Ranking on memorials

[Jock Bruce]

Lee,

interesting that the guy at the top of the WW2 list is from a family with some pretentions, at least, to gentility (Younger of .....) - and looking at CWGC the only WW2 IP Grant is a Lt Col.

Wonder if the apparent democracy of this one hides a hierarchy.

Jock

[Guest Hill 60]

Wonder if the apparent democracy of this one hides a hierarchy.

Jock - Could be.

How about this one then? This memorial is a few yards away from the Loch Ness Visitor Centre and commemorates the men of Glen Urquhart.

The 2nd name down is Capt. James Grant, Clan Chief of Clan Grant and Earl of Seafield, his family used to own Urquhart Castle.

[Clive Maier]

Just to recap, the aim of this poll is to use the knowledge and reach of the forum to try to determine how widespread was the practice of sorting and arranging the fallen by rank on our memorials.

To get a reliable result, we need as many voters as possible. So if you are familiar with a memorial and have not yet voted, I hope I may encourage you to do so now. The question is:

Does ‘your’ memorial sort the fallen by rank? Yes or no?

If you know about lots of memorials, please either vote for the one you are most familiar with, or cast a vote representative of the majority of these memorials. If you can also add a post detailing how the majority was made up, that will be even better.

If you have joined this thread for the first time at the bottom of the page, you can find the poll right at the top of the page.

Thanks again.

[paul guthrie]

Clive you may want to throw my no out because it's a US memorial, not what you are looking for.

[Clive Maier]

Paul,

OK, noted. Thank you.

[Clive Maier]

Voting seems to have stalled on this poll. However, I realise I have not been very clever in calling the poll at the height of the holiday season. For that reason, I propose to give it until 3 September before calling a halt and attempting to draw conclusions.

For those who are returning to the forum after a holiday, the question is:

Does ‘your’ memorial sort the fallen by rank? Yes or no?

If you know about lots of memorials, please either vote for the one you are most familiar with, or cast a vote representative of the majority of these memorials. If you can also add a post detailing how the majority was made up, that will be even better.

If you have joined the thread for the first time at the bottom of the page, you can find the poll right at the top of the page.

Thanks again.

[Clive Maier]

I think it is time to regard voting on this poll as complete. The idea was to use the reach of the forum to find out how widespread was the practice of using rank to create a hierarchical listing of the dead on war memorials.

First of all, sincere thanks to all those who voted and commented.

The question was, Does ‘your’ memorial sort the fallen by rank? Yes or no?

Adding in one vote that went missing for technical reasons, we finished up with 42 votes split thus:

Yes 7.1%

No 92.9%

42 votes represents less than 4% of the membership. I had hoped for 60 or more, having guessed that 40% of the members might be ‘active’ and 15% of those might respond. The figure of 15% is often regarded as a reasonable response rate for a questionnaire. I realise now that my 40% guess was wildly optimistic. Doing now what I should have done then – looking at the total individual postings table – I find that only 149 members (13.7% of the membership) have scored 50 or more posts. Allowing for some active members being new, this means that the voting rate of active members was probably 25% or better. That is quite a strong response so thanks again.

I think that one or two conclusions are possible. First, the poll might not be quite such a good data mining tool as I thought. The poll question must be very carefully thought through, and I did not quite manage that. I foolishly forget about memorials outside the UK. I did realise that many respondents would know about several memorials and I tried to get around that by asking about ‘your’ memorial, meaning the one you know most about or feel closest to. However, this turned out to be an imperfect workaround. I also conclude that the reach of the forum is not as great as I imagined. The depth is immense but the width less so.

I have tried to address some of these shortcomings by adjusting the figures. First, although I am grateful for the response from outside the UK and I am very glad to have the information for the bigger picture, I have excluded all such votes as I can identify from the voting. This is because there may have been significant variations in the attitude to ranking between the different cultures. I have also added in votes to reflect the information that some voters kindly gave about a number of ‘their’ memorials. This required a certain amount of interpretation so I don’t guarantee the outcome but with that proviso, the end result then becomes:

Yes 9.8%

No 90.2%

Total (number) 102

After all that, can we draw any conclusions about ranking on memorials? Strictly speaking, no. The National Inventory of War Memorials estimates that the total number of UK war memorials in all forms is about 54,000. Not all of them commemorate the Great War or carry names but the overwhelming majority do both. We need a random sample of perhaps 200 to 500 memorials to draw confident conclusions about such a huge body of work. Our adjusted vote of 102 falls short. We can’t regard it as anything more than an indicator. Having said that, the vote is skewed very strongly towards ‘No’, so maybe it is quite a good indicator.

I am surprised by the result. I had expected to find a significant majority for ranking. The Commission’s egalitarian decision to disregard rank was far-seeing but it was not unopposed. Britain in the late teens and early 20s was still a hierarchical, class-ridden and deferential society. Inequalities of income, education, opportunity, articulacy and self-esteem were vast. Ranking would surely have seemed part of the natural order of things. Tom Morgan put it very well when he pointed out that “… it was often the local great and good who would have expected (and been expected) to make the decisions.” Occasionally this could be taken to extremes. In another thread, Terry Denham has told of a vicar who assumed virtual power of veto about which names went on the local memorial and which did not. Kate Wills, Frank East and Lee gave examples of people using local power and influence in a quite blatant way. No doubt it seemed to them only right that a prime position in life should be reflected in death by a prime position on the memorial. Malcolm on the other hand told of a notably democratic memorial.

Overall, I think the poll was a useful exercise. I learned plenty and I hope others did too. It seems likely that UK memorials in the mass were more egalitarian than I gave them credit for. My thanks again to all the voters who brought about this finding.

[andigger]

No, but it does by race!

Andy

[chrisharley9]

Llanberis Memorial the Great War names are listed by rank with a the exception that a VAD appears 1st, the WW2 names are strictly alphabetical

All The Best

Chris

[Guest]

Portsmouth Naval Memorial.

I notice that Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Craddock's name would appear to be the first on this memorial.His name including rank are on the extreme left hand panel at the top in a somewhat isolated position.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Was he the only British admiral to be lost at sea in the war, or are others shown on other memorials?

The difference is, of course, that the one at Porsmouth is an official memorial to the missing, equivalent to the Menin Gate, Thiepval, etc. Presumably some official convention was followed which did not apply to local memorials.

[Clive Maier]

The change of attitude on the Llanberis memorial is very interesting.

Race was not much of an issue for UK memorials. Had it been, I believe there was quite enough prejudice around for racial sorting to have been adopted on many memorials.

[bernardmcilwaine]

mine is in alphabetical order,bernard