From Lincoln we travelled south, first via Grantham to take a look at its most famous son, Isaac Newton. His house was actually a few miles outside the town but we’ll stretch a point. The statue is slap bang in Grantham town centre.

Right beside the statue there was an unusual War Memorial commemorating those who had lost their lives in various wars, campaigns, peace keeping operations or terrorist actions since 1945.

There must be a War Memorial to both World Wars but it wasn’t in the part of the town centre we walked through.

The town looked pretty down at heel. There was one Art Deco building.

Could this have been a Burton’s?

On the way down on our trip we stopped off at Wetherby just to have a bite to eat and stretch the legs. I didn’t spot much in the way of Deco but there was a nice bridge over the River Wharfe.

As you can see the river was quite high, in fact flooding the banks so that you couldn’t walk on the bank underneath the bridge.

Just to the right of the above photo Wetherby War Memorial stands on the bridge parapet – see photo on the left below. I’m not too keen on the ones which feature angels like this. A day later I also photographed Lincoln’s War Memorial, on the right below, a more intricate and to my mind more æsthetic design. A couple more photos of Wetherby are on my flickr.

On Saturday we ended up at Dollar, Clackmannanshire.

This is Dollar’s WW2 memorial, situated in a small memorial gardens just off the main A 91 road. The gardens side has two names for servicemen killed in Northern Ireland. There was no sign of any First World War names.

We walked up the hill beside the burn, over which there are two nice bridges.

The white building behind the second one houses Dollar Museum, which contains, among other things, a display on the Devon Valley Railway (now sadly defunct, victim of the greatest act of institutional vandalism in Britain in my lifetime, the Beeching cuts, though the part to Alloa has been reopened recently.)

We asked the attendant if there was a WW1 memorial anywhere and were told it was in the school grounds.

Of course, Dollar Academy. Lots of former pupils would have served in the wars. The memorial is unusual, showing a figure with outstretched hands.

The main school building can be seen in the first photo. The side facing it seemed to contain names from the parish rather than FPs. Other sides were reserved solely for ex-pupils, with WW2 and later conflicts also commemorated.

On a sudden impulse we went to Edinburgh on Sunday morning. (Well the good lady wanted to return an item to a shop.)

It was a pleasure not to have to fight our way through crowds on Princes Street as we would have on a Saturday.

I had the camera along and ended up taking 46 photos.

This is the war memorial that stands on North Bridge (the one above Waverley Station.) The uniforms are of the South African War/Wars.

If you read the writing (click on the picture to enlarge) it’s not just to commemorate those wars but also engagements in Afghanistan (nothing changes, eh?) Egypt, Chin Lusha, Chitral and Tirah.

This bottom picture is of the plaque below the memorial. It commemorates the laying of the foundation stone of the North Bridge by some local worthy.

In the gardens surrounding the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, inside a hedged enclosure just behind where I took the picture in the post linked to above there is a memorial to the Cameronians Regiment, also known as the Scottish Rifles, which has a long association with Glasgow.

The statuary is not, like some, a mawkish example of the form, representing as it does members of the regiment in action during the Great War. Indeed it is unusual in that it seems to depict one of the fallen – which such memorials tend to shy away from.

Front view

Side view

Wording on plinth

After Newcastle we scooted down to Durham (passing Antony Gormley‘s Angel of the North on the way.) The main attraction there is, of course, the Cathedral. I’d seen it before from the train, dominating Durham’s skyline.

This is a side view I took from the south.

This one is from the north: a stitch of two photos as I couldn’t get back far enough to get the whole thing in.

Just to the right of the cathedral entrance in a grassy area there was a large stone cross.

We crossed the grass to investigate and it was another memorial to the South African War, if not quite as ornate as the one in Newcastle (see two posts ago.) The photo is floating right.

The cathedral itself is impressive while more intimate than York or Canterbury. It apparently costs over £60,000 a week to maintain it.

The stone columns suporting the structure are carved with different patterns. The chevrons were the most attractive. The shrine to St Cuthbert is a bit over the top though. Its canopy has iconography you would more expect to see in an Orthodox context rather than C of E. (But it would have been constructed in the RC era I suppose.)

On one wall there were lists of previous abbots, deans and bishops. I noticed one Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal, in the latter. He seems to have been the only Bishop of Durham who was also a Cardinal. The early names were all single. When did the practice of adopting surnames come into being?

The part of the cathedral I found most moving was the side chapel devoted to the Durham Light Infantry (DLI.) There were lists of battle honours dating back to beyond the Napoleonic wars. Books of remembrance of both World Wars were open at the relevant week’s dates showing the names of those DLI who died on the corresponding days in the war years, and where they fell. I saw no blank days for either war. So it goes. Several small crosses with poppies were laid in a niche. There was one for a former DLI soldier with the dates 1910-2010 and annotated “Veteran of Kohima.” Kohima was a particularly vicious battle on India’s border in World War 2. He did well to survive it, and to reach such an age.

There was also a memorial to miners who had died in pit disasters and such, not the sort of thing usually found in cathedrals I think. And a modern piece of stained glass showing the cathedral’s and Durham area’s history.

There’s a lot to see.

In Great Britain there are War Memorials – mainly to the Great War and the Second World War – in even the smallest towns and villages. Sometimes when you’re driving along in the countryside there will be one at the edge of a field; covered in names even though there appears to be no habitation worthy of the name round about.

I’ve also come across them on walls in churches, police and railway stations (does anyone know what happened to the memorial at Dumbarton East when they demolished the old buildings?) and Post Offices commemorating the former workers who “gave their lives.”

It’s always striking that the number of dead for World War 1 outstrips that of World War 2 – perhaps a reflection of the fact that, after 1916 till late 1918, the greater burden of the Allies in the Great War lay on Britain and its Empire, while in WW2 most of the fighting after 1941 was done by the USSR and the US.

I spent a fortnight in Germany 30 years ago and was tremendously saddened by the war memorial in the town where I was staying. The sacrifice seemed even more poignant because they lost (and, of course, in WW2 had no shred of excuse nor reason to fight.)

I have already posted pictures of Kirkcaldy’s War Memorial.

There is another war memorial in Kirkcaldy, though, one which is fairly unusual.

It is to the local dead of the Spanish Civil War; members of the International Brigade who came from Fife or the Lothians. That conflict preceded and presaged the greater anti-fascist fight of WW2. Arguably had France and Great Britain taken the government side in that war then the later, bigger war might have been averted. But Britain at least was in no mood to fight (think of all those names on the WW1 memorials) and was also unprepared (no Spitfires for example.) This was still more or less true by the time of the Munich crisis in 1938. But failure to stand up to him on both those occasions and also during the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 and the 1938 Anschluss encouraged Hitler to believe we never would.

Here is the memorial in situ. It stands just off Forth Avenue, quite near Kirkcaldy railway station.

The main plaque is inscribed as below.

These are the names just above the plaque.

There are more on the plinth below the shield.

This is the shield. The mounted knight is an old emblem representing Fife.

It’s strange to think that had the Western European powers fought in Spain and helped the Spanish Republic to victory, a Nazi Germany would, paradoxically, likely have survived long past 1945.

I took these photos on Sunday afternoon (Remembrance Day.) The wreaths from the morning’s memorial service are prominent. Among the wreaths from the local Council and councillor and various military and civilian organisations there was one from the US Marine Corps.

The central memorial pillar has bronzes on it displaying soldiers, seamen and airmen, ships, aircraft, airships etc. In this respect it resembles larger memorials I have seen such as the one in Plymouth (which is mainly dedicated to naval personnel.)

The building beyond the memorial contains Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery and was built with money donated from the linoleum manufacturer family Nairn as part of the memorial to the dead of WW1.

This is to the right of the WW2 memorial and is a relatively recent addition. It provides a place for individual memorial poppies, as you can see, and also for commemoration of those who have died on active service since WW2. One time I looked there a poppy had been placed in memory of someone who had been killed in Basra.

Some years ago, when skateboarding was a newish fad and before special areas for it had been built in parks etc skateboarders used to use the tarred area in front of the memorial to do their thing. There were several letters to the local paper objecting to this as a mark of disrespect in part disguised by concern that they might be damaging the memorial itself.

I never saw it as disrespect. After all, wasn’t it precisely so that people could go about doing whatever they enjoyed within the law that those commemorated had given their lives for?

I also never noted any damage, even to the tarmac.

It’s mostly quiet these days of course.