A grave undertaking

War Dead: Remembering the War Dead: British Commonwealth and International War Graves in Ireland since 1914 By Fergus A D'Arcy…

War Dead: Remembering the War Dead: British Commonwealth and International War Graves in Ireland since 1914 By Fergus A D'Arcy OPW, 457pp. €22From Pearse's oration at the burial of O'Donovan Rossa to Emmet's epitaph speech, the grave has often served as a metonym for the sacred body of the Irish nation.

Given this tradition, honouring or neglecting graves has a powerful political and symbolic resonance - a problem all too familiar to the Office of Public Works (OPW). To it fell the sensitive task of dealing with British, Commonwealth and international war graves in Ireland, following the change of state in 1922, a little-known history now finally told by Fergus D'Arcy in this new OPW publication.

Although far from the western front, Ireland was not spared its share of first World War graves - mainly servicemen who had died of wounds in Irish hospitals or while on leave, or military bodies washed ashore, from ships sunk by U-Boats, most famously the Lusitania and the Leinster. The dead included British, Irish, Canadian, Australian and South African soldiers, sailors or merchant navy, as well as German prisoners of war and internees; some war-grave recipients were very young, such as ordinary seaman, John Thomson, buried at Cobh, aged only 15.

For the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC), all these graves qualified for the same level of care as first World War graves in France or Belgium. It hoped that the new Irish Free State would join the commission and empower it to maintain war graves on its behalf, in perpetuity, in exchange for a financial contribution, similar to Australia or New Zealand. However, the Irish government had no desire to join the IWGC, for reasons of State sovereignty, as well as cost, believing Ireland should deal with any war graves on its territory itself. For this reason, it offered to erect the standard IWGC headstones and maintain British, Commonwealth and German war graves at its own expense, work to be carried out by the OPW, provided that the IWGC could provide it with details of the location and identity of the dead. It was a remarkable proposal: far from neglecting first World War graves located in Ireland, the government was offering to pay for their memorial headstones.

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However, the Irish offer was not accepted until May 1928, mainly due to political sensitivities: all war-related deaths of British or Commonwealth servicemen or merchant navy up to August 31st, 1921, qualified for IWGC care. Thus British servicemen who had died in the Irish War of Independence also required war-grave treatment, complicating matters. The IWGC felt that relatives of men killed by the IRA would scarcely appreciate learning that the new Irish government was to be made responsible for caring for their graves; as the late Fabian Ware of the IWGC put it: "Many of the relatives of the men killed in Ireland still harbour at least unfriendly feelings towards the Irish, some of them a very bitter feeling." The final agreement was a compromise - the IWGC would contact relatives living in the United Kingdom, on behalf of the OPW; all other relatives in Ireland and overseas would deal directly with Irish officials. The OPW went on to erect headstones upon some 2,602 British and Commonwealth war graves located throughout the Free State, a mission largely completed by 1935, with the help of an indefatigable IWGC liaison officer, Capt PE Vesper, lifelong adviser to the OPW, who later also marked the graves of the second World War.

The delay in reaching agreement meant that graves and graveyards had fallen into a dilapidated state by 1928, causing distress to relatives and ex-servicemen. The British Legion complained about Ballymullan British military cemetery where horses and goats were "grazing over the graves of the immortal dead and the place is full of manure - crosses and wreaths torn up from the graves and a stable erected in the cemetery." The Steenson family of Donagh, Co Monaghan lost four sons in the Great War: they were upset that the one boy buried in Ireland still had no grave headstone in 1925. Tired of waiting for the governments to agree a deal, the father of Matthew Carson, a bandsman in the 1st Battalion Manchester Regiment, shot dead by the IRA in 1921, aged 18, made his way from Manchester to Bandon, where he traced the body and reinterred it in a graveyard himself, with "great sympathy and assistance" from the local gardaí.

THE IRISH GOVERNMENT'S decision to pay the OPW to maintain British and Commonwealth war graves contrasted starkly with its treatment of the graves of those who had fought for Irish independence: relatives of a former Carlow IRA man, Daniel Purcell, requesting assistance with his grave headstone, were told the OPW had "no provision" to undertake such work. Maud Griffith ultimately had to pay for her husband Arthur Griffith's memorial on his grave at Glasnevin, as did the family of Michael Collins; it was the 1960s before the Army Plot, where the Civil War dead were buried, got its monument - here D'Arcy builds upon Anne Dolan's pioneering Civil War research. Remarkably, Kathleen Clarke was the only voice in the Dáil to object that £25,000 could be voted for the OPW to maintain British, Commonwealth and German war graves, "while the patriot dead are left uncared for".

In contrast, the marking of British and Commonwealth war graves by the OPW occurred with remarkably little friction. Few Irish relatives refused the standard IWGC headstone; only two county councils, Sligo and Clare, protested at the use of regimental badges in its design - Sligo ultimately relented. Fianna Fáil coming to power led to a change in climate; Vesper noted increasing anti-English feeling and there was continual postponement of the official opening of the Irish National War Memorial at Islandbridge. Yet even still, Vesper reported no incidents of malicious damage to IWGC grave headstones. Fears that publicity would lead to vandalism by militants persisted, however, leading the OPW to omit photographs of its work on war graves in its annual reports.

In contrast to the 1928 deal, during the second World War de Valera's government agreed only to provide temporary wooden crosses and to record the location of the war graves of all nationalities; the erection of permanent headstones was postponed to take place at the expense of the various belligerent governments after the conflict. The Republic contains 539 British and Commonwealth war graves from the 1939-1945 war, often in remote locations, as most of the dead were naval victims, washed up on Irish beaches, or airmen whose planes crashed. A few were Irishmen and women serving in the British forces, buried at home, such as 18-year-old Waterford Wren Margaret Clarke. Again the war dead covered a wide range of nationalities, including Chinese, Canadian, Norwegian and Dutch. They included victims of the Arandora Star, sunk as it transported German and Italian citizens, interned by the British government at the outbreak of war: among those who drowned were refugees who had fled fascism to Britain. External Affairs faced the dilemma of whether to return personal effects found on the body of one anti-Nazi German victim, Franz Kirste, to the German legation or the British; eventually it opted for the British.

The question of insignia on headstones was also deferred until after the war: the Irish government was deeply reluctant to allow British regimental insignia, including the crown, on graves, but also anticipated "possible difficulty about putting the Swastika on German graves", particularly as many were "in Protestant graveyards". It was December 1950 before it finally accepted that regimental insignia could be inscribed upon British and Commonwealth graves and the erection of headstones could, at last, begin. This work was finished in 1956; in the German case, finalising graves took longer, due to the decision to rebury the German dead at a more accessible, centralised graveyard at Glencree, officially inaugurated in 1961.

The northern Troubles brought new difficulties, with vandalism and neglect of British and Commonwealth war graves in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably at Cork Military Cemetery. In 1972, after the burning of the British embassy in Dublin, the IWGC suspended inspection visits for that year. Overall, however, D'Arcy argues that although nationalism played a not insignificant role in Irish attitudes to British and Commonwealth war graves on Irish territory, most maintenance problems were due to bureaucratic or financial shortfalls. The OPW emerges in a new light as custodian of war graves in this fascinating book; so too do the myriad tragic individual tales behind these gravestones, each with its unique litany of untimely personal heartache.

Heather Jones is a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute, Florence and a member of the Comité Directeur of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne. Her doctoral work on the first World War was awarded an IRCHSS Eda Sagarra medal in 2007