Episode 26: The War Memorials Of WW1: The Secrets of the Stone

In advance of Remembrance Sunday on November 11, Clive has been visiting the Commonwealth War Graves in France. The Imperial War Graves Commission, as it was called when established in 1917, was the brain child of Fabian Ware, a civil servant turned newspaper editor who commanded a Red Cross dressing station during the First World War and was therefore saw the horror at first hand. Ware realised that the hundreds of thousands of young men who died for Britain deserved proper burial and commemoration. The losses were on a scale unknown in previous wars, and the monuments and cemeteries built to remember them were also completely without precedent. The British government rose to the challenge, finding a solution that was supremely well-adapted to the character of the nation. The result was one of the greatest commissions of public art ever seen.

Clive and John discuss this epic achievement. On the Somme alone there were about 450 cemeteries, requiring monumental expression. Architecturally, this gave the lead architects - Sir Edwin Lutyens, Sir Reginald Blomfield and Sir Herbert Baker, who were later joined by Charles Holden (who twice rejected a knighthood) – an unparallelled opportunity to design structures that were both poetic and abstract, akin to music in having no practical value than in the remembering the Fallen. Today no one can see the cemeteries of the First World War without feeling deeply moved by the experience. Fortunately, the need arose at time when it was possible to find a shared architectural language for the profoundest emotions, centred on a nation’s sense of loss.