innovate-issue-005

Remembering The Fallen of World War OneJune 28th 2014 was the centennial anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary a hundred years before. That event in Sarajevo was to lead, just over a month later, to the outbreak ofthe First World War.Both sides entered this conflict with great confidence and popular enthusiasm, decades of relative peace havingimmunised them to the true horrors of war. At first, the combat was waged between armies consisting ofprofessional soldiers and reserves, who had been called up, but as the months dragged on and there was noend in sight, Britain began a recruiting campaign to increase its army, now bogged down in trench warfare onthe Western Front.For the first couple of years of war there was a reluctance in Westminster to introduce conscription, orcompulsory military service, and it was therefore important to convince young men to sign up. Recruitingcampaigns therefore toured the country, recruiting offices set up in major towns, and the support of localcouncils, churches and businesses was encouraged.Every town and community across Britain was soon affected by the ongoing conflict. Of course, it was not justthe trenches of the Western Front, the war was not called a 'world' war without reason. Troops were thus alsoassigned to units heading for Aden, at the end of the Red Sea, and for the conflict against the Ottoman Empirein Mesopotamia, now Iraq. Before long, local newspapers were reporting on the fallen of the locality, listing suchseemingly exotic places as Kut and Aden as locations of their death.In the South Wales valleys the fallen are remembered on local memorials, placed in chapels and welfare halls,as well as eulogies in the newspaper. The official war memorial for the towns would come later, after the war,usually as a result of community collections.One project, commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War is the Wargraves andRemembrance Graves of Ystradgynlais and Ystalyfera, towns which at the time were thriving industrial andmining communities in the Swansea Valley. This project is a not-for-profit venture and its websites can be foundatwww.ystradgynlais-wargraves.co.ukandwww.ystradgynlais-fallen.co.ukIt is an ongoing project, seeking to create a comprehensive database of the local memorials, cemeteries andnewspaper reports of the fallen from the two towns, and their surrounding villages. Many of the memorials nolonger exist either in their original form, or in their original location, especially if the latter were one of the onceubiquitous independent chapels of the valley, a lot of which have been sold off and demolished in recentdecades. In addition, cemetery records vary in their completeness, so a lot of original research has beenneeded to bring this information to the public.A more surprising problem has been the identification of some of the individuals named on the memorials.Although the Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists all of the recorded fallen from the First World War,and later conflicts, many of the individuals with a local tie did not originally come from the area. The CWGCtends to record places of origin more than work, so many labourers who came to live and work in Ystradgynlaisor Ystalyfera, and who were treated by the newspapers as local men, and mourned by their friends as localmen, originally came from elsewhere.Over the years of the project, a large number of these men have been identified, but a few remain uncertain, oreven completely unknown. Where there is no local family tradition, and where the only thing that remains is thename upon a wall, and a place upon the memorial, local newspaper archives of the time have proven invaluablein tracking down reports on the individuals' death, and thus on establishing identity.We hope that this project brings to life the men, and occasionally women, who gave their lives for their country.We have included photographs, reports and where we can locate it family data to round them off as people, andhope that in this new digital era it provides of itself a fitting memorial to the fallen of the two towns, and theircommunities.Grey Wolf and Val Trevallion