Sons of this Place

School war memorials underline the enormous loss suffered in conflict - from the Crimean War through to the present day. Sarah Wearne, Archivist at Abingdon School, looks at how schools commemorate their fallen.

'You were only David's father But I had fifty sons'

Lieutenant Ewart Mackintosh, who was educated at St Paul's, summarises the paternal responsibility that he, a twenty-three-year-old officer, felt for the men in his command, and his grief when just one of them was killed. What must it have been like for the schoolmasters when 71,501,1,157 of their 'sons' were killed?

British public schools paid a high price in the 1914-1918 war. The casualty rate for officers was 15% compared with 12% for the army as a whole, and since the main qualification for a commission, at least in the early days of the war, was that a man should have been educated at a recognized public school, the casualty rate for these schools was correspondingly high. At Winchester, where 500 Wykehamists were killed, the casualty rate was 21.4% of those who served, at Eton 20.4%, Charterhouse 22.8%, Lancing 19.5%, Sherborne 18%.

How do you commemorate 1,157 (Eton), 682 (Rugby) or 675 (Cheltenham) of your former pupils? The first imperative seems to have been to record their names. Siegfried Sassoon bitterly described the 58,000 names on the Menin Gate as 'intolerably nameless names', but for the schools, many belonged to boys they remembered. At Abingdon, where the casualty rate was 19.6%, 52% of the casualties were under 25. Abingdon recorded the names of its 71 dead on a brass plaque in the Chapel; Eton its 1,157 dead on a series of bronze plaques stretching along the upper part of the colonnade; Rugby on the stone walls of its memorial chapel; Haileybury on the marble of its cloisters; Worksop on oak tablets in its ante-chapel; Wellington College in illuminated letters on parchment in the Great School. Some lists were fashioned into works of art by well-known craftsmen - Bootham's repousse bronze tablet was the work of the Arts and Crafts metalworker Edward Spencer, whilst the City of Norwich School's oak triptych was the work of the art master, WT Watling. In a break with past custom, the majority of names were listed alphabetically, as at Rugby, to emphasise 'that, in their sacrifice, all were equal.' Occasionally names were listed in chronological date of death but traditionally names had been listed according to military rank, as on Radley's South African War memorial.

Many schools recorded the names of all former pupils who had served in the war. The List of Etonians who fought in the Great War 1914-1919 runs to 5,660 names. It was written in vellum by the calligrapher Graily Hewitt and a printed version was prepared on hand-cut paper for private distribution. Some schools prepared printed records of their dead: Volume 1 of Memorials of Rugbeians who Fell in the Great War, carrying a biography and photograph of the School's first hundred casualties, was published in January 1916. It was 1923 before the final volume, the seventh, came out. The Dragon School used the same formula but instead of a single photograph of the soldier it also included one of the prep school boy. Sometimes there was scarcely 6 years between the two photographs. After recording the names, the majority of schools chose utilitarian schemes as memorials since, as Colonel Heywood, the grandson of the founder of Denstone College said, 'Were these (memorials) not signs pointing ... to the future with confidence?' So, with the future in mind, Ardingly built a new classroom wing, Bishop's Stortford College an Assembly Hall, Berkhamsted a Library, Haileybury a new dining hall, Marlborough a Memorial Hall. There were schemes, as at Wellington and Harrow, to establish scholarships for the education of the sons of the 'fallen'. At Worksop, a #50 closed scholarship was set up to send an old boy to St Catherine's College, Cambridge, whilst the money raised at Owen's School, Islington was to help old boys and their families in need as a result of the war. It was not a new idea, Radley's scholarship fund had been set up after the South African War and as the archivist, Clare Sargent, confirms, it has been used and added to ever since.

Thomas Arnold's mid-nineteenth century reforms at Rugby established the Chapel as the focus of school life; hence the many chapels (Monkton Combe and Charterhouse), and chapel extensions (Rossall and Brighton College), built as memorials. In addition to being of practical value, such buildings, together with memorial altars, stained-glass windows, lecterns, screens and communion plate, reflected a school's Christian ethos. At Oundle, the Memorial Chapel bore witness 'to the abiding values of the Christian faith', with the words Faith, Hope, Sacrifice and Service carved onto the rood beam. At Rugby, the Memorial Chapel was intended to inspire future generations and help them realize 'the call of Duty', an idea reinforced at Durham School where there are 98 steps leading to the entrance to the Chapel - one for each of their dead.

General Lord Home, at the dedication of the Mill Hill memorial, said the dead had understood, 'It was not the players that mattered but the game, it was not the crew but the ship.' Sentiments repeated at the dedication of Lancing's memorial when Prince Henry spoke of the spirit of unselfishness boys learnt on the playing field, 'To play for your side and not yourself...' The unmistakable echo of Newbolt's 'play up, play up and play the game', explains why many schools chose to commemorate their dead with playing fields - as at the City of London School; cricket pavilions - Cranleigh; Fives courts - King's School, Worcester; or swimming baths - Leeds Grammar School. If the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton, as the Duke of Wellington almost certainly didn't say, this new generation of schoolboys were to be ready for another war, which come 1939 they were.

The choice of a free-standing cross made its own statement. At Winchester, the inscription that runs continuously round the four sides of War Cloister refers to those who 'went forth ... and treading the path of duty and sacrifice laid down their lives for mankind.' The comparison is obvious, as the cross in the centre makes plain for, in the words of Arkwright's O Valiant Hearts, 'Christ, our redeemer, passed the self same way.' Winchester chose a wheel cross; Bradfield College and The Dragon School, Celtic crosses; St Edward's, Oxford, a wayside shrine, the sort the troops had become familiar with after their years in France; Haileybury adopted the cross designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield for the Imperial War Graves Commission, whilst at Monmouth Grammar School the cross was designed and made by Alfred Ursell, whose son was among those commemorated.

Some considered that it wasn't only the dead who had made a sacrifice: Sir Arthur Sutherland, dedicating the memorial at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, spoke of the solemn pride the next-of-kin must feel at having 'laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.' A pelican - emblematic of Christ's sacrifice but carrying implications of parental sacrifice - was part of the decorative scheme of the stained-glass window at Warwick School, given by the Headmaster in memory of his son.

From left to right: Coats of arms commemorating the dead of the Crimean War at Eton (Photograph by Roddy Fisher, published by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College); Plaque commemorating Old Radleians killed since 1945; The Dragon School's 1914-1918 memorial.

Christ's death may have been the exemplar but the model for these young men's lives was very often St George, epitomising Christian courage. Usually depicted in the act of slaying the dragon, he represents the patriotic triumph of good over evil. At Westminster the figures were carved out of solid oak - and destroyed by a German bomb on the night of 12 May 1941 - at Lancing they were represented in stained glass, and at Wellington in marble. When St George appeared without the dragon, as at Malvern College, it was as 'the symbol of the best qualities in the character of English manhood and those most worth striving for.' There were other models: Sir Galahad, the perfect knight, at Victoria College, Jersey; Sir Philip Sydney at Shrewsbury; and Bunyan's Mr Valiant-for-Truth who was recalled more often in the inscription, 'My scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles', than in any image.

These memorials commemorate the First World War, but it was not the first war to commemorate its dead, and nor was it the last. There is a private memorial at Sedbergh to Lieutenant Henry Rishton Buck, killed at Waterloo, but the dead of the First Anglo-Afghan War, 1839-1842, appear to be the earliest school commemoration. The names are recorded on brass plaques in the Chapel at Cheltenham College; the Chapel however was built in 1896 so the commemoration was not contemporary. The earliest contemporary commemoration was of those killed in the Crimean War, 1853-1856, where at Cheltenham a stained glass window was installed in the old chapel, now the dining hall, and the coats of arms of the officers killed were painted on its walls. This was the same memorial scheme as that adopted at Eton; a German bomb damaged the stained-glass window in 1940 but the coats of arms have largely survived. Unlike the determinedly egalitarian nature of First World War memorials, social rank was a factor worth noting in 1856. Chapel walls record the scattered dead of the Empire's 'far flung battle line': India, Ashanti, Matabeleland, Burma, Somaliland, Afghanistan - which has cast, and continues to cast, a long shadow. Plaques record men killed in Jalalabad 1842, the Chardeh Valley 1879, Mazra 1880, Chittral 1895, Umra Kelli 1908, Waziristan 1922, all places now either in North-West Pakistan or Afghanistan, as is Helmand Province where Radleians Lt Colonel Rupert Thorneloe and Lieutenant Douglas Dalzell have both been killed within the last twelve months. All these schools employed similar memorial schemes to commemorate the dead of the Second World War, although perhaps the imagery and the language of the inscriptions were less idealistic. Casualties of subsequent conflicts have been recorded: Radley has a plaque to those killed between 1945 and 2005 - in Korea, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and the Falklands; Thorneloe and Dalzell will head a new plaque.

School war memorials, by recording the names of those killed in conflict, acknowledge at the very least, the duty of those who served. With their memorial chapels, libraries, playing fields and monuments, schools attempted to build a future based on the values of the past, the values of those 'lads who will die in their glory and never grow old.'

'Sons of this place let this of you be said
That you who live are worthy of your dead.
These gave their lives that you who live may reap
A richer harvest ere you fall asleep.'
Canon TF Royds, 'Inscriptions Suggested for War Memorials', HMSO 1919

Sarah Wearne is the Archivist at Abingdon School.
This article first appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Attain.