Death and burial
Death, Identification and Burial
Death, Identification and Burial
The Great War left a 'million dead' from Great Britain and its Empire.
The Prince of Wales wrote in The Times
in 1928:
'It is not easy to grasp the meaning of the words "A Million Dead". No one has ever seen - or ever could see - an assemblage of that number of living; and when one tries to visualise them, remembering what splendid fellows they were - what hopes and affections had clung to each one in his life - what heart-break his loss meant to his family and friends - then one begins to get some conception of the sacrifice which the Empire made in a cause which was thrust upon it'.
The Great War left a 'million dead' from Great Britain and its Empire.
The Prince of Wales wrote in The Times
in 1928:
'It is not easy to grasp the meaning of the words "A Million Dead". No one has ever seen - or ever could see - an assemblage of that number of living; and when one tries to visualise them, remembering what splendid fellows they were - what hopes and affections had clung to each one in his life - what heart-break his loss meant to his family and friends - then one begins to get some conception of the sacrifice which the Empire made in a cause which was thrust upon it'.
Of the 1,062,944 British or Dominion personnel commemorated by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 53 per cent are buried in named graves, 17 per cent in graves marked ‘unknown’, with 30 per cent ‘missing’.
The post-war exhumations
Between 1918 and 1921 Army exhumation squads moved across the battlefields and recovered 204,604 of the then missing half million soldiers . The task was passed to the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission, who by 1939 had recovered nearly 40,000 more.
Peter describes the progress and problems of the exhumations in his article 'Clearing the Dead' published in the Birmingham University Journal of the Centre for First World War Studies (2014)
(photo IWM Q100915).
Peter describes the progress and problems of the exhumations in his article 'Clearing the Dead' published in the Birmingham University Journal of the Centre for First World War Studies (2014)
(photo IWM Q100915).
Identification of the Dead
A task for the exhumation squads was to attempt to identify the dead. Peter examines how this was done in his article 'Identifying the Dead of Tyne Cot', published in Stand To!, the journal of the Western Front Association in 2019.
West Norwood Cemetery
One of London's 'magnificent seven'
The CWGC records 91,389 Great War casualty burials in the UK, and there are 140 actual interments at West Norwood. There are, however, further inscriptions on family graves to those buried in cemeteries or commemorated on memorials overseas.
Working with the Friends of West Norwood Cemetery, Peter and fellow researcher John Clarke have produced a book of mini-biographies of the nearly 600 known individuals interred or memorialised there.
Read a 'taster' article about the WW1 dead of West Norwood Cemetery published in Stand To! (2022) ...
Peter and John Clarke's book on the First World War and the Cemetery is now available ...
