Railway war memorials are memorials dedicated to railway company employees killed in war. Some were commissioned by the railway companies while others were commissioned on behalf of the employees. Such memorials were first erected after the Second Boer War (1899–1902), though the vast majority appeared after the First World War. Over 400 railway war memorials are known to exist in Britain, ranging from paper rolls of honour to imposing stone monuments. Some have been destroyed or lost through multiple changes in ownership or redevelopment of their surroundings. The Railway Heritage Trust and Network Rail maintain a database of the known surviving memorials.[1][2]
Second Boer War
The Second Boer War (1899–1902, also known as the South African War) was one of Britain's first wars to make extensive use of railways. It was also the first war to prompt a large wave of monuments dedicated to the memory of fallen soldiers, as opposed to victory monuments or memorials to commanders which had been common before. Few survive, but one highly visible example is the bronze plaques on platform 1 at Derby railway station, which list men from the Midland Railway killed in South Africa.[2][3][4]
The First World War produced casualties on an unprecedented scale. Thousands of railwaymen joined the armed forces, to the point that railway companies were forced to limit the number of men leaving. The railways themselves were placed under government control and entirely devoted to the war effort. Modern estimates are that almost 200,000 railwaymen fought in the war, and that over 21,000 of them were killed. During the war, several railway companies named locomotives after war heroes, including Marshal Joseph Joffre (commander of French forces), Charles Fryatt (captain of a railway-owned ship who was executed by the Germans), and Edith Cavell (a nurse executed for helping to release prisoners of war). Many companies also kept a paper roll of honour, listing employees who had left for the forces or who had been killed. The Midland Railway, a third of whose workforce enlisted or were conscripted, produced a pamphlet giving details of its employees who had joined up by December 1914; after the end of the war, it published a book of remembrance honouring its employees who had been killed.[5]
As well as the erection of memorials, a service of remembrance to railwaymen killed in the war, attended by King George V and over 7,000 people, was held on 14 May 1919 in St Paul's Cathedral.[9] A centenary memorial service was held in Southwark Cathedral on 6 November 2019.[10]
Second World War
Far fewer memorials were built after the Second World War. By that time, most railway companies had been amalgamated into the Big Four in 1923. The railway network suffered greatly from over-use and under-investment during the Second World War and the Big Four were nationalised to form British Railways in 1948. In many cases, the names of the dead from the Second World War were added to the memorials for the first.[11]
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