“ON a damp morning in March, when the mist hung like a thick veil over the whole valley, the solemn ceremony of the planting of the oak trees began,” records the Wolsingham Grammar School magazine’s summer edition of 1918. “All the school children were assembled for the occasion and silently looked on while the school’s youngest pupils planted the trees.”
And so in Weardale, eight months before the First World War came to an end, the first memorial to the fallen of this conflict in the whole country was commenced.
The idea of commemorating those ordinary people who had given their lives in battle was really a new development in 1918, although Britain’s oldest war memorial is said to be All Souls College at Oxford which was founded in 1438 on condition that then students pray for those men killed fighting the French.
By the 19th Century, commemorations of war were usually statues of victorious commanders riding heroically on charging stallions. The fallen foot soldier didn’t get a look-in.
A change began with the Second Boer War, which was fought when the British Army was trying to impose its colonial will on South Africa, between 1899 to 1902. About 180,000 British troops the largest force ever sent overseas – was sent to South Africa, and 20,000 died and another 20,000 were injured. Those who returned home, were welcomed by impressive civic ceremonies.
The popularity of the soldiers involved in the war led to the first memorials being created to the fallen, and the first one of these in our area seems to be the Dorman Memorial Museum, in Middlesbrough, which opened on July 1, 1904. It has a companion brass plate in St Mary’s Church in Richmond.
Both the museum and the plate were paid for by Sir Arthur Dorman, the co-founder of the Dorman Long ironworks on Teesside, in memory of his son and the 53 other members of the Richmond-based Green Howards who had died in South Africa.
Lt George Lockwood Dorman was only 20 when he died at Kroonstad on March 30, 1901, of “enteric fever”, or typhoid – because water was not boiled before drinking, this disease killed more British soldiers during the Boer War than the Boers did, with up to 50 men a day dying from it.
Before Lt Dorman succumbed, he had sent back interesting ethnographical items from South Africa to go with his collection of similar materials from Australia and New Zealand. This collection was at the heart of the museum opened in his memory.
Therefore, the second war memorial in our area is the bronze plaque in St Mary’s Church, Barnard Castle, which was unveiled on July 27, 1904 – a month after the memorial museum opened. It, too, has a companion memorial: a large stone boulder on a plinth in Galgate.
These memorials were paid for by the officers and men of the 3rd Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry, a battalion that had been based in Barney since its formation in 1853. They commemorate the 30 Durhams who had lost their lives in South Africa, including their commander, Colonel Richard Wilson, who had also died of enteric fever.
There are other Boer War memorials in Gateshead and Hartlepool, and, of course, there is one beside St Cuthbert’s Church in Darlington. When such a memorial was first proposed in 1902, Darlington’s pacifist Quakers were against it and when the soldier design was drawn up, they disapproved of its aggressive stance.
However, it was one of their number, William Edwin Pease of Mowden Hall, who enticed Lord Frederick Roberts, Britain’s veteran war hero who had rescued the situation in South Africa, to come and unveil it. Mr Pease, the chairman of Cleveland Bridge, met Lord Roberts on a rickety bridge over the River Zambezi beneath the Victoria Falls in southern Africa. Lord Roberts was inspecting Cleveland Bridge’s attempts to throw a permanent bridge over the river, and Mr Pease jokingly threatened to throw off the temporary bridge unless he came to Darlington.
He duly arrived on August 5, 1905, and was made the first Freeman of Darlington in return for unveiling the memorial – but as he did so, 70 members of the Peace Association met in the Friends Meeting House in Skinnergate to make their point.
The memorial commemorates the two Darlington men - Colonel JG Wilson of Cliffe, near Piercebridge, and the luckless Sergeant CS Luck who were killed in action - and the nine townsmen who died of their wounds. Also on the memorial are the names of the 77 Darlington men who took part in the conflict.
Britain was then peaceful until 1914, and Wolsingham school was, according to the Imperial War Museum, the first place in the country to create a memorial to those who had died in the conflict.
The headteacher, Joseph Backhouse, is credited with coming up with the idea, and that misty morning in March 1918, the pupils planted 12 oaks – one for each of the former pupils who had been killed.
The school magazine records: “‘I plant this oak, hereafter to be called the [name] Oak, in memory of [name], who died gloriously, fighting for his country’ ¬– these words were delivered in a small quavering treble, as each successive oak was planted. At length the last tree was firmly set in the earth, and each returned to his lessons with thoughts somewhat sobered.”
By it wasn’t the last tree. By the end of the war eight months later, another six old Wolsinghamians were known to have died, and so six more oaks were planted. To cover the cost, Mr Backhouse asked for donations of a shilling or half-a-crown, and he had enough money leftover to create a pictorial memorial showing each of the dead soldiers.
The Imperial War Museum also notes that the Wolsingham memorial is highly unusual in that it is a living memorial – the oaks grow older with each passing year, unlike the men who were cut down in their prime.
Other communities joined Wolsingham in commemorating their dead from the early 1920s. The impetus for having local memorials came because most grieving parents or wives were unable to afford to travel to the European battlefields to see the graves of their loved ones and so the local monuments became their shrines.
One hundred years later, most communities have used their memorials as the focal point for their commemoration of the centenary of the First World War. It will be interesting to see if anyone uses the centenary of the unveiling of their war memorial as a reason for further commemoration.
L Are there any other unusual war memorials we should be aware of? Was your community’s war memorial among the first to be unveiled in 1920? Are there any other Boer War memorials we haven’t mentioned? Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk
Of course, conflicts continued after the end of the First World War. In the Second World War, 40 more Wolsingham School pupils were killed and saplings taken from the First World War oaks were used to commemorate them. In 2003, a 59th tree was planted in memory of Warrant Officer Colin Wall who was killed in Iraq.
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