Gardens ‘for ever england’: Landscape, identity and the first world war british cemeteries on the western front

Cultural Geographies (formerly Ecumene)

Volumn 4, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 410-434

  Morris, Mandy S ^a  

^a Geography Discipline The Open University   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ENGLISH IDENTITY; GARDEN CONSTRUCTION; ICONOGRAPHY; NATIONAL IDENTITY; WAR GRAVES;

EUROPE, (WEST);

EID: 0031418847     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/147447409700400403     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. R. Brooke, ‘The soldier’, 1914, quoted in J. Silkin, The Penguin book of First World War poetry (London, Penguin, 1979; repr. 1981), pp. 81-2.
2. M. S. Morris, (PhD thesis, University of Notdngham, 1994).
3. M. Heffernan, ‘For ever England: the Western front and the politics of remembrance in Britain’, Ecumeme 2 (1995), p. 306. Also M. Heffernan, ‘Over there! the American commemoration of World War One in Europe’, Royal Geographical Society with the Insdtute of Bridsh Geographers Annual Conference, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, 3-6 Jan. 1996.
4. S. Hall, ‘New cultures for old’, in D. Massey and P. Jess, eds, A place in the world? (Oxford, Open University with Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 182.
5. The cemeteries were not the only kinds of reconstruction taking place. Hugh Clout, in ‘Restoring the ruins: the social context of reconstrucdon in northern France in the aftermath of the Great War’ (RGS/IBG Conference, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, 3-6 Jan. 1996), has examined the social context of reconstruction undertaken by various segments of French society.
6. Memorials throughout Britain, Armistice Day and war cemeteries were public recognitions of bereavement, whilst in private a ‘denial of death’ was taking place with the increase in the spiritualist movement. See D. Cannadine, ‘War and death, grief and mourning in modern Britain’, in J. Whaley, ed., Mirrors of mortality: studies in the social history of death (London, Europa, 1981), p. 227.
7. War Graves Commission, Correspondence I/W.G.C./ID Registry 4.XI.65 (London, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew Archive). During my doctoral study, researchers were denied access to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) archives.
8. G. Mosse, Fallen soldiers: reshaping the memory of the world wars (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 7.
9. Cannadine, ‘War and death’, pp. 201, 219-26, argues that the War Cabinet had been unprepared for such public displays.
10. J. M. Winter, The experience of World War I (London, Papermac, 1988), pp. 206-7.
11. P. Longworth. The unending vigil (London, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 1967; rev. edn 1985; The Times, War graves of the empire (London, Times Publishing, 1928); S. C. Hurst, Silent cities (London, Methuen, 1929); Heffernan, ‘For ever England’.
12. A. Hill, ‘Our soldiers’ graves’, Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 45(1), XLV, Part 1 in File: Misc. Papers 1: A. W. Hill (Royal Botanic Gardens Library, Kew, 1919).
13. Longworth, Unending vigil, p. 15.
14. Maj. A. A. Messer, letter dated 2 Feb. 1916, signed by Messer for the Director, Graves Registration and Enquiries, BEF, to the Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (War Graves Commission Registry 4.XL65, Kew Archive).
15. D. Prain, letter dated 2 Mar. 1916, to Director of Graves Registradon and Enquiries, BEF, regarding application for assistance (War Graves Commission Registry 4.XI.65, Kew Archive).
16. F. Ware, letter dated 14 Mar. 1916 to A. Hill (War Graves Commission Registry 4.XL65, Kew Archive).
17. A. Hill, typescript draft of introductory chapter to Capt. J. S. Parker's undded book on the military cemeteries in France (War Graves Commission General 1931-9 Registry 4.XI.65, Kew. 1936), p. 4.
18. Tending soldiers’ graves: work for women in France’, The Times, 5 July 1917, p. 3. ‘Some corner of a foreign field that is forever England: women gardeners tending soldiers’ graves’. Illustrated London News, 6 Oct. 1917, pp. 388-9; ‘Tending the graves of our heroes: gardeners of the W.A.A.C.’, Illustrated London Nexus, 2 Mar. 1918, p. 261. There is also a short (40-sec.) piece of fihn footage showing WAAC cemetery gardeners in the Imperial War Museum video, War luomen of Britain: luomen at war 1914-1918 (l.ondon, IWM, 1991). The footage comes from the newsreel Topical Budget and is titled ‘Where our heroes sleep: W.A.A.C.s tending Britons’ graves in France’.
19. As far as I have been able to discern, only women cemetery gardeners were depicted in the Bridsh illustrated press, not their male colleagues. 1 have found one illustration which alludes to male cemetery workers: ‘For ever England: in that rich earth a richer dust concealed’, London Illustrated News, 19 Apr. 1919, pp. 558-9. The doublepage drawing depicts a chaplain consecrating an extension of the Hooge Crater Cemetery, near Ypres. There are several men standing around who are presumably the cemetery workforce. They are not shown working, as the women were in the earlier images.
20. IWGC, FR. 52, the Abbeville Community Cemetery Extension, The War Graves Register: war graves of the British empire, France-, vol. IV, France 41-63 (London, IWGC, 1922), p. 5.
21. After the armistice the thirteenth-century ‘Five sisters window’ in York Minster was restored as a national monument commemoraUng the 1400 women ‘of the Empire who died during the war. See D. Boorman, At the going down of the sun: British First World War memorink (York, William Sessions, 1988), pp. 157-8.
22. Longworth, Unending vigil, pp. 29-30.
23. G. Stamp, Silent cities: an exhibition of the memorial and cemetery architecture of the Great War (London, Royal Institute of British Architects, 1977); G. Plumptre, The garden makers (London, Pavilion, 1993).
24. The Times, War graves, p. 34.
25. P. Goode, G. Jellicoe, S. Jellicoe and M. Lancaster, eds. The Oxford companion to gardens (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 520-1.
26. Hill, typescript draft, p. 2.
27. G. Jekyll, Home and garden (London, Country Life, 1900), pp. 266-76.
28. F. B. Grinham, ‘The British cemeteries in northern France’, letter to the editor. Journal of the Kew Guild 4(31), (1924), p. 237. There was, however, no unitary ‘English’ garden idea - rather, many different ‘English’ gardens. But there were popular themes, especially the cottage garden with its notion of old-fashioned planting heavily influenced by Gertrude Jekyll. Indeed, the partnership struck between Gertrude Jekyll and the eminent architect Edwin Lutyens ‘became an Edwardian craze’, with 80 gardens completed before 1913. See J. Brown, The English garden in our time: from Gertrude Jekyll to Geoffrey Jellicoe (Suffolk, Antique Collectors’ Club, 1986), pp. 36-7. This style of gardening, however, is linked to the ‘southern’ rural English idyll which, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was mobilized as representative of England. See G. Rose, ‘Place and identity; a sense of place’, in Massey and Jess, A place in the world?, pp. 87-132; also M. J. Weiner, English culture and the decline of the industrial spirit 1850-1980 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981).
29. Hill, ‘Our soldiers’ graves’, p. 5.
30. Maj. Edwin Gibson and G. Kingsley Ward, Courage remembered: the story behind the construction and maintenance of the Commonwealth's military cemeteries and memorials of the wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 (London, HMSO, 1989), pp. 44, 51; The Times, War graves, p. 4.
31. The Times, 18 Sept, 1920, p. 6. Estaminets were cafes allowed to sell alcohol.
32. The Times, War graves, p. 8.
33. Hill, ‘Our soldiers’ graves’, p. 6.
34. Grinham, ‘Bridsh cemeteries in northern France’, pp. 235-38.
35. The Times, ‘ “Forever England”: garden graves on the Western Front. An empire's tribute (by our special correspondent)’, 7 May 1921, p. 11.
36. The Times, War graves, p. 15.
37. F. Kenyon, War graves: how the cemeteries abroad will be designed, report to the IWGC (London, 1918), p. 16.
38. Longworth, Unending vigil, p. 62.
39. Kenyon, War graves, p. 6; Cannadine, ‘War and death’; K. S. Inglis, ‘World War One memorials in Australia’, Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains 167 (1992), pp. 51-8.
40. Kenyon, War graves, p. 10.
41. Heffernan, ‘For ever England’, p. 307.
42. Kenyon, War graves, p. 7.
43. See Illustrated London News, 26 Apr. 1919, pp. 592-3, ‘ “Their name liveth for evermore”: War graves - a design’ and ‘The cross of sacrifice: a design for British war cemeteries’. ‘Official drawings’ by D. Macpherson of general designs for the cemeteries, the Stone of Remembrance and the Cross of Sacrifice indicate individual graves clearly distinguished and planted with a profusion of flowers in much the same manner as the graves in Figure 1.
44. M. Wheeler, Death and the future life in Victorian literature and theology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 47-64.
45. J. Bourke, Dismembering the male: men's bodies, Britain and the Great War (London, Reaktion, 1996), p. 25.
46. J. Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 5.
47. Morris, Home and garden, p. 142; Mosse, Fallen soldiers, pp. 90-100. This substitution of England for Britain was common during the war, with writings alternadng between the two terms indiscriminately. Such usage obviously obscured the importance of W'elsh and Scottish images.
48. A. Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in R. Colls and P. Dodds, eds, Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920 (London, Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 80-81. A. Parker, M. Russo, D. Sommer and P. Yaeger, eds. Nationalisms and sexualities (London, Roudedge, 1992), p. 6. To boost voluntary British military service, propaganda posters were produced which deliberately used images of domestic voilnerabil-ity, of threatened Belgian homes, women and children, in contrast to a potentially threatened English rural idyll. Morris, Home and garden, chs 3 and 4.
49. M. S. Morris, ‘Women and gender-class relations in 19th century Sussex: a study of Isfield and Little Horsted 1830-1890’ (MA thesis. University of Sussex, 1988).
50. Morris, Home and garden’, C. Dakars, The countryside at war 1914-1918 (London, Constable, 1987).
51. Morris, Home and. garden; Bourke argues that ‘wartime experiences made men yearn for the comfort and security of conventional domesticity’, and that men brought to the war a tradition of tenderness fostered in pubs, sports fields, gyms, allotments and over garden fences in suburbia (Bourke, Dismembering the male, pp. 21-5).
52. B. Johnson, ‘ “The perfection of species” and Hardy's Tess’, in U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, eds. Nature and the Victorian imagination (Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1977), pp. 261, 263.
53. See e.g. T. S. Eliot, ‘The wasteland’, 1922 in Selected poems (London, Faber & Faber, 1954; repr. 1982); R. Kipling, The gardener’ in Debits and credits (London, Macmillan, 1949), pp. 399-414, in which there is a misrecognition of the symbol of resurrection and hope - the gardener/C'hrist.
54. The soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote of his love of nature and spring, the usually comforting metaphors of renewal and harvest grimly juxtaposed with the war (Memoirs of an infantry officer, Oxford, Clio, 1930; repr. 1989). Blomfield's Cross of Sacrifice makes an explicit reference to Christ's Passion and Resurrection combining both sacrifice and triumph. Stanley Spencer painted a series of resurrecdon images based on the war. The resurrection of the soldiers in the Sandham Memorial C.hapel, Burghclere, depicts soldiers arising from their graves in a Macedonian landscape, picking up their white wooden crosses (a familiar sight of temporary cemeteries), and clasping their comrades’ hands.
55. Kenyon, ‘War graves, p. 18. Kenyon, in explicitly stating that cemeteries needed an architectural feel, was taking part in a batde that had been raging between architects and landscape gardeners since the late nineteenth century and in which they each argued for ‘superiority’ in the field of garden design. At the beginning of the twentieth century architects still proved the strongest opposition to garden designers per se in what had become known as the ‘battle of the styles’. See J. Wolschke-Bulmahn, ‘The “wild garden” and the “nature garden”: aspects of the garden ideology of William Robinson and Willy l.Ange\ Journal of Garden History 12(3) (1992), pp. 183-206; J. Brown, The art and architecture of English gardens (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), p. 115. ‘
56. The Association of German Garden Architects was founded in 1913. The British Institute of Garden Architects was not founded until 1927, and almost immediately changed its name to the Institute of Landscape Architects; the change from ‘garden’ to ‘landscape’ indicadng the direction in which the profession was moving, as well as the influence of some of the leading members, who felt they wanted work considered more ‘serious’ than gardens. See Goode et al., Oxford companion, pp. 174, 322-3. Brown, Art and architecture, p. 121.
57. Plumptre, Garden makers, p. 145.
58. Kenyon, War graves, p. 15.
59. The registradon and care of military graves during the present war’. Journal of the Royal United Services Institution (1917), p. 297. See also F. W. Wile, ‘Why I believe the Germans are ghouls’, War Illustrated, 19 May I9I7, p. 308.
60. A. Bennett, ‘Scenes of war: the zone of Paris’, Illustrated London Neius, 21 Aug. I9I5, p. 227; ‘ “Kultur's” crudity expressed in war monuments’, War Illustrated, 25 Sept. I9I5, p. LS9.
61. The Times, War graves, p. vi.
62. Baker quoted in G. Stamp, Silent cities, p. II.
63. Inglis, World War One memorials, pp. 54-5.
64. Hill, ‘Our soldiers’ graves’, p. 8.
65. Hill, typescript draft, p. 8.
66. Hill, ‘Our soldiers’ graves’, p. 8.
67. Mosse, Fallen soldiers, p. 112.
68. Hill, typescript draft, p. 6.
69. Morris, Home and garden-, see also R. Samuel, ‘Introduction: exciting to be English’, in Samuel, ed. Patriotism: the making and unmaking of British national identity 1: History and politics (London, Routledge, 1989), pp. xviii-xvii.
70. E. Blimden, ‘Introduction’, in F. Ware, The immortal heritage: an account of the luork and policy of the Imperial War Graves Commission during twenty years 1917-1937 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1937), p. 20.
71. Lutyens quoted in C. Percy and J. Ridley, eds, The letters of Edwin Lutyens to his idfe Lady Emily (London, Collins, 1985), pp. 363-5.
72. As noted earlier, 550 000 headstones, 63 miles of hedge, 539 acres of grass and 13 million plants were issued for French and Belgian cemeteries by 1928.