Beyond the War Memorials - My Experience

The Waterloo and Seaforth War Memorial

Recently, I took part in an online project run by Sefton Library Service called "Beyond the War Memorials". This involved a number of volunteers, including me, compiling a database of all the men of the Sefton area who fell in the Great War, and whose names are listed on local war memorials. For those who do not know, Sefton MBC is located in the north-west of England, and incorporates Southport at the north end of the borough, stretching south in a coastal strip through Formby, Waterloo and Seaforth, down to Bootle in northern Liverpool. Thousands of men and women from this area died on active service in WW1, and there were a number of memorials erected to them, as happened everywhere in Britain in the post-WW1 years.

With one other volunteer, I was allocated the "5 Lamps" memorial seen above. My estimable fellow volunteer, Laura, had the arduous task of listing the names and brief biographies of the fallen while I was on holiday in the Philippines in an area badly served for internet provision (Laura, I salute you). Consequently, I could not start until mid-March. Now, I was told by several people not to make the biographies of the men too detailed and, before I started, I looked at the number of names on one panel, and thought "I'll never manage this, anyway!".

Well, I was wrong about that, happily. I volunteered for the task as I have an interest in WW1. I have read a fair number of books about it, and even written and recorded several poems about it for my charity albums. In a very short time, I became absorbed in the project, and the details of how these names on a wall came to be there. I accepted the need to avoid too much detail, but it would be a hard hearted person who could read the brief biographical details available on the Merseyside Roll of Honour and not be moved. 

The more I worked on these names, the more I engaged with the feelings of the families and, after the passage of a century, came to share something of their grief and bereavement. For, behind the panel, there is a wellspring of pain of family members whose relatives never came home. There were widows left with large families, parents who lost their only son, some parents who lost more than one, and children who lost their fathers. Again and again, I shook my head in sadness when I saw the ages of most of the 438 fallen men. For the most part, they were young, some as young as 17, losing their lives in battles that now belong to history: Loos, Aubers Ridge, the Somme, Arras, Gallipoli, Passchendaele, Mesopotamia. In an age when most people never travelled far from home, the knowledge that your relative was lost far away must have been unbelievably painful. A deeply moving example of this is found in ''The Bootle Times'' of July 11th, 1919. Mrs Catherine Cunningham of Seaforth placed a memorial tribute to three of her sons, killed in the war: Andrew, Robert, and William Charles Cunningham. Included in the tribute is this short couplet, perhaps written by Mrs Cunningham herself:
"To graves far away, a mother's sad heart wanders to-day"
A few simple words, inspired by what must have been immeasurable grief.

All too many of the men have the bleak epitaph "No known grave" or "No grave but the sea". It does not require much to imagine what might have become of them. For me, having read a good deal about the first day of the Battle of the Somme, I had a fairly good idea of why so many men who fell on July 1st, 1916, had no known grave. When I read of the men who were lost at sea, however, I learned something new to me: nearly 90% of the crew of the Lusitania, sunk on the 7th May, 1915, came from Merseyside, and a number are listed on the Seaforth and Waterloo memorial. Tragically, several were no more than boys. The youngest, a "steward's boy" named Harold Joseph Wright, was only 14 when the Lusitania was sunk.

So many of the brief biographies were painful to read, such as that of Matthew Robinson, 17 years old, who was aboard the SS Ausonia, torpedoed in 1918. Both of his legs were broken in the attack, and he died in hospital in Ireland after eight days in an open boat, before being rescued. Two women are listed: Florence Jones, a nurse who died of pneumonia in 1918, and Agnes B. Hird, a 42-year old stewardess, lost on the SS Ava in January, 1917. Sadly, Agnes's husband, Anthony, was killed on the Western Front later that year.

There are also inspiring stories of courage. One is that of the gallant Lieutenant Walter Duncan of the Kings Liverpool Regiment who was captured during the Somme battle in 1916. He escaped from his POW camp in February, 1918, and returned to duty in England, only to die of pneumonia in the December of that year.

Particularly poignant for me was the fate of  Second Lieutenant Francis Zacharias, of the South Wales Borderers, who died heroically while fighting on the Somme in 1916 ("No known grave"). The Merseyside Roll of Honour quotes "Liverpool's Scroll of Fame" as saying: "He gave his life for his men". Zacharias lived in Victoria Road, Waterloo. His mother was British, his father was German by birth, but a naturalised British citizen. Like many Germans resident in Britain during WW1, Francis's father was loyal to Britain, and many sons of German families, including Francis, fought in the British armed forces. 102 years after the death of Francis, I find myself hoping that his father was spared the irrational, populist hatred of all things German that swept Britain at that time.

When I first started this project, I was daunted by the size of the task. Instead, I found it a rewarding and humbling experience.

Men of the King's Liverpool Regiment, 1915. Many men from Seaforth and Waterloo served in this regiment during the First World War; 13, 795 Kingsmen died in the conflict.