she said, to “t h atcrimson cup flower of Flanders, the red poppywhich caught the sacrificial blood of ten millionmen dying for the peace of the world”.

Her boundless energy overcame manyhurdles and, in 1921, the poppy was adopted asthe official remembrance flower of the UnitedStates. The Buddy Poppy, as it wasrechristened in 1924, remains America’s na-

tional flower of war commemoration to thisd ay.

Meanwhile, Anna Guérin, a French widow,championed the manufacture of silken red pop-pies in the devastated areas of France, and soldthem across the world to raise money for Frenchwar orphans. In the USA, Moina won the daywhen she supported American veterans whodecided that their own disabled comradesshould make poppies, and not import them fromF rance.

Undaunted, Anna Guérin sealed the poppy’sinternational success by travelling to Canada,and her representatives to Australia and NewZealand, all of which adopted the commem-orative flower, and placed orders with herFrench poppy makers. She visited London too,where she convinced the British Legion toembrace the poppy. The Legion soon beganmaking its own artificial flowers for their PoppyDay Appeal.

Buying a Remembrance Day poppy in Britain

from 1921 directly supported the war-wounded,who were employed in the British Legion’snewly established poppy factory.

The beginnings were modest, in a small roomabove a shop off the Old Kent Road in south eastLondon. The operation soon moved to Rich-mond, in Surrey, and then, in 1933, it movedagain to a purpose-built factory nearby, where itremains to this day.

The symbolism is as poignant and appro-priate today as it was at the time. Men shatteredby war created poppies to commemorate theirfallen comrades and raise money to supportthemselves and the bereaved.

During the inter-war years of 1919-1939, crim-son poppies for the living and counterpartwreaths on headstones and memorials becamea new tradition.

As war loomed once again, people visited thedesolate battlefields of the old Western Front.They fell silent only to ponder or weep, to buysouvenirs, and imagine their loved ones whohad once passed this way. They set down theirpoppies on memorials, in cemeteries, and at theedge of bomb craters.

The Remembrance Day poppy flourished, re-newing itself each year, bringing hope to fam-ilies decimated by the war. Wearing the poppywas an act of faith and solidarity with the deadand the living, and seemed to promise that suchterrible sufferings would never be repeated.

Strange sights were seen in Britain. Apoppy-decked elephant paraded the streets ofLeeds in 1924, and in the same year apoppy-covered goat hauled a miniature replicaof Wimbledon’s war memorial around southLondon streets. In the grounds next to London’sWestminster Abbey, a single wooden cross stoodalone until 1928 when passers-by began plantingtheir own poppies alongside – and the Field ofRemembrance was born.

The commemorative poppy changes also tosuit different times and different wars. Pas-sengers at London’s Heathrow airport wereastonished in 2008 to see a huge Poppy Man,pictured left, towering five metres tall, andswathed in 8,000 scarlet poppies. The giantfigure had been invented for the Royal BritishLegion. It connected with a younger generationin a more original and meaningful way thanprevious campaigns that had relied on theendorsements of celebrities.

The Legion launched its 2008 Poppy DayAppeal by taking Poppy Man to southern Iraq,where he posed alongside British soldiers, calmand surreal among the chaos of war. He stoodalongside troops in Basra at a service of ded-ication at a memorial wall commemoratingfallen British soldiers in Iraq.

Poppy Man taps into the core of the Re-membrance Day poppy – honouring the past,but resolutely contemporary, forever relevant tothe young men who die and are wounded farfrom home, and who leave parents, wives, sweet-hearts and children behind.

Every year, around 80 million people acrossthe world buy a Flanders poppy in one of itsmany forms, participating in its message ofremembering and honouring the war dead.Given its literary status by John McCrae, andits final shape by Moina Michael and AnnaGuérin, the commemorative flower is arguablyone of the most evocative and enduring symbolsof our humanity.

� Dr Nicholas Saunders is a lecturer in theDepartment of Archaeology and Anthropologyat Bristol University and is one of the world’sleading experts on the archaeology of the FirstWorld War. His new book The Poppy: FromFlanders Fields to Helmand Province, has justbeen published by OneWorld.See http://tinyurl.com/The-Popp y.

IN FLANDERS ’ FIELDS

By John McCrae, 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row,That mark our place; and in the skyThe larks, still bravely singing, flyScarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:To you from failing hands we throwThe torch; be yours to hold it high.If ye break faith with us who dieWe shall not sleep, though poppies

growIn Flanders fields.

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