Great War Wikipedia
The Imperial War Museum has launched the most ambitious war memorial ever — a website where EVERY family can post the stories of loved ones who did their bit against the Kaiser
SHE sounds like something out of the BBC Great War drama, The Crimson Field. But there’s nothing fictional about Molly O’Connell Bianconi of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps.
With the bombs raining down during a five-hour air raid over her sector of northern France in May 1918, she jumped in her ambulance and set off for a blazing ammunition dump to retrieve as many survivors as she could.
Aged just 19, Molly went on to receive the Military Medal from the King. As t he London Gazette recorded: ‘She worked for long hours under fire in the brave attempt to save the lives of those who were being buried in caves, dugouts and hospitals which had been hit.’
But what happened to her after that? And what became of her comrades? A trawl through the internet shows that she was a direct descendant of the great Irish nationalist, Daniel O’Connell, that she ended up marrying a chap from the Royal Surrey Regiment, wore uniform in World War II and died in 1968.
Hers is clearly a fascinating story: an Irishwoman, from proud nationalist stock, at the frontline and risking her neck for King and Country. But no one turned her into a book, let alone a drama. She just went home and got on with her life, thankful to have made it through in one piece.
Ditto Sergeant Tom Stratford of the South Wales Borderers. A veteran of the Boer War, he went on to witness the horrors of Gallipoli, was wounded and then recovered in time to be severely wounded at Hawthorn Ridge on the Somme.
He made it home, though, married, had a daughter and died in 1935.
His story was so f amiliar that he probably never talked about it much. In any case, he would never have seen himself as a hero — however much his f amily and his l i ttle girl may have thought otherwise.
Molly and Tom are just two of the millions now included in what is surely the most ambitious exercise in remembrance we have ever known: an attempt to chronicle the lives (and, in many cases, deaths) of every man and woman who did their bit for the Crown between 1914 and 1918.
Yesterday morning, the names of 4.5 million men and 40,000 women were placed on a new website by the Imperial War Museum.
In the coming months, as the world marks the centenary of the outbreak of hostilities, the names of millions more servicemen and women from all over the Commonwealth will be added.
In due course, they will be joined by munitions workers, civilian personnel and even 17,000 registered conscientious objectors.
AND then everyone — be they loved ones, descendants, schoolchildren, archivists, genealogists and anyone else — can upload any details, however trivial, to help transform a vast bundle of records into a digital encyclopaedia of an entire generation. It might just be an old photo, letter or postcard. It might be a diary or even a well-worn family anecdote; a school report or the register of a former employer. But it is all welcome.
All sources and contributors will be attributed, to deter hoaxers.
Long i nto t he f uture, t his monumental undertaking will not just be a memorial but an everexpanding Facebook-cum-Wikipedia for the entire Great War.
And that, in fact, was exactly why the Imperial War Museum was established in the first place. The original ambition of the founding fathers was to create an institution which would honour the war effort of everyone who had taken part in World War I — from combatants in uniform to factory staff churning out shells and cans of bully beef. As the museum’s first directorgeneral, Sir Martin Conway, put it: ‘The humblest war worker will be able to find examples of the work he or she did for the Empire.’
King George V summed it up as follows: ‘A lasting memorial of common effort and common sacrifice.’
The sad truth was that the common sacrifice was so great that it would prove impossible to do justice to all the dead, let alone all those who survived.
An initial plan to display a photograph of every fallen serviceman was soon abandoned. ‘Trafalgar Square would not contain them,’ the museum’s Keeper of Photographs explained to his superiors.
After two temporary exhibitions, the museum finally moved into its current South London home in 1936 after this was gifted to the nation by Viscount Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail. Even then, it could not hope to display all the tragic keepsakes and mementos which ended up in its possession, and another world war would soon impose fresh demands.
But there was never any suggestion of letting the Great War recede from mind or view. Two months from now, the museum will reopen following a £35 million renovation and the creation of the spectacular new First World War Galleries. Now, in parallel, we will have this enduring and powerful online archive of all those who took part.
‘We want to continue the original vision of this place as a hall of memory,’ e x pl a i ns Melanie Donnelly, project manager for the museum’s Lives Of The First World War project.
‘So many people contributed in so many ways. While those who died might be remembered on a memorial, there are many more who are not recorded anywhere.’
Three years in the making, the starting point for this vast database has been the medal records of the British Army. These list all those eligible for every campaign medal for service overseas. This list, alone, comes to more than 4.5 million.
Next to be added in the coming weeks will be the records of the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force and its predecessors, the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service.
Around a million Commonwealth troops, starting with 600,000 Canadians, will also be included.
‘This is a world first. There’s nothing like it anywhere else,’ says Luke Smith, head of all things digital for the World War I centenary, pointing out that the public interest in the project has already been enormous.
In just the first few hours of operation yesterday morning alone, more than 30,000 contributions were received.
The museum cannot hope to update every individual entry; that will be down to the rest of us. But it has already put together a few examples using some of its rich archive of personal effects. So, we know a few things about Private Albert Tattersall of the Manchester Regiment.
We know he was one of seven children from Moston, Manchester, and one of three brothers who all arrived in France in December 1915. We know he wrote home saying: ‘The trenches are in a rotten condition with water and mud, but I am not grumbling because war is hard at any time’.
The following summer, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, Albert was mortally injured and died of his wounds two days later.
But what sort of chap was he? Does anyone have details of a loved one who went to school with him or played football with him?
Can anyone shed any light on the Brown brothers of Dulwich, Keith and Clive? Keith arrived on the Western Front with the Queen’s Regiment in November 1914 and survived until September 1918 when he was fatally wounded.
CLIVE, a Captain in the Royal Engineers, died just four days before the Armistice. The museum has a photo of Keith but little else.
We cannot begin to imagine the grief felt by the Brown family at the very moment war was making way for peace. But at least now, the whole world may learn a little more about these two young brothers, no longer just two names on a crowded memorial.
And what of women like Sister Fanny Tindall? Here was a professional nurse who had spent three years in France and Malta before being posted to Mesopotamia in January 1918.
Just eight days after her arrival at 85 British General Hospital, she was invited to attend a ‘sociable trip’ on the river. The boat capsized and she drowned.
More f ortunate was Rachel Moseley, a comrade of Molly O’Connell Bianconi.
She, too, received the Military Medal for driving her ambulance under machine gun and shellfire when not ‘obtaining particulars of wants of the British wounded’.
We know that the Birmingham Post called her ‘a fine example of English womanhood’ and that she lived until 1954. But what was life really like for her and the men she rescued and nursed at the Front?
Well, we don’t have to wait for the next series of The Crimson Field to find out.