Tag: memorial

  • Heritage and Memory: Warlingham War Memorial

    Heritage and Memory: Warlingham War Memorial

    Benjamin Locke, a second year History student at the University of Portsmouth, has written the following blog entry on Warlingham War Memorial for the Introduction to Historical Research module. Benjamin considers the messages provided by the memorial’s imagery and how they reflect the social expectations of the time of its unveiling. The module is co-ordinated by Dr Maria Cannon, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Portsmouth.

    ‘Heritage is the valorisation and preservation by individuals and groups of traces of the past that are thought to embody their cultural identity’. [1] The values and practices of heritage preservation are determined by major political and economic trade-offs, both of which determine what sites and properties are to be preserved. [2] In this blog, I will assess the role collective memory played in the foundation of the Warlingham War Memorial, and if the 1920s values on which it was built can come into question. This is important in understanding the cultural significance of the memorial. Maurice Walbwachs’ quote ‘We can understand each memory as it occurs in individual thought only if we locate each within the thought of the corresponding group’summarises how assessing collective memory can help interpret and understand its cultural significance and influence. [3] In this blog I will also determine whether the memorial is successful in its original role as a site of remembrance for those who tragically lost their lives in the Great War, and its greater cultural meaning and representation for contemporary British society.

    https://www.iwm.org.uk/memorials/item/memorial/919
    Warblingham War Memorial, Tandridge, Surrey
    Image: iwm.org.co.uk

    Warlingham War Memorial was designed by John Edward Taylerson and was originally unveiled on the 4th December 1921 to commemorate the First World War. A plaque was later placed in 1946 in honour of those who fought and died in the Second World War. It consists of a tall column, with a high-standing soldier sheltering a helpless woman and the baby in her arms. The role that collective memory has on remembrance and how this comes into play is questionable. Halbwachs argues that we must ‘put ourselves in the position of others’ and ‘tread the same path’ to really understand remembrance. [4] Does the memorial really represent how contemporary British people viewed the war? It seems to portray the war as a male sacrifice for well-being of women and children. Angela Woollacott argues that women’s participation in the war effort was lamented by guilt, anger and adoration that their brothers/fiancées were evoked in their role as warriors, which ‘subsumed their own novel freedoms’. [5] She uses the memoir of Peggy Hamilton, a middle-class woman, who wrote that women suffered an ‘inferiority complex’ which put a barrier of ‘indescribable experience’ between men and women. [6] The Warlingham Memorial reflects this, with its lack of acknowledgement of the great sacrifices’ women made to the war effort in favour of the valorisation of the male soldier. The hopeless woman on the memorial is in no way a representation on the role of women, or how collective memory today views the role of women in the war. However, class differences are what really distinguishes people from their roles in war. A middle-class woman’s experience would arguably be completely different to the experiences lived by working women.

    The roles of war memorials are to do the dead justice and to make sure that we follow their example and ensure that they did not die in vain. Alex King perfectly summarises this duty, saying that it is ‘necessary to understand what the dead had died for and to follow the example they had set. The dead had died for others, and by emulating them they were, indeed, worthy of the sacrifices the dead had made on their behalf’. [7] The memorial does a successful job in showing that soldiers died to protect their families. The message the memorial emits is powerful and successfully aids our memory in the sacrifices made, even if the message that can be seen to invalidate the role of women. Despite its success in acting as a memorial for the fallen, is it dangerous for us to entirely take in the messages, which according to some revisionist historians are inaccurate portrayals composed of myths? King argues that commemoration had always offered a political platform, which had become available to mass organisations like the British Legion and the League of Nations. [8] The latter of these organisations would have wanted to preserve the status quo and deflect any criticism of the war, which was directed to the ruling classes, by instead portraying the war as a noble cause of death for the good of Europe and everyone at home. Ross Wilson supports this argument, believing that interrogation must be done when thinking about the message that memorials portray. However, he argues that myths in popular memory of the war are widely known by the public, and that the audiences do not passively consume everything they see. [9] Indeed, Wilson uses the popular television series Blackadder Goes Forth to show that there is an understanding of what the Great War was like, as it contains suffering soldiers, incompetent officers, atrocious conditions and pointless military advances. [10]

    In conclusion, the war memorial successfully acts as a symbol of remembrance for those that fell in the First World War. It creates an image of noble sacrifice, and despite any opinions on the causes, justifications and pointlessness of the war, it is clear that many of these soldiers fought and died for their country, and will ensure that the people of Warlingham will never forget the sacrifices of combatants in both the First and Second World Wars. However, the connection between politics and remembrance has meant that the role of women during the war has been diminished, with the memorial’s portrayal of the woman as being helpless, weak and being shielded by nothing but the men fighting on the front line. By today’s standards, this is not a completely successful memorial in showing the great sacrifices that the whole of British society had made to the war effort. It is important for us to not judge societal norms through the lenses of today, and we must remember that gender roles and norms were completely different to what they are now. Nicholas J. Saunders’ remarks – ‘While memorials are supposed to serve as tangible weighty structures denoting consensus, they can divide a community as much is it could unite’ – perfectly details how the politics in memory can be polarising. [11] The memorial is overall, very moving and sad, but it makes me wonder that if it were to be situated in central London rather than a village in Tandridge, would it prove too controversial and raise debate?

    Notes

    [1] Yudhishthir Raj Isar, Dacia Viejo-Rose and Helmut Anheier, Heritage, Memory and Identity (London: Sage Publications, 2011), 3.

    [2] Isar, Viejo-Rose and Anheier, Heritage, Memory and Identity, 4.

    [3] Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (London: University Chicago Press, 1992), 53.

    [4] Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 53.

    [5] Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, Gendering War Talk (Winchester: Princeton University Press, 1993) Chapter 6: Angela Woollacott, 128.

    [6] Cooke and Woollacott, Gendering War Talk, 128.

    [7] Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 155.

    [8] King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain, 165.

    [9] Bart Ziino, Remembering the First World War (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2015) Chapter 3: Ross Wilson, 135.

    [10] Ziino, Remembering the First World War, 140.

    [11] Nicholas J. Saunders, Matters of Conflict: Material Culture, Memory and the First World War (London: Routledge, 2004), 134.

  • Heritage and Memory: The NAMES Project Quilt

    Heritage and Memory: The NAMES Project Quilt

    Sophie Loftus, a second year History student at the University of Portsmouth, has written the following blog entry on Cleve Jones’ NAMES Project Quilt for the Introduction to Historical Research module. Sophie discusses how the quilt acts as an important memorial to the people who lost their lives to AIDS, while at the same time challenging social and cultural understandings of the disease. The module is co-ordinated by Dr Maria Cannon, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Portsmouth.

    In 1989, activist Cleve Jones stood in front of the White House with a message. Jones stated: ‘We bring a quilt. We hope it will help people to remember. We hope it will teach our leaders to act.’ [1] In that year, with limited response or recognition from its government, the death toll from AIDS in the United States of America – not simply homosexual men, but also heterosexual women, children and men – already stood at almost 90,000. Some three years earlier, in 1986, Jones realised that the dead in San Francisco from HIV/AIDS had already reached 1000 people. At the annual march, held in honour of Harvey Milk on the anniversary of his assassination, Jones asked members of the march to put the names of those lost on placards as a form of remembrance. These were then hung on the side of the old federal building. The effect reminded Jones of a quilt, something familial, cosy, handed down through generations for warmth and memory. [2] Jones wanted to create a memorial to those who had died from AIDS. In the Quilt, Jones argued that he wanted to take AIDS from ‘a “gay disease” into a shared national tragedy.’ [3] By the time the NAMES Project Quilt was displayed on the Mall in Washington DC in October 1987, as part of the National March for Lesbian and Gay rights, there were almost 2000 panels. [4] As of June 2016, The AIDS Memorial quilt makes up more than 49,000 panels, each one to commemorate someone lost to HIV/AIDS. [5] This blog looks to examine the power of collective memory and remembrance and how historians can engage with these sources to understand the power of memory not just as a source, but also as a subject. [6]

    The AIDS quilt. Image from Wikipedia.

    Arthur Marwick argued that the definition of a primary document was one which ‘by its very existence records that some event took place.’ [7] However, it must be argued that when historians are looking at other types of sources for historical importance, by simply reducing an object to little more than evidence, this can remove any form of emotive understanding of an event. [8] Sarah Barber argued that each type of source has ‘its own history which overlaps and influences those of other sources.’ [9] Here, the AIDS memorial Quilt can be seen as a useful tool in the understanding of other forms of source doing the work of memorialisation. Elaine Showalter, argues that the Quilt is seen as a ‘metaphor of national identity.’ [10] Cleve Jones, in the Quilt, attempted to represent familial bonds. By creating a memorial to the sheer size of the AIDS problem in the United States, he wanted to create a ‘way for survivors to work through their grief in a positive, creative way.’ [11] By attempting to create a positive representation of the AIDS epidemic, Jones may not have realised that he was also tapping into the ways in which scholars had begun to understand that there was a violence to the 20th century, which meant that people attempting to understand and process grief would require new ways to do this. [12]

    In the 1920s, Maurice Halbwach argued that collective memory was a ‘product of social frameworks.’ [13] He argued that history was the recording that remained once social memory faded away, and that ‘there is only one history.’ [14] However, this cannot be seen to be true; when understanding collective memory, one must understand that as a source, it is as unreliable as any other due to its potentially personal nature. The Quilt is a highly emotive piece, and some members of the LGBT community argued that it was too sanitised in its remembrance. Douglas Crimp argued that AIDS Activism hinged on how the gay community wished to be remembered, or how the crisis was intended to be seen: whether it was a disease ‘that has simply struck at this time and in this place – or as the result of gross political negligence.’ [15] Some members of the LGBT community argued that the Quilt was simply making the problem more palatable to heterosexual viewers. Thus, Marwick’s theory cannot be substantiated, collective memory cannot be seen as one history, for memory can be to some, a moment for grief and mourning, and for others a call to action and activism. [16]

    Scholars such as Bill Niven have argued that collective memory can be fruitful in understanding the way in which states and governments have attempted to encourage groups to certain views. [17] The AIDS Memorial Quilt however, is a vital example of how collective memory can challenge this. At the time of its conception, the American government were doing everything in its power to ignore AIDS. President Ronald Reagan did not mention the word AIDS on television until 1986, by which point almost 15,000 people had died of the disease. It is here that it can be seen that collective memory, or what John Bodnar has called ‘vernacular culture’ is crucial in describing the way in which groups form ways which ‘reflect how they want to remember historical events’. [18] This can be important for underrepresented groups who wish to control the narrative surrounding the memory of their own. The Quilt can be seen as what Mary Fulbrook describes as a ‘remembering agent’, or as what Jennifer Power calls a ‘counter memorial’, a piece of history which can be seen as not only a political protest, but also arguably showcasing the human side of the AIDS crisis. [19] It is not as some memorials, including those also represented at the Mall where the first showing of the quilt was presented, are normally envisioned. It is not made of stone, it moves and grows. The Quilt travels the nation and the world, in an attempt to challenge social and cultural understandings of AIDS.

    The Quilt was nominated in 1989 for a Nobel Peace Prize, and is the largest community art project in the world. [20] Cleve Jones created a memorial that grows every day, and can easily challenge historians regarding appropriate representations of remembrance. While some historians argue about the validity of collective memory as a source due to its potentially unreliable nature, the Quilt shows that counter memorials and representations of collective memory can be so important in understanding underrepresented history. They can place in the hands of historians and the world the ability to understand a past and a present which for some will never be memorialised in stone, but that people still require to grieve, to process, and to remember.

    NOTES

    [1] Cleve Jones, When We Rise: My life in the Movement. (London: Constable, 2017). 194.

    [2] Peter S. Hawkins, “Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Summer, 1993). 752-779.

    [3] Hawkins, Naming. 752-779.

    [4] Ibid.

    [5] The NAMES Project, “AIDS Memorial Quilt FAQs”. https://www.aidsquilt.org/about/faqs, last accessed 11 April 2019.

    [6] Joan Tumblety, “Introduction: working with memory as source and subject” in Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject. ed. Joan Tumblety. (London: Routledge, 2013). 1-17.

    [7] Sarah Barber and Corinna M. Peniston-Bird, “Introduction” in History beyond the text: A Students guide to approaching alternative sources. ed. Sarah Barber and Corinna M. Peniston-Bird. (London: Routledge, 2009). 1-13.

    [8] Barber, Beyond. 1-13.

    [9] Ibid.

    [10] Elaine Showalter, Sister’s choice: tradition and change in American women’s writing. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1991). 169.

    [11] Ibid.

    [12] Tublety, Memory. 1-17.

    [13] Bill Niven and Stefan Berger, “Introduction” in Writing the History of Memory. ed Bill Niven and Stefan Berger, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 1-25.

    [14] Ibid.

    [15] Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” The MIT Press, Vol 51, (Winter 1989): 3-18.

    [16] Jennifer Power, Movement, Knowledge, Emotion: Gay activism and HIV/AIDS in Australia. (Canberra: ANU Press, 2011). 157.

    [17] Niven, Writing. 1-25.

    [18] Ibid.

    [19] Mary Fulbrook, “History Writing and ‘collective memory’” in Writing the History of Memory. ed Bill Niven and Stefan Berger, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 65-88; Power, Movement, 148.

    [20] The NAMES Project, “AIDS Memorial Quilt Background.” https://www.aidsquilt.org/about/medianewsroom, last accessed 11 April 2019.