Abstract
From the 1990s onwards, the study of commemoration has developed exponentially as historians have turned their attention to the means by which the past has been interpreted. This cultural or mnemonic turn has led them to seek out signifying practices which can tell us something about what a given society thought about its past. Memorials present scholars with a moment where an artist, but also a benefactor or an organizing committee seeking funding, had to determine how to represent an individual, an incident, a battle or a war. They then set it in stone and bequeathed their idea of history to our public spaces. Amongst the most visible and ubiquitous of these across Britain are the war memorials to the First World War which can be found in virtually every town and village. These public sculptures have spawned a vibrant historiography. Curious then, for a country with such an important maritime history, that naval memorials have been largely neglected. This is not just a reflection on the nature of the First World War, wherein the war at sea has been remembered as being of secondary importance to the blood-letting of the Western Front, but of a wider omission by scholars.
Barbara Tomlinson’s Commemorating the Seafarer starts the process of correcting this neglect of naval memorials. Its scope is broad, aiming for an overview of all memorials relating to the sea from the post-medieval period onwards. In that regard, it is a tremendously ambitious project, borne of 35 years’ work at the National Maritime Museum. Since 1978, the NMM has been developing a database of maritime-related sculpture, a project that has been fostered by a series of professional curators including Tomlinson but also an army of volunteers from the public and particularly NADFAS (the National Association of Decorative and Fine Art Societies). Its scope includes church and cemetery monuments, commemorative stained glass and public sculpture.
In the array of case studies it presents, it is possible to read a history of the changing nature of seafaring and society itself; from the exercise of military power by the chief of the MacLeods in the late medieval period to the privateering of the seventeenth century, and from the nation-building heroes of the French wars to the more democratic era of the twentieth century. There is room here too for the commemoration of accidents, explorers, fishermen and lifeboat men. Hence this wide-ranging book includes short histories of monuments to Nelson and Drake, Cook and Scott, Shackleton and Jack Cornwell, Titanic and Lusitania, Grace Darling and the RNLI, all with some sense of the events which led them to be memorialized.
There is vast knowledge on show here, and much detailed description of the monuments themselves. Yet, the breadth of the study means it necessarily can only skim across the surface. We await further studies which focus more closely on a single era or memorial and analyse them within the context of the academic literature.