Remembering the dead in Northop: First World War memorials in a Welsh parish.

Abstract

The village of Northop, in the Flintshire parish of the same name, is dominated by the tower of its church. Just inside the tower door is a brass plaque, mounted to commemorate the dead of the first world war. It names 13 men from Northop itself, 16 from Soughton, a mile south, and 10 from Northop Hall, a community that grew up around the manor house of that name, two miles to the east of the parish church. The plaque, and the other memorials of the parish, were raised in the years immediately after the war, and were part of the remarkable wave of memorial construction that followed this particular conflict. Naturally, all the acts of remembrance had much in common, and much has been written about the general meaning and function of memorials. Winter, for example, emphasizes their role in helping the bereaved. They were places where people could mourn, and highly visible places, so that the suffering of the bereaved would be recognized. For a country the vast majority of whose dead lay in foreign graves, if they had graves at all, the memorials were a way in which those dead could come home. They were also a way in which loss could be expressed and perhaps in the end accepted. They were places where a meaning could be found for what had happened, to those who had gone and those who were left behind. It is also possible to approach a single memorial like that in Northop and ask more specific questions about what it means. It can even be argued that with memorials, it is the individual that matters most. The questions they raise may be universal, but the answers are singular, because a study of any memorial leads back not only to the names of the individuals that it records, but to the individuals who established it and decided on the form that it should take. We can also use a single example to look beyond the memorial to other ways in which memories were kept alive, and perhaps in this way see how the memorial, powerful symbol though it undoubtedly was, failed to satisfy some of those it was meant to serve: the bereaved. This article examines these points in the parish of Northop, a place where the establishment of the various memorials is unusually well-documented, and where evidence of different kinds — local, regional, official and private — is available. Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 1999 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol 34(2), 231–242. [0022-0094(199904)34:2;231–242;008010]