The ‘People’s War’ in Concrete and Stone: Death and the Negotiation of Collective Identity in Second World War Britain

Abstract

This article explores ideas and feelings about the burial of the war’s dead, and their memorialisation. It investigates the relationship between a drive to remember the conflict’s dead as members of the collective wartime nation, and a desire by many of the bereaved to emphasise familial ties and the individual lives of the dead. While this was not a new concern—and had already been seen, for example, in debates about where to bury, and how to commemorate, the dead of the First World War in Britain—it gained an additional politics in the Second World War. In this conflict, ideas about the nation, about the state’s duty to its citizens and about citizens’ reciprocal duties towards the wartime state were interwoven with ideas about domestic reconstruction in the war’s aftermath. This article traces the articulation of these ideas through contemporary discussions of, and feelings about, burial and memorialisation, using these as a means of thinking about the meaning of the ‘people’s war’ both during and after the conflict.