 Yn y blynedd, mae'n ystyried gweithio'r ddweud gweithio'r unrhyw fawr i ddweud o'r 2023, Saki ac Michael Doctoral Memorial Lecture. Dysgrifonau hyn yn ymgyrchol, mae'r llefyn yn ymlaen i'r ddweud i'r ddweud yn yr unrhyw ysgol ac y symud yng nghydfodol ni'n gael i'r holl iawn gan yr aelu'r partnod ysgolig ar gyfer gweithredu ymmyrwyr cwm iawn i'r fforddon ymdysgol yn y bwysig cyhoedd ac iawn i'r fforddon cyllid ar gyfer gweithredu. ac mae'r gweithredu Mike i'r Sackie i ffordd i'r yearlen dechrau gyda'r £aith yn ei dweud â'r partnod. Wyddownid i hyn y gallu wneud i'r gweithredu yma arall. Ieithaf y gallwn gweld hwnnw ddechrau'n gyfnogi ar gyfer ddychrau'r gweithio, ac mae'n ddweud ei fod yn gwybod y gallwn i'i gwneudio eich bod yn rheiddiol ar gyfer gyfer gyfer gweithio. Ond mae'n meddwl i'r gyfrifedau mewn gyfliadau. Mae gynhyrchu i'r ddiolch i'r ddechrau i'r cyfrifydd yma, wedi gweithio i'r gweithio i'r ddechrau, i hefyd i ddim yn gwneud Professor Keith Hamilton, gallai cynhyrchu hwnnw yn gweithio mewn eich ymddangod i'r ysgol. After completing his PhD Keith Hamilton took an academic post at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. In 1990 he became the first external academic to be recruited as a full-time editor by the historical branch of the foreign and Commonwealth Office. Yn ymddangos ar y FCO, rwy'n dweud y profesorio cyfnodd yn cyfnodd, ond rwy'n dweud yw'r cyfnodd ymddangos cyfnodd ac maen nhw'n ddwylo gyda'r dros ysgol yn cyfnodd ymddangos cyfnodd i'r Dr Michael Candiyna. A llyfr yn ymddangos yma, rwy'n gweithio'r gwerthol o'r hynod ymddangos, ond, mewn gwirioneddau, mae'n dweud yn ymddangos a'r amser ac yn ymddi'r llunio. Keith wedi'ch credu peth yw'r amser yw Mike ac Sackies. Mae'n ddweud yn ymddangos i'r llunio, ac mae'n ddweud i'r cyfnod yw'r wneud yn yw'r gweithio Cathie, yw'r llyfr ar y cyfnod i'r cyfnod. Ac mae'r cyfnod i'r cyfnod i'r amser, i'n dweud i'r colli'r dros. Mae'n ddod i'n ddiddor i'r cyfnod i'r cyfnod i'r llunio, rydw i'r cyfwyrd yn rhoi meddwl i'r iechyd ac nid oedd y bwrdd yn gwneud hynny. Yn ymdaw'r cyfnod yn ymdweud o'r ysgol yw'r mwyaf, ac yn ystod o'r hefyd yn cyfnod, ymgylchedd Celf. Mae'r alumna o'r Clawd Cymbridd ac yn Llyfrgell Cymru yn ymddefnyddio'r Lŵr Llyfrgell, i gyd-dwy'r Llefrgell yn ei ddau'u llwyr, yn ymdegol'r cyfwyrd. Her research interests are many and varied, including Britain's relations with the European community, the Labour Party and European integration, Britain's nuclear weapons policy, and Anglo-French relations. She is a prolific author whose work has received many accolades, and her most recent book about the Falklands War, Our Boys, The Story of a Paratrooper, won not only the Templar Medal Book Prize and the Wellington Medal for Military History, but also the Longman History Today Book Prize and was longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. She is currently a British Academy and Leaver Hume Senior Research Fellow, and it is her work on this project which informs the subject of her lecture tonight. Our speaker will address the subject remembering death in British military campaigns from Korea and Malaya to Iraq and Afghanistan. Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure. Please join with me in welcoming Professor Helen Parr. Thank you so much for the incredibly generous introduction, and thank you so much also for inviting me to give this lecture. I really do feel honoured to be here. I remember Mike and Saki very fondly from when I was a PhD student, because they were both so encouraging and friendly. They always seemed to attend events where PhD students were present, and they really were always very encouraging just by their presence. So it's quite remarkable to be here. I couldn't possibly ever have anticipated it then, and it's sad that they're no longer with us. Thank you also for coming to listen to the talk. So I want to start with some images with which I'm sure we're all familiar. The British military cemetery at Etup near Boloin, the largest of the Imperial War Grave commissioned cemiseries in France. Men in Gates at Ypres opened in 1927, on which were engraved the names of 55,000 British Empire soldiers who had known known graves. And the memorial to the missing on the sown at Thiefal unveiled in 1932, on which 72,000 names were carved, and the cemetery below, where there are 300 graves of French and British soldiers. The French graves are simple cross marked with the word anconnw, and the British with details where they were known, and the phrase proposed by Rudyard Kipman known under gold. And here we have the cenotaph unveiled in stone on Armistice Day in 1920, designed by Sir Edwin Lutschens. It's designed reflecting the absence of bodies, literally the empty tomb, and which inspired thousands of local war memorials on which the names of the dead locally were inscribed. And the unknown warrior lying in Westminster Abbey, whose body it was genuinely was unknown. On 9 November 1920, six bodies were exhumed from six different battle sites in northern Europe. The bodies were taken to Ibra and a blindfolded officer selected one of the coffins. The coffin was taken past the cenotaph and interred in Westminster Abbey. A million and a quarter British people visited the tomb within a week, many in the hope and belief that the body might be that of their own son, husband or brother. So, as we know, the Great War shaped and defined how Britain's remembered war. The scale of death was huge. By the time the war ended in 1918, 772,000 men who had fought for the British forces had been killed. And at the heart of the commemorative practices was the Imperial War Grave Commission and the government's decision not to repatriate bodies. That decision was always disputed. Influential people like Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill disagreed with it. They wanted both to bring back the bodies if the family requested it and to allow headstones of the family's choosing. The Countess of Selburn, a Conservative suffragist, wrote in an article entitled National Socialism of War Cemeteries that the absolute uniformity of the cemeteries was the end of individual freedom. She said, the conscription of bodies is worthy of Lenin in its contempt of liberty and exaltation of the state. However, the views of the newly formed Imperial War Graves Commission headed by Brigadier General Sophobian Ware prevailed. Ware, initially head of a Red Cross unit, took great care to itemise and record details of every death. He maintained that British men should be buried where they had fallen, where they were with the men with whom they had served. They had died for their country together and therefore they were equal in sacrifice. For Ware, this was a remarkable democratisation of death in military service. It helped to mask some horrible divisions. If repatriation had been permitted, the families of wealthy servicemen would be able to pay for respectable or lavish burials and the families of the poor could not. Bodies would be returned to be buried as so many had been before the war in pauper's graves, some of them unmarked. Bringing home the bodies could also reveal which men had been too badly injured to be identified and those whose bodies had been eviscerated. Some families would have a body to mourn and others nothing. Ware also believed that cemeteries should be uniform. Each headstone was to be an identical size and shape with a regimental emblem and a religious symbol, most commonly the Christian cross. Ware necks of kin were established, families could pay to have a very small additional inscription. There was to be no profusion of allowing families to put up unsuitable effigies in cemeteries as Sir Lionel Earl, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Works, put it. The military cemetery showed that the men had died fighting to defend the British Empire in service of crown and country. Sir Frederick Kenyon, the director of the British Museum, reported to the commission that the lines of headstones represented the order and discipline that was at the heart of the British Army. He saw the British military cemetery overseas as the enduring symbol of Britain's global reach, centred on an idea of a pastoral, Christian, timeless England. In 1914, the poet wrote, at Brook Road, if I should die, think only this of me, that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. Forever England. The care of the bodies of the dead helped to remake an idea of British civilisation after the war and the care of the bodies could be seen as a dividing line between civilisation and barbarism. Of course, there were exclusions in the democratisation. As Michelle Barrett and others have shown, although Fabian Ware argued for the equal identification of African troops, the colonial office considered Africans not to need individual recognition. That was not only because of race, but because they were seen to be pagan or heathen rather than Christian. Their resting places, therefore, were allowed to revert to nature. At the War Memorial in Bathra, Mesopotamia, now Iraq, the main place where troops from the Indian army died, the colonial office named the officers as individuals, but not the 33,000 men in the other ranks. And so, as Thomas LeCœur argues, the memorialisation of the First World War was created alongside the modern British nation. The tomb of the unknown warrior and the fact that there must have been mistakes made in the reburial of bodies in military cemeteries after the war, but everybody behaved as if they were not. Represented, LeCœur said, a magic we can believe in. They did not, in 1919, anticipate that the Great War would not be the war to end all wars, and that 20 years later, Britain would be forced into another, even more cataclysmic war, in which 50 million people were killed worldwide, more than half of them civilians. But in fact, for Britain, the death toll in the Second World War was not as high as in the first, not nearly as high as in the first. 63,635 civilians were killed, mainly in air raids during the Blitz between September 1940 and May 1941. And 264,443 members of the armed forces, the women's auxiliary services and the merchant navy were killed in action. For Britain, the relatively low death toll and the fact that defeating Nazi Germany was unequivocally good meant that the British government saw no need to revisit the forms of commemoration already created. The dead of the Second World War were added to the memorials of the first, and Armistice Day was recreated as Remembrance Day to remember the dead of both world wars. As Lucy Noakes has argued, death, while still present, began to disappear. It was not as central to the aftermath of the Second World War as it has been in the first, and it was not the defining British experience of the war. That was ultimate victory over Nazism. Hence, mourning, and the deaths from military violence that caused it became almost taboo, and stoicism in the face of adversity was expected. And so that introduction brings me to the subject of the lecture, the memorialisation of death in British military service after 1945. After 1945, military death was obviously nowhere near as prominent as it had been, and yet, in that period, British forces were almost continually committed to operations, and it was also a time in which Britain's world role and British society have significantly changed. So, what I'm going to trace in the lecture in perhaps a somewhat fragmented way, as the research is still in its early days and the evidence base is therefore a bit mixed, is how memorialisation of death changed in the conflicts in Korea and Malaya, the Falklands, and the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I'll discuss some of the implications of those changes. So, the Korean War and the Malayan emergency were very different conflicts although both resulted from the developing Cold War and the threat of communism and Malaya from the anticipated end of the British Empire, and both occurred during a time of conscription in Britain, Korea between 1950 and 1953 and Malaya from 1948 until 1960. Of all the wars of Cold War at the end of Empire, only Korea was, for British servicemen, anything like a war of death. In Korea, 1,106 British servicemen were killed and the hostile weather in terrain, the desperate poverty of the country, the renowned brutality of the North Koreans and the awful conditions of some of the fighting meant that many servicemen, perhaps particularly national servicemen, did not want to be posted there. So, there's a photo, a roll call of survivors of the Gloucestershire Regiment after the Battle of Injin River in 1951 and given what they'd been through, they looked surprisingly cheerful. DF Barrett, national serviceman, DF Barrett, arriving in Korea in September 1950, wrote in his diary, of full light, the source of the strong smell of rotting flesh is self-evident, coming as it does from bodies buried in shallow graves all over our hill, some of which have been partly exposed by the heavy rain. Hands, feet and the occasional head are springing up like corn all over the hillside, coupled with lumps of flesh that was once a man. National Service Officer John Hollands called his autobiographical novel The Dead, the Dying and the Damned, and Sir Peter Holmes recalled the horrible death of an officer hit by shrapnel, whose body seemed to stand up for ages with blood sparroting and the six-hour death of Corporal F, whose stomach had been blown away by a grenade. Private soldier Jim Grundy interviewed many years later by the Military History Website Legacy, recalled that he had been tasked with collecting the bodies of the dead from the battlefields. It was, he said, heart-breaking. The North Koreans often used to take the dog tags, and so sometimes it was hard to identify bodies, but they tried. And the team of three he worked in, they told themselves they were doing a good job. The first body he found had been sat up. It was winter and he was frozen solid. They had to use a spade to chip him away from the tree. In the summer, Grundy said, they found three bodies because gas bubbles coming through the water in the rice fields and one lad's body who'd been eaten by wild dogs. The work he had to do haunted him for the rest of his life. It struck me at night that some mother's son, a brother, an uncle, or a nephew, you couldn't name them, you couldn't do anything about it. And in Korea, British forces were in the middle of the war. They were in the middle of the war. British forces were buried in the United Nations cemetery in Busan. There's a photograph from the early days of that cemetery. So Malaya was a different experience, I think. So there's a rather general photograph of patrols in Malaya. In October 1951 the British High Commissioner was assassinated in an ambush and a few weeks later 11 platoon of D company of the Royal West Kent Regiment were also ambushed and an officer, 10 men from the ranks and two E-band trackers were killed. One man recalled arriving on the scene to find dead lying in all sorts of twisted positions. There were pieces of hair and skin and bones stuck to the side of the truck and the truck itself was like a sieve. But after 1951 the death of British servicemen was more intermittent so it's difficult to establish exactly how many but it's between 300 and 500 across the period, 111 of whom were national servicemen. As Richard Vinal observes Malaya was usually seen as a good war as unless they were sent out on patrol servicemen were not usually in danger or might be more in danger from the jungle than from the insurgents. Leslie Thomas' novel The Virgin Soldiers sold 4 million copies worldwide and it summed up the sense of Malaya as an exotic location as it took a group of national servicemen through the boredom, alcohol, sex swimming and occasional desperate violence. I bought a second hand copy of The Virgin Soldiers and when I opened it it fell open at the page at the point at which a drunk young woman who was the daughter of a socially climbing bully in the form of a regimental sergeant major was about to get into bed with a socially inferior sergeant and she was consoling him that he didn't need to worry about the fact that he was in her father's house because we have to do this because my father thinks I'm a lesbian it's the only joke in the lecture for which I find the rest of it very sombre. So in memoir and oral history interviews concerning Malaya men seem to talk more about the challenge of having to kill than the fear of their own deaths killing was often close up they could see who they had killed and they sometimes had to carry the bodies out of the jungle after patrol platoon commander Raymond Hans in the Suffolk Regiment described this as unpleasant and hard work if a British man were killed his body would be taken away from the patrol and buried in a military cemetery it was up to the officer to write a condolence letter to the parents and sometimes possessions were returned the officer Geoffrey Barnes remembered going through the possessions of one of his private soldiers to ensure that nothing was sent back that might distress his family in 1966 British authorities decided to consolidate the remains of servicemen who were currently located in 16 cemeteries in Malaya into five main cemeteries British forces would ultimately leave Malaya and in view of the arrangements for the long term care of the graves they wanted to concentrate the remains to ensure that the graves would be perpetually maintained the war office wrote to next of kin to notify of the move but they stressed that the Ministry of Defence have stated that the consent of next of kin is not being sought and the transfer of remains is not to behave because of advice to next of kin further they said they would not inform the next of kin of guercas but that records of reinterment were to be held by the records office in the brigade of guercas in case of subsequent enquiry of next of kin they didn't elaborate so it's hard to know why that was the case but the different treatment of the guercas who were deployed throughout the campaign was a little uneasily in response to correspondence received from family members the war office agreed to cremate bodies and send home ashes if families requested it and they agreed to send photographs of the new headstones Mrs Ryan wrote in to the war office she had misunderstood the notification to mean that her son had not previously been buried in a military cemetery but nevertheless her letter is a sort of testament to her despair she said I should like to know why my son could not have been cremated at the time of his death and his ashes sent to me I could have arranged for them to be buried in the crematorium near my home where his father has been cremated it's too late now I have no money to spare I thought I could have saved the ashes and have them buried along with mine but this is their own way I am fed up, sick and tired with worry you take my son away from me and then after ten years time I find out he was not buried in a military cemetery it's disgusting the war office replied to explain that he had been buried in a military cemetery nevertheless her letter indicates her pain and also suggests her sense of powerlessness against the administration so this was a period in which individuals were not encouraged to talk openly about grief one woman who was three when her father was killed in Korea in 1953 said that she knew virtually nothing about him her mother was distraught and her mother's parents arrived to help to take care of the children the woman now in her 70s was instructed by her grandparents never to mention her father or ask any questions about him for fear of upsetting her mother she said they used to tell her don't upset your mum, she's had enough troubles she said she was the only child at her school who did not have a father and she said that not knowing left a huge void in her life so to conclude these fragments from Korea and Malaya with three thoughts first the imperial war graves commission became the commonwealth war graves commission in March 1960 as Britain's empire ended however the consolidation of the dead into the five military cemeteries in Malaya illustrated the war office's conception of Britain as a world power it did not need to consult with nex of kin because that would slow down the work of the British authorities as empire became commonwealth therefore assumptions of Britain's global responsibilities remained central to Britain's self-perception and this placed distance between the British administration of the military dead and the families affected by those operations relatives kept their grief private even within families and the little evidence gathered so far strongly suggests that military death disappeared even further during this period secondly it seems that there was almost no space for the expression of public grief nor much public recognition of death in these conflicts outside of regiments or military units one father who had himself been in the army wrote to the war office in 1961 to ask whether on Remembrance Sunday the government could lay a wreath for those lost in the Korean War his son had been killed there in that awful valley Lieutenant Colonel P.L. Bins replied that the annual service at the Cenotaph was not the appropriate occasion for the laying of wreaths connected to Korea he said that the Cenotaph is a national monument commemorating those who lost their lives in the 1914-18 war and subsequently those who fell in the 1939-1945 war the father replied are those who died in Korea to be forgotten as being unworthy of remembrance in 1978 the home office summarised that the Cenotaph ceremony stands as an annual public recognition by the country of those who gave their lives for the country in the two world wars and that for such people the ceremony might lose much of its impact if it had to cover a wider theme if a change seemed to lessen the commemoration of those you've died in the two world wars this could likely be controversial and thirdly the men who fought in Korea and Malaya at least national servicemen did not on the face of it seem particularly enthusiastic about the endeavour there does not seem to have been a zealous sense of believing in a global war against communism for example not desire to extend the reach of the British Empire many men did not know where Korea was were perturbed to discover that the far larger American forces did not realise the British were there and many men recognised that Malaya would become independent therefore the roots of British military service at least in this time of conscription seemed to have been domestic based in men's knowledge that their grandfathers fathers, older brothers friends and neighbours had fought in the world wars or had also had to do national service experienced the remembrance of these wars of cold war and end of empire therefore was both shaped by and almost totally overshadowed by the magnitude of the two world wars and while the second world war was so proximus a fundamental reassessment of Britain's world position did not take place although that position was obviously changing Britain's global role was assumed to be ever present despite knowledge that it was not so fast forward then to the Falklands war in 1982 it's easy to forget that when the Argentines invaded East Falkland and raised the Argentine flag at Government House it was a terrible failure for Britain the foreign secretary Lord Carrington resigned to take the blame for allowing such a humiliating oversight and Margaret Thatcher's Prime Minister ship hung in the balance Michael Foote the leader of the Labour Party in the House of Commons on Saturday 3 April recalled that in the second world war Britain had learnt it should not appease a dictator and that the people of the Falkland Islands should be able to look to Britain in this moment of their desperate plight there was therefore cross party agreement when the fleet began to sail and this photo shows three command over grades setting sail from Southampton on the Canberra on the 9 April like men sent to Korea the British soldiers did not know where the Falkland Islands were before they set off however most men in this now all professional British army were glad to go and believed in the task that they were asked to carry out a lieutenant colonel of the Royal Marines said at the time I've never known the men so enthusiastic, motivated and with such high morale these young men did not believe that they were likely to die their training in regiments like the parachute regiment and the Marines had instilled in them a tremendous confidence they often welcomed the prospect of being tested and being able to prove themselves in battle Private Warall of the Parachute Regiment interviewed by a senior officer after the conflict said that on the start lines he felt terrific I always wanted to do it, I always wanted to kill I wanted to be a soldier when they were confronted with the deaths of comrades therefore it came as a shock watching ships being hit in San Carlos Bay one soldier remarked we watched it burning all night we were a bit shattered we realised there are men in there dying actually that's a photograph of the Parachute Regiment on Sussex Mountains from where they were watching they could see what was happening in San Carlos Bay another man said it will never leave me I can see it burning now it's always going to be imprinted there you can't do anything, you can't help them after two men in his patrol were shot and killed at Goose Green a 19 year old lieutenant said it might sound rather naive to say so but until then we were quite gung ho and confident that death would only happen to someone else the close quarters nature of some of the fighting also meant that they could not escape seeing what artillery could do to the human body one lance corporal recalled seeing a body convulsing on the ground the artillery shell landed right close to him the blast had gone up an artillery shell at that range I found out to my horror it takes off everything that was showing he had no hands, his face was completely missing it was horrible, absolutely horrible and it was actually my mind and after the battle was over they had to collect the bodies of their comrades and that could also leave a lasting legacy one man said it took four or five of us to put him in a body bag his legs were like pulp the skin was still but there was nothing there that's one little experience so these were not death scapes like the First World War 255 British service personnel were killed during the Falklands War 174 of them at sea but the close regimental system meant that those who survived talked frequently about the death of individual comrades as death in military service for the British had become comparatively rarer comrades felt responsibility to remember the names of those who had died after the conflict was over Mrs Thatcher overturned decades long military and government policy and agreed that the bodies of those soldiers who had fallen on land could be repatriated for families who requested it she did so only partly because families wrote to ask for it a small number of families felt that the bodies belong to them not to the military others felt more simply that the Falkland Islands were a long way away and it would be impossible for them to visit the graves others did not know what to think but they didn't want their sons to be left if the other bodies came home the main pressure to change the policy came from members of the public who wrote to the government in quite large numbers it seems that many people had seen footage shown on the BBC after the conflict of the temporary burial of paratroopers after the battle of Goose Green and they thought that that was the final resting place of those paratroopers and they didn't think that it was fitting so they wrote to the government about it and the tabloid press took up the call to repatriate and were also vocal in their support of favourable treatment for forces families and Mrs Thatcher I think instinctively sympathised with family members and she didn't want any grounds to grow for criticism of the prosecution of the war so Whitehall assessed that the cost of the repatriation would not be that high they said that while the policy could surface a division between those who died at sea whose bodies obviously could not be recovered and those who died on land families already knew what happens to their relatives nobody was missing presumed dead this decision signalled an enormous change in the iconography of military death probably greater than people realised at the time the change in policy had not been anticipated before the conflict and so bodies did not come home until late November six months after the end of the war as it took time for exhumation in barming and return there was no ceremony when the ship carrying the bodies docked at Southampton a lone piper played a lament on the key side and then bodies were taken mainly to local undertakers most were buried in local churchyards and most like my uncle he was a prior in the parishate regiment who was killed in the Falklands and this photo is from his funeral and you can see the coffin is actually carried on a gun carriage and pulled through the streets of old and broad the small town where in East Anglia where he lived it's a really impressive spectacle it's a really impressive military spectacle brought into civilian settings and then the funeral there's a gun salute I don't think they used gun carriages anymore to transport the coffins it's interesting that they did in 1982 so most people chose even when the bodies were buried in civilian churchyards most people chose to have them buried with full military honours so did repatriation of bodies something many families had argued for since 1914 affect the ways that families experienced grief that is not an easy question one brother remembered his father standing by the coffin at the undertakers and howling it's just a box and I remember as a child at the undertakers by my uncle's coffin with my father and other uncle angry that they just didn't know what was inside the coffin many people commented that other people did not know how to talk to them Frieda McKay, the mother of Ian McKay who won the Victoria Cross after being killed on Mount Longdon said that grief was like entering a long dark tunnel and that people often crossed the street to avoid her because they didn't know what to say I read a recent interview with Ian McKay's daughter Melanie who was three when he died and she said that as a child she didn't fully understand she would never see her father again she said she suppressed her grief and was only coming to terms with it now she said she had longed to be part of a normal 2.4 children family and that sentiment strikes me as being not dissimilar from the Korean war daughter I mentioned earlier fathers did say that bringing the bodies home gave a form of closure one father said it's a terrible thing one of the reasons closure state came better when the bodies were brought back home because you had something tangible you had a body and you laid into rest it just seemed you could come to terms with it then most people recall how awful it was of the funeral of her son at Aldershot military cemetery one mother said I bought a grey coat it was cold it was an overcast day there were thousands of people there I just felt it was as though like living a dream I felt absolutely numb as though you weren't really there the rationale for the military cemetery overseas had been to democratise death in service and now something of that state control began to be weakened soldiers came to be seen not just as servants of the crown of the country but as individual men who had chosen to join up and as individual men with families who loved them the Falklands therefore stood on a bridging post from the second world war to the present day the conflict had evoked memories of world war two but the living memory of the world wars was starting to erode thus in the 1980s Britain started to remake itself as a nation and in that remaking remembering military service as opposed to allowing it to be forgotten became more important so turning now to the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan I think what we all associate with military death in Iraq and Afghanistan is the somber procession of herces through wooden basset renamed Royal Wooden Basset an acknowledgement of the part that the town played in memorialisation symbolically these repatriation ceremonies were very important however in some ways they were a small part of the process of remembrance overall 179 British service personnel were killed in Iraq and 453 in Afghanistan the deadliest years were in 2009 and 2010 when 108 and 103 service personnel were killed in Afghanistan and the heaviest loss of life in Iraq was in 2003 when 53 service personnel were killed the practice of crowds lining the roads in Wooden Basset began in 2007 quite spontaneously after three members of the British Legion spotted a cortege and asked the airfield subsequently to notify them one time the passage coincided with a bell ringing practice at the local church and the practice evolved of tolling the bells for the dead it became front page news in 2009 as eight herces passed through carrying the bodies of eight soldiers killed in Helmand five of them killed rescuing comrades from a roadside bomb when the second device exploded and actually this photograph is quite harrowing as you can see one man pushed through the crowds to tie a rose to the rack of his brother's hearse and hammered on the window and the crowd started to clap repatriation was now the government's prior agreed policy meaning that bodies of the dead would be brought home shortly after they were killed family members were invited to greet the arrival of the plane and a lot of work goes into making these ceremonies as good as they can be in the awful circumstances one mother said it was awful we were on plastic chairs on the runway to know that your son's body is coming off that plane it was awful another said simply it was the worst day of my life the bodies were then relocated to local undertakers one man whose son was killed in Iraq in 2003 remembered that he had not been told that his son's body was coming back to Yorkshire he only knew when the local undertakers rang him families were given the option of visiting at the undertakers or taking their son's home son chose to have open coffins so that they could care for their sons one said his sister did his hair with hair gel and they could speak to them and their friends could come to say goodbye so I want to emphasise three things firstly the crowds lining the route in pictures like this have been described as anti-war but I don't think that gives the the whole picture military families were prominent in the campaign for a public enquiry into the Iraq war in 2004 Reginald Keyes the father of Royal Military Policeman Lance Caulfall Tom Keyes killed by a mob in Basra in 2003 and Rose Gentle the mother of Fusilia Gordon Gentle killed by a roadside bomb in Basra in 2004 created military families against the war specifically to campaign for a public enquiry into the reasons for going into Iraq they were motivated by reports that the so-called 45 minute claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that could hit British strategic targets in 45 minutes had been to use the infamous rage sexed up and by the fact that no weapons of mass destruction had been found Reginald Keyes stood against Tony Blair in his Sedgefield seat in the 2005 general election and Rose Gentle stood against Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram in East Kilbride Gentle said at the time that the revelation that Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had changed his advice that the war was lawful without any obvious reason for the change meant that the military orders what are lawful and the war is illegal and the pressure brought by military families against the war eventually led Gordon Brown to agree to establish a public enquiry under Sir John Chilcol which reported in 2016 here is a photo of Rose with her memorial bench to her son in the front garden of her house a photo of Reg on the memorial bench in his garden so these photos were taken by Stuart Griffiths who I'm working with as part of the project on this and so the second point although they protested the politics of the Iraq war and wanted the government especially Tony Blair to be held to account the parents I've spoken to are not anti-military people respect the armed services in which their sons fought one father who also said he was a Jeremy Corbyn supporter admired the collective culture of the army he said they all looked out for each other and they wanted to help others to the point of being willing to lay down their lives another mother whose son was killed in Afghanistan said it brought her consolation to know that he had died doing a job he loved and doing his duty another mother said her son had believed in what he was doing in Afghanistan he believed the British army was there to develop the country and improve people's lives and she was so proud of him and in some ways I think the gradual revelations about the weapons of mass destruction and the eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan were more painful because people had believed in what their sons were doing Reg Key said that finding out that there were no weapons of mass destruction and the manner in which his son has died which was initially which had initially been concealed from him he said it hurt so much and thirdly and this is moving to my conclusion the remembrance of the military dead seen at Woodman Bassett was shaped by the traditions of war commemoration begun in the first world war and reinforced in the second that the individual dead who fought for Britain should be named that mourning their lives should be recognised and that British civilisation should be defended but it also represented a transformation in those traditions driven I think by social change as the voices of military families have been heard more as military service has become much more unusual and as deference to authority has receded those transformations in commemoration were also driven by the politics of Iraq and Afghanistan which the legacies of which undermined centre left internationalism and galvanised distrust in government the people who lined the streets at Woodman Bassett often supported and respected the armed services but strongly criticised the government who had sent them to conflict in the first place people's feelings about losing a son or a husband or a brother and they still are nearly all men there have been three women were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan but they are still nearly all men seem to be similar through time Val O'Neill whose son Corporal Chris O'Neill was a medic killed by a roadside bomb in Basra in 2007 said that grief was like entering a parallel universe it resembled real life but you could never get back to how it had been she said her joy and her ease with living had gone and she would give anything to see him again one more time this is a photo of her memorial in her front room grief therefore was still intensely private and personal but the public response to those deaths had changed although that didn't necessarily mean the public had developed a language for talking about grief people still said that people crossed the streets to avoid having to say anything to them nevertheless from the stoicism that was encouraged during the Second World War there is now a greater expectation that emotion could and should be expressed so in that sense then military death reappeared and private forms of remembrance proliferated this was no more the tidy and ordered cemetery in a far off land controlled by the state rather traces of the dead appeared in public gardens and parks private homes and gardens in street names and civilian cemeteries so this is a photo of a memorial bench in Batley you can see positioned by the the local war memorial still emphasises the connection between and the importance of the connection between local communities and war members and that's a photo of the grave in Allison Cemetery in Liverpool of Corporal Peter Eustis of two rifles killed by an IED in Helmand in 2011 actually the anniversary of his death is today and this is a copy of the street sign to mark the street named after Private James Proser of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers killed in Helmand in 2009 and this is the National Memorial Walk in the town centre in Sunderland where people can buy stones to remember anyone who served in the armed forces it was set up by a former paratrooper whose paratrooper son Private Nathan Cuthbertson was killed by a suicide bomber in Helmand in 2008 so as they came home the responsibility to remember their names increased perhaps in a more secular society maybe remembrance is the afterlife of the dead one mother said that she felt guilty that she was alive and her son was not her family's want to keep the names of the dead alive they want people to know what their children did and these photos are from the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire where the names of all those service personnel who died in British military campaigns after 1945 are listed the photos are from the annual Ride to the Wall when bikers, veterans families and supporters from all over the country converge at the Arboretum and take over this space of remembrance it illustrates I think the strength of a remembrance culture that comes from the bottom up those connected to the armed services or sympathetic to them and it's positioned as a reaction to the perception that otherwise recent conflicts would be forgotten so this reappearance and domestication of the military dead illustrates the diminishment of Britain's world power compared to the period of the world wars but it also augments at least in some political circles the importance of tradition because British involvement in the world wars is largely regarded as a positive in British national life and also because support for the armed forces has now sometimes become seen as a test of patriotism so what this shows I think is the end of the living memory of the world wars remembrance day now remembers the dead of all post-1945 conflicts and there's no longer a collective memory of the hardships and the realities of violence brought by war and no longer a presumption that everyone remembers because they or their parents lived through it the second world war is still very prevalent in national memory but its meanings have become fragmented and distilled and in that dissipation arguably Britain has been reshaped only under that shadow thank you well thank you so much Helen for that moving unpowerful lecture I'd like to open the opportunity to our audience for questions John thank you very much indeed I hesitate to ask this question because maybe you've dealt with covering this area was the longest operation for it at home with a very excuse me with a very significant loss of life among British service personnel and I just wonder whether you think that has also shaped how memory is directed let's say in this post-war era or is it actually a special case now that is a very good question and I'm kind of glad it's the first question because I am completely aware that that's a glaring absence in the work that I've done so far and the question is it important in the memorialisation that is a very very interesting question so obviously soldiers who died in Northern Ireland are on home soil which makes a difference to the way in which the bodies are dealt with and obviously also it's a period in which there's not a great deal of public attention drawn to those deaths I often wondered when I was doing the work on the Falklands how families whose soldier relatives were killed in Northern Ireland must have felt about the Falklands because all of a sudden there's a mention of recognition the South Atlantic Fund which raises a large amount of money for service families and none of that is there for Northern Ireland families I think there's actually a similar kind of feeling that it's not exactly the same as military families against the war but there are military families in Northern Ireland who don't want British troops in Northern Ireland so I think you get that kind of bring the troops home sort of feeling this isn't worth our son's lives and I think it probably contributes I think it probably does contribute to that sort of general sense of disappearance of death so John Major when he was Prime Minister had a conversation with I think it was the chief of general staff should he write to the families of people who were killed in the Gulf War and the chief of general staff said well no because you're going to write to all the families of soldiers killed in Northern Ireland so it's a period when they don't want that kind of regular ceremony I think I mean I need to look into it more and I need to also sort of think about how and whether it changes across the entire periods the British forces are serving in Northern Ireland because obviously you're absolutely right it's the biggest single loss of life in the post-1945 period Actually I was going to ask a question about the Prime Minister writing letters to families obviously there was the infamous incident with Gordon Brown and one particular letter I can't remember whether the soldier had been in Afghanistan or Iraq but actually when which sort of brought that element to wider public attention if John Major didn't do it for the Gulf War when did it actually start that is also a good question so people think that Mrs I'm glad you've asked it because it gives me the chance to say this people think that Mrs Thatcher wrote to the families condolence letters because it's in the film, the Iron Lady but she didn't and I think that's just because that it was not the policy it was not the thing that the Prime Minister's did I think I don't know exactly when it starts I think it's only in during Iraq and Afghanistan as it becomes but what I don't know I know that Gordon Brown didn't do it I don't know whether Tony Blair did it maybe he did but it's only sort of I think it's one of the things the reading out of the names of the dead and the House of Commons I think it's one of the things that illustrates this quite big change during those campaigns specifically in the way in which people start to think about military dead That was fantastic Helen Just as in our boys in the military Britain alongside the socialist room a moralisation of death in the military and I was thinking about what you said about the 1980s when you said that the returning dead from the Falklands was part of a remaking of Britain and clearly you're talking about phases of remaking aren't you? and I just wondered what it is about the overall phases and it's something to do with a wider acceptance of expressions of grief or of emotion about mass movements that the British seem to allow themselves in a post war generation and I wonder if it's something generational that you're talking about and thus Iraq and Afghanistan are a different generation to 1982 as 82 is a different generation to Malaya and Korea because it seems to me that the dead coming back from those two world wars would have families who brought up an entirely different tradition of expressions of grief which probably vaulted privacy in the home or in a community or in a regiment whereas later families wouldn't have felt that because Britain becomes more democratised and it's not so centred on some kind of abeyance to either a regiment or a state yeah that's the question really isn't it that is the question I think that one of the things that's really different in the Falklands war is the press and that is obviously reflects kind of social change as well but the way in which the press particularly the tabloid press take up stories about grieving Falklands widow or mother who can't afford to go to the hospital to tender wounded son after they've come home that's just something that wouldn't have happened previously because there wouldn't have been that kind of public interest in the prevails of ordinary people so I think that which itself reflects a greater democratisation of listening to voices of ordinary people is one quite quite big factor I think taking what women say more seriously is also a big factor although there's a bit of reaction against that as well but the fact that they're willing to listen to mothers and wives who wouldn't have been so much in the same way at least in the earlier period I think is important and I think I think this is much more pronounced only really during Iraq and Afghanistan is this kind of expectation of talking about feelings so there's a real shift from that kind of culture of stoicism culture of kind of repression feeling just getting on with it and not allowing other people to see your sort of private things that has to be you have to keep a kind of public face to repress that kind of pain and hardship whereas to move to a much more sort of open culture in many ways where people are more expected to encourage to talk about how they feel and less expected to repress it but it doesn't mean that everything has changed it doesn't sort of you don't move into a perfect environment for talking about emotions there's still a lot of stigma and I think that from what I can gather I think that grief is really really difficult for people to deal with to talk about and for people who are not in that position to accommodate because I think it's such a big especially perhaps the loss of a child is such a huge transformation for people it's very very hard to articulate that so I do think that a lot of these changes in memorialisation are driven by wider social changes but actually that's been quite consistent I mean Thomas McCurr says that during the First World War the memorialisation is driven by by civil society so in a way the whole pattern has been that society is kind of driving the way in which the different conflicts are a memorialised Helen thank you very much indeed a really great lecture I suppose the thing is grief is very personal and one of the things that struck me was that there are certain accounts there there might be regional or national variations so a book Dead Men written by Toby Harman talks about the fact that in the Welsh Guards officers who tended not to be Welsh dealt with grief in different ways from their NCOs and their trips who tended to be Welsh that there was sometimes Welsh funerals were more demonstrative than English ones I suppose the second one is sometimes it's the element of how people commemorate dead so there was the famous story the Afghan soldier who was killed in Afghanistan and one of his blokes turned up and dragged as he dressed as a schoolgirl and they'd actually had a bet or they had a wager that said that if one of us gets killed the other one turns up at the funeral dressed like this so in a way it was a tibit it's the kind of warped humour that soldiers have and obviously there's one but it's just that that's sometimes how do people deal with those differences which can often be based not just on different parts of the country but also soldiers or service personnel generally and civilians It's a really good question and I think that there are differences and they might be regional and they might partly be class based as well so I've actually yet to interview family members of any officers who were killed and I don't know whether there's a difference within the services sort of based on officers and other rags but I do think that there are different mourning practices partly in different regions and partly class based and I'm quite interested in the practice of having an open coffin because I think that was very common in England in an earlier period I think it's kind of rooted in working class culture I think it was very widely done but I think sort of from the 1950s onwards it became less and less widespread sort of as society kind of became more middle class or sort of adopted more middle class habits so there's a kind of there's a sort of connection somewhere in some minds between sort of respectability and hygiene and sort of the treatment of the bodies in that sense but I think it's quite heartening that the practice of open coffins is still there is still practised in different kind of communities in England still so yes I think there are variations there may also sort of be variations based on religious practice as well but I haven't been able to sort of establish that as yet that might be also there Thank you very much for a wonderful talk I just wonder if you've considered the influence of the arrival of private military and security companies because suddenly in the most recent wars these have been conspicuous actors and how are what are they called operatives in these companies who get killed more has any because they are citizens of you know various countries and one would think they are more grievable and quite clearly the cash that pays for these services of these companies is taxpayer cash so shouldn't we mourn them as well Interesting question I don't know is the short answer it's not something that I've looked into yeah I'm not sure I can elaborate I'm thinking that there are a number of thinking about the British Army there are a number of soldiers from places like Sierra Leone and Fiji who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan one of the things I've been interested in thinking about is if the families kind of respond and react to these deaths and what repatriation means in those circumstances if the family doesn't reside in the UK and about private security companies I would probably be even harder to look into it but it's an interesting point thank you Hi, yeah, great lecture thank you very much you referred a couple of times to campaigns where the Britons have been fighting alongside soldiers from other countries so I just wondered to what extent you thought there was influence between countries in terms of memorialisation practices as we've increasingly become globalised and co-combatant that is another very interesting question so in Korea I think one of the interesting things here is that there is a divergence between British and American cultures with regard to the treatment of the dead so in Korea all the bodies are initially in the UN looked after territory but then American bodies are repatriated and the Imperial War Graves Commission at that time they have a discussion about that and they actually talk about whether they should move British bodies into a cemetery in Japan at that time sort of as the Americans soldiers are being repatriated back to America but they very very strongly take the view that they shouldn't they should leave them in the UN cemetery in Korea because the argument was that if they move them to Japan then there's no real reason why they should bring them home so if they were going to move them to another country why not bring them home because that's what the families want so I think that British policy was very strongly sort of very very strongly informed by that initial kind of decisions that they took after the great war that they don't repatriate that they continue this tradition those traditions are very very strongly enforced which is why when Margaret Thatcher overturns that policy I really strongly think another prime minister wouldn't have done that because the military weren't in favour of it at the time so it's only because of her kind of her willingness to sort of to kick against that particular tradition that that happens it wouldn't have happened otherwise and then that's an interesting sort of proposition at what point it would have happened so to sort of set it alongside it is an interesting contrast that you need to look more into Australia and New Zealand how they can deal with it it's an interesting contrast with America another sort it provides some other kind of quite interesting things to think about thank you I've also a question I'm from the Netherlands and in Holland we have a a big American graveyard is called Margraten and all the American soldiers who died in Germany were brought to Margraten in the Netherlands because you don't bury soldiers in enemy's land also after the war so after the war all the Americans were brought to the Netherlands about Afghanistan and Iraq was there maybe a kind of thought that it would be also a country of the enemies and in the practical sense you must bring people back that's a good point an interesting question they had decided at least in Britain they had decided prior to the outbreak of the conflict they would repatriate bodies I don't know the extent to which that was driven by the inability subsequently to care for the bodies in overseas military cemeteries that's obviously there as a consideration but I think they bring bodies back after Sue is for that reason or some bodies after Sue is for that reason that's not overturning the tradition it's just a practical consideration we're going to bring the bodies home because we can't guarantee the security of the cemetery which of course itself is a sort of indication of Britain's changing world position from the world wars to the present thank you I just want to draw on some of the themes that you spoke about about the transition from maybe stoicism to more of a I don't know if you'd call it like fashionism or something without wanting to kind of delve into divisive political issues we all saw the the tension that arose because of the proposition that there might have been protests at the Cenotaph last weekend and I just wondered if this might reflect again maybe the tension in British traditions on memorialisation between stoicism and a more subjective expression of grief and whether you think we do have a continuing tension in that regard between maybe an older generation who are more inclined towards grieving in a more stoic manner and a newer generation who think that or might be more inclined to believe that grief can be a subjective process and that it perhaps might not it might be acceptable to use grief to use protest as an active grief or active remembrance it's a good question it's a good question and I do think that in some ways the enhanced focus on emotion and on grief is one of the ways in which remembering the old services can become as if it's a test of patriotism so that emotional expression can be made into a kind of are you patriotic do you support the old services and therefore the opposite that would be well if you don't support the old services you're not patriotic so I think that is one of the kind of political ways in which memorialisation has changed but I think it's probably a move from a more collective remembrance in the sense that everybody there was more of a I think there was more of a kind of collective view of what was being remembers after the world wars just simply because the experience was widespread so not necessarily the experience of grief in the second world war but just the experience of participating in the second world war was widespread so they don't really need to hammer home what is being remembered because it's all furious whereas nowadays because there's so far fewer people serving the armed forces and of those it's only a small proportion really who have the misfortune to be killed so the experience of death in the military service is quite an isolated experience it's quite a solve so there's a real don't you do I guess because some families say that they will be forgotten because it's not a widespread experience and that puts a kind of an additional charge into we need to remember but I think that need for remembrance it can be politically positioned in different ways one of those ways is to make that kind of connection between emotion and patriotism but there are other ways of doing it Thank you Helen I'm so many thoughts maybe it is about numbers then because if you think back to 1991 and the preparations that were made the crematoria that were prepared people's bodies were not going to be brought back to the UK they were going to be cremated on the battlefield if you think about military preparations my question is about how we think about war and what the greater meaning is is to think perhaps more about the more contemporary debates on moral injury because we get more people back because of casualty evacuation people survive even after really devastating injury and how do we think about that as well I don't want to overcomplicate what it is you're looking at but it's remembering survival it's remembering moral injury as well as death itself isn't it a relationship between society and our responsibilities to those who serve and sacrifice for us their mental health as well as dying is quite interesting too It is a really really good point so I think in some ways it is about numbers I think you're right the other thing I think is a ship from an era where there's lots of people who are missing presumed dead to an era where nobody's missing presumed dead they know what's happened to people and one of the things that struck me looking at some of the material about career is that they are still in that missing presumed dead territory it takes time for them to retrieve the bodies it takes time for them to identify the bodies so there's families who don't know what's happened to their loved ones for a period of years perhaps that isn't the case in the other conflicts and I think that does make a difference I think that's all missing presumed dead I think that's one of the big things that goes into the memorialisation of the world wars as well but when death becomes more personalised when you know what's happened to people and I think it really enhances the responsibility that service personnel feel about the people who don't come home or as you say about the people who are badly wounded or whose lives are otherwise transformed by the experience so there is a question there about what does society owe to these people and I think that also does inform some of these arguments about memorialisation so I know a veteran who I've spoke to who see the sort of wooton vaset phenomenon as being an expression of collective guilt on behalf of the population for having sent on behalf of sort of collective guilt by politicians perhaps even for having sent soldiers into situations that ultimately Britain can't prevail in so that it's not a very easy question but that personalisation and individualisation of death I think is a really big shift so we cling to the we still use the traditions of the memorialisation for the world wars but the context is really very radically different and that's quite interesting in some ways that's the kind of perhaps another problem I mean thank you for a fascinating lecture I have a composite not very good question it's got lots of bits in it and it has echoes in so many of the things that have been asked already and that you've already said and I'll start with John's point about Northern Ireland and in that case is it that assistance to the civilian authority is a different kind of mission a different kind of context giving rise to the question yet is it about what the mission is and you look at the controversies around Iraq and how people respond and that matter of grief is really a large part of was it worthwhile what was the purpose and those changing contexts and purposes maybe have a role to play in understanding how things go and what you said about the attitudes on Iraq is thinking would it make a difference if I could go and explain nuances to people and they'd understand more than they seem to understand from the comments and you showed us pictures of Wales and Scotland and earlier in that you spoke about decolonisation that kind of contemporary theme and also you've made reference to that kind of trope of a few words forever and that really makes me think in all of this is there any sense of the union and differences within the union as well decolonisation within a union context because we know that many of those who go to serve come from the countries rather than from England of course there are not from England but then again from particular parts of England and you mentioned regionalism so we've got all of these changing aspects and impact on the context and changes within it and as a part of that context left field wild card where does the Diana phenomenon fit into all of this was it a catalyst to some of the things that came or was it part of a general pattern of change in the context that's been going on I don't know what you can make of all of that so I have been wondering a lot the extent to which it's the politics of the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan that govern the forms of memorialisation it must have a it must have a real bearing on it it must have a real bearing on the way in which it plays out families certainly I suppose it is it is harder to explain those deaths when, you know, what they hear is well there weren't any weapons of mass destruction and my son's tank wasn't faced with the right safety equipment and we were through from Afghanistan, Taliban took power again it does make people question what they were doing there in the first place in a way that wouldn't be true so it's a very serious question so if the politics have been different if the outcomes have been different would the memorialisation have been quite as impactful as I think it has been probably not but those social changes would still have been there so I think we still probably would have had repatriation at some stage and perhaps partly for the reasons given there it doesn't have the world power to maintain the overseas severities so I think there would have been a change but whether it would have had the implications that I think it has had I don't know I doubt it it would all look different wouldn't it and as for you're right Scotland and Wales so the question of how our end of empire plays out in different parts of the union it may be relates to the question that Caroline asked about different commemorative practices in different regions I don't know but I do find it very interesting that the places that I've been to visit relatives have been for the industrial places not all of them cities but there is still that kind of connection between former working class areas industrial heartlands and arms service that was there in the Falklands too so yeah it's tracing the end of something isn't it it's tracing the end of something there the end of that kind of link between industrial labour and ideas of nation as well so it's all going into another kind of implication of your question yeah it is yeah it is well my goodness some excellent questions there and I think lots more that we can now discuss over a drink so I'd like to thank our speaker once again Helen for a fascinating thought provoking and moving lecture thank you very much indeed