Issue 109

Nov / Dec 2009

Contents

news

Museum calls for fund to study treasure finds

Missing Stonehenge circle did not come from Preselis

with Important revision to Stonehenge bluestone theory
An interim note on the latest developments, by Rob Ixer and Richard Bevins

Found: "The great lost monument of Cambridge"

in the press

in brief & phase 2

features

Staffordshire Gold

Nevern Castle – Castell Nanhyfer

Tracking Hunters and Gatherers on the Continental Limits

with Bibliography

Remembering the Great War with Lutyens

Extending the British Museum

letters

your views and responses

on the web

Caroline Wickham-Jones looks at excavation websites

Matt Ritchie introduces Forest Heritage Scotland

CBA Correspondent

Don Henson looks at the Marsh Award shortlist

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

features

Remembering the Great War with Lutyens

We recognise the achievement of architect Edwin Lutyens in the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London, where every year the national service of remembrance pays respect to Britain's war dead. But, says Tim Skelton, Lutyens's memorial legacy is far greater than this.

July 2010 will see a unique event in northern France – the opening of a new first world war battlefield cemetery on the Western Front, to join over 900 others that run through Belgium and France from Switzerland to the North Sea. It had long been suspected that German troops buried British and Australian dead after the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916, but that the graves had not been discovered when the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC, now known as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission or CWGC) searched the battlefield after the war. Those graves have now been found, and after excavation earlier this year, the men will receive individual burial in what will be known as the Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery. It will share the design principles of its forbears, which owe much to the influence of the eminent architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944).

When the guns fell silent in 1918, Lutyens was at the height of his powers. Aged nearly 50, he was the architect of choice for those who wanted to build themselves a distinguished yet comfortable house, often in Surrey and usually in partnership with the celebrated plantswoman Gertrude Jekyll, who had championed his early career. Society connections through his wife Emily, the daughter of the Earl of Lytton, had led in 1912 to him being awarded the plum commission to design the new Indian capital of New Delhi. This fey gesture of dwindling imperial power had, as its centrepiece, the Viceroy's House, larger than Versailles and to all intents and purposes a British royal palace at the heart of the subcontinent.

Lutyens's annual trips to India by boat, a cabin of which was converted for him into a drawing office, gave him time to contemplate the horrors of the first war and how it should be commemorated. He was not a religious man, although he was influenced by his wife's close involvement in the theosophy movement. On May 27 1917 he wrote to Fabian Ware, the dynamic head of the IWGC, with his thoughts upon how the dead should be commemorated:

On platforms made of not less than three steps... place one great stone of fine proportion 12 feet long [3.7m] and finely wrot – without undue ornament and tricky and elaborate carvings and inscribe thereon one thought in clear letters so that all men for all times may read and know the reason why these stones are placed throughout France – facing the West and facing the men who lie looking ever eastward towards the enemy. After this you can plant to desire and erect cloisters – chapels – crosses buildings of as many varieties as to suit the always varying sites. Every grave enclosure should be made for permanence and to have one permanent building wherein a roll of honour may be kept indelible.

Lutyens's letter reached Ware at an opportune time. Too old to fight he had gone to France in August 1914 "to do something", and joining the Red Cross, had soon realised that there was no formal process for recording the graves of the dead soldiers. This became an all-consuming passion and, in the same month that he received Lutyens's letter, had led to the formation of the IWGC with its remit to acquire land and build cemeteries for those who had died in the campaign. Ware had been appointed its vice-chairman and de facto chief executive.

The question of cemetery design had been very much on his mind, and he invited Lutyens to accompany him as part of a small working party to visit France within the month. The group, which included fellow architect Herbert Baker and Arthur Hill from Kew Gardens, toured the battlefields and produced a series of recommendations which, in broad terms, followed the earlier suggestions made by Lutyens. One key matter, however, became the subject of a broader discussion at a national level – the extent to which the individual graves should reflect religious symbolism.

The IWGC was very clear that it wanted a uniform treatment within the cemeteries, both for aesthetic reasons but also to reflect the equality of death, and had designed a standard non-denominational headstone. To respect the religion of the majority of those who would be buried, each cemetery would also contain a cross. It was opposed in its views by a vociferous group led by Earl Balfour and Lady Cecil, the wife of the Bishop of Exeter, which argued that relatives should also have the choice of a gravestone in the form of a cross if they so wished. The matter came to a head in a passionate debate in parliament in May 1920 that resulted in clear support for the commission's stance.

Three prototype cemeteries were unveiled later that year. The widespread public acclaim that they received gave the IWGC confidence to commence its work in earnest under the architectural guidance of Lutyens and Baker who, along with Sir Reginald Blomfield and, for a short time Charles Holden, had been appointed as its principal architects. They were paid £400 a year to work with the commission's own architects. The task facing them was enormous, with over a million soldiers from Britain and the empire having been killed in Europe and around the world. That the work was completed in under 15 years and within the original budget of some £8m (the cost of the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele alone was £3.75m) bears testament to the superb organisation that the IWGC became.

It was decided that, in broad terms, the bodies should remain where they were buried, although graves should be concentrated where appropriate. The result is that the cemeteries graphically represent the confused nature of the conflict. Some might contain only a small number of bodies from a particular action, perhaps buried as an expedient in a suitable shell hole. Others are more ordered, where they were at the hospitals and casualty clearing stations comfortably behind the front line. Common to all are a cross designed by Blomfield and the planting, under Arthur Hill's guidance, redolent of an English garden and strongly influenced by Jekyll.

In contrast to Blomfield, who allowed his cross to be varied in size according to that of the cemetery, Lutyens jealously guarded the design of his "great war stone" (which became known as the stone of remembrance). He would not allow it to be altered, with the result that it was omitted from the smaller cemeteries where it was felt that it would be out of scale. The stone tends to be relegated to a footnote in books about Lutyens, almost as if its ubiquity has rendered it invisible, but it is one of his most important and powerful works. Designed on the basis of entasis to correct optical distortion, and carved with the familiar words, "Their name liveth for evermore" (chosen by Kipling from the Book of Ecclesiasticus) it has a brooding, sentinel-like presence wherever used.

But, as much as anything, it is the modest shelters that give the cemeteries their unique quality. Rather than forced to a standard design, the architects were given free rein by the commission to build within a general cost formula. Lutyens's work was particularly inventive and amongst his best, with buildings ranging from the exotic to the modernist, embracing pure classicism along the way. The cemeteries were treated as pieces of architecture in their own right and are worthy successors to the English landscape tradition that stretches back to Stowe and Stourhead.

Many of the bodies were not found, either because, as at Fromelles, they were "lost", or because they had been destroyed by the shelling. Nonetheless, the commission was anxious to ensure that all those who had died in the war were commemorated by name where they had fallen. Its solution was to carve a series of "memorials to the missing", of which Blomfield's Menin Gate at Ypres is the most famous – Lutyens having been rejected for the commission because the location was seen as being "too gothic" for him. He was, however, appointed to design the memorial at Thiepval to commemorate the 72,099 missing from the Battle of the Somme. The 140 foot (42.7m) high series of interpenetrating brick arches is the largest British war memorial in the world, and one of our nation's most distinguished pieces of architecture. Bizarrely, such was the country's weariness for the war, it was not mentioned in Lutyens's obituary in the Times.

Independently of his work for the IWGC, Lutyens also designed over 50 war memorials at home and abroad. His supreme creation, the Cenotaph (Greek for empty tomb), came about by chance. He was asked to design a temporary saluting point in Whitehall for the peace procession in London in July 1919 marking the formal ending of the war. His sketch built at short notice out of wood and plaster struck an immediate chord with the public, its simple but elegant form catching the mood of a nation still coming to terms with the loss of so many of its citizens. There was an immediate call for it to be made permanent and, with slight modifications to incorporate entasis, the Portland stone memorial with which we are so familiar was unveiled on November 11 1920.

Other memorials range from the humble plaque containing just three names in the church of the Buckinghamshire hamlet of Tyringham, to the grand memorial arch in Leicester's Victoria Park, which replaced an intriguing initial proposal from the architect for a tree cathedral. Most perfectly of all though is the memorial at Spalding – a small pavilion standing at the head of a long reflecting pool. However there was to be a coda. With the subtlety and wit that was his trademark, and unnoticed by most Londoners who walk along Park Lane, the rooftop plantrooms of the Grosvenor Hotel show how elegantly Lutyens was able to bring a reminder of the Western Front to the heart of the nation's capital.

Tim Skelton is the author (with Gerald Gliddon) of Lutyens & the Great War (Frances Lincoln 2008, ISBN 9780711228788).

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