My thanks to Dr Julie Rugg at the Cemetery Research Group, York University, for allowing me to present at the Group’s Colloquium in York on Friday 18th May 2018. Her encouragement and support made all the difference between ‘having a go’ and keeping all this to myself. https://www.york.ac.uk/spsw/research/cemetery-research-group/
The presentation was entitled ‘The Kopje-crest and the Uniform Headstone’. It explored the links between the experience of the South African War (1899-1902) and the Imperial War Graves Commission after 1917. There is more about this in a separate article.
Here are some photos from the presentation. They are all cemeteries in France: Tranchee de Mecknes, Heilly and Warloy-Baillon. They were selected to show the similarities between IWGC war cemeteries (even though smaller ones do not have Lutyens’ Stone of Remembrance, and Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice may be smaller too). The other reason is that they each contain one of the Moon brothers. Four of them, in total, died in a 10-week period in 1916. But that’s another story.
Tablets of Stone: religion, war and loss. 