Thieves target Plymouth Naval Memorial to the Missing

Memorials were erected to preserve the memory of those who had died for their country. They provide a place of remembrance for families who cannot easily get to their graves or else have no grave they can go to. As such they have huge emotional value but for some all they can see is the [...]

Read Full Post »

The sinking of the Lusitania

Barbara McDermott, one of the two remaining survivors of the RMS Lusitania, died on 12 April. The British ocean liner, Lusitania, was sailing to London from New York when she was torpedoed by a German submarine on 7 May 1915.  Over half of the nearly 2,000 passengers on board were killed.  The sinking was condemned in Britain and America [...]

Read Full Post »

The Merchant Navy

I was reading an interesting book on the bus on the way into work this morning – ‘Tracing Your Family History: Merchant Navy’.  It’s one of a series of guides to tracing military ancestry (Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force being the others) published by the Imperial War Museum.   The Merchant Navy played a crucial role in both [...]

Read Full Post »

The Channel Dash

A memorial service has been held in the English Channel to mark the anniversary of the ‘Channel Dash’.  Watch a report about the service from BBC News. The Channel Dash is the name given to an action that took place during the Second World War.  For several months, from early 1941, three German ships (the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau [...]

Read Full Post »

‘If I should die…’

Richard, one of our volunteers, writes the following… The American Major Olmsted’s contemplation of his own death on active service sent me searching for an example from an earlier conflict. When a young naval lieutenant, David Tinker, was sent to the Falklands he requested that if he were to be buried in earth the following be inscribed [...]

Read Full Post »

New memorial to WW2 Royal Navy destroyers

The Duke of Edinburgh has unveiled a new memorial at the Historic Dockyard Chatham to the 11,000 men who died while serving on Royal Navy destroyers in the Second World War. Read more from BBC NEWS Among those who died was Captain Bernard Warbuton-Lee VC.  On 10 April 1940, Warburton-Lee led a flotilla of 5 destroyers into a fjord in a [...]

Read Full Post »

Arms and the cat

Richard, one of our volunteers, has been looking into war memorials to cats. ————————————————————- Animals such as horses and elephants have been pressed into military service since classical times, and also used have been dogs, camels, oxen, mules, donkeys, pigeons and various other ‘humble beasts ‘. Of the animal memorials on the UKNIWM database, those [...]

Read Full Post »