Tynemouth WW1 Commemoration Project

Controversy over national plans to remember war sacrifice

A row has broken out amongst those planning how the nation will commemorate the centenary of the Great War. With barely a year before the centenary of the beginning of the war, there appear to be two rival themes emerging amongst the members of the committee chaired by Maria Miller, the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport.

The group which wishes to see a restrained and non-nationalistic approach is exemplified by Sebastian Foulkes (author of Birdsong) and seems to regard any sense of celebrating Britain’s ‘victory’ as undesirable and offensive to the other nations involved – particularly Germany, where it seems there will be no formal government action to mark the outbreak of the war or the ensuing four years of conflict.

A rival camp believes that our understanding of the war was distorted in the 1960’s by the over-emphasis placed upon the works and memoirs of a small group of poets (many of them undoubtedly very brave men); the influence of Joan Littlewood’s ‘Oh what a lovely war’ and Alan Clarke’s history of the British Army ‘The Donkeys’.

This view has been put forward by another member of the committee: Professor Sir Hew Strachan (who is to deliver the first of the Tynemouth Project’s lectures this October in conjunction with Northumbria University). He believes it is important to recognise that there were issues of right and wrong in this war, and that the hard won victory of Britain and her allies should not be overlooked.

The proposed concentration on a number of totemic dates e.g 1^st July, 1916, seen by many as redolent of waste and senseless carnage provoked by incompetent generals, is to miss the point that lessons were learned, albeit at terrible cost. Strachan believes that to overlook the battle of Amiens (August 1918) and the final 100 days of the war is to deny the enormous success of the British and dominion forces.

The men who volunteered, and those conscripted later were fighting in what the vast majority believed to be a just cause, and you only have to look at the letters home from the front, or the massive expansion of the Royal British Legion in the 1920s and 30s to see that. Indeed, the view that heavy losses were a necessary price to pay in the struggle between right over aggression, comes across very strongly when you read the parish magazine of Christ Church in North Shields from that period.

Now, with only 14 months to the centenary of the fateful day in Sarajevo (28^thJune, 1914) that sparked the greatest conflict in history, the government’s plans seem in disarray or at best in dispute. On the other hand, here in Tynemouth and North Tyneside plans are well in hand to mark the events of the war recognising the sacrifice of the whole community and the consequences for families and those who returned.