We have all seen the pictures of them. Many of us have visited those humbling and beautifully-maintained British and Empire/Commonwealth war cemeteries in Europe and further afield.
Row upon row of white headstones carrying the names and regimental or service emblems of men (and some women) who made the ultimate sacrifice in both world wars. Sometimes the name of the deceased wasn’t known, and so the stone simply says the soldier buried there is “known unto God” – the words were suggested by Rudyard Kipling.
Aside from visiting the cemeteries, many of us have had cause to use the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s (CWGC) website (www.cwgc.org) to find out a little more about some family member who was lost in one of the wars.
The CWGC, as it has been known since 1960 (it was the Imperial War Graves Commission before that) is responsible for the commemoration of 1.7 million British and Commonwealth soldiers and civilians, and cares for around 23,000 separate burial sites around the world.
The Commission was established thanks to the work of a Bristolian, Sir Fabian Ware.
Fabian Arthur Goulstone Ware was born at Glendower House, Clifton Park in 1869. His father was a chartered accountant, and he would go on to a successful career taking in teaching, journalism and business.
He was a director of Rio Tinto Zinc when the First World War broke out. He tried to enlist, but at the age of 45 he was too old, so instead became a volunteer with a Red Cross ambulance unit.
It was this which made him realise that there was no system or organisation responsible for marking and recording the graves of those killed, so he established the Red Cross Graves Registration Unit.
He also reasoned that the graves would have to be cared for after the war’s end, and he leveraged the influential contacts from his careers as a newspaper editor and businessman to form the Imperial War Graves Commission.
He established cemeteries and war memorials and oversaw the enormous task of recording the details of the dead. He approached artists, architects and poets and others to devise appropriate memorials and cemeteries.
Headstones would be all alike, with no distinction of rank, race or religion. They were to be laid out in straight rows with the national emblem or the service or regimental badge plus the rank, name, unit, date of death, age and religious emblem on the headstones. Families could also add a short personal inscription if they wished.
Ware found himself managing a small army of gardeners, gravediggers and masons, many of them ex-soldiers, who would end up settling in France or Belgium and marrying local women.
It was an immense task, complicated by the fact that for years afterwards human remains were being found which could not be identified. At the same time, tens of thousands were known to have died but whose remains could not be located. These would be memorialised with monuments such as the Menin Gate at Ieper (Ypres) and the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in northern France.
Ware was knighted for his work in 1920, and was called out of retirement on the outbreak of the Second World War, which could leave us with a legacy of even more CWGC cemeteries around the world, and which would provide graves for civilians who died as a result of enemy action.
When he died in 1949 his ashes were buried in the local Holy Trinity Churchyard, Amberley, Gloucestershire with an Imperial War Graves Commission headstone.
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