Credentials
I am a historian with a life long love of history who read history at Bath University gaining an Honours Degree and a Masters degree.
The National Inventory of War Memorials was set up in the mid 1990s by Catherine Moriarty for the Imperial War Museum. The aim was to log details of the nation’s war memorials including the names of the fallen, the monument type, who paid for it and who was responsible for its upkeep. In academic circles the revolutionary study of war memorials found a champion in Adrian Gregory of Cambridge University, whose book ‘The Silence of Memory’ had just been published. This pioneering school of thought placed war memorials and rituals at the heart of First World War study.
Reading history at Bath I was very fortunate to discover my research tutor, Professor Patrick McQuinn was a contemporary of Gregory’s. My interest in the First World War had stemmed from my late grandmother and was now further inspired by Patrick, who encouraged me to look at how the conflict was remembered through the medium of war memorials.
The dissertation studied ten villages in the Blackmore Vale – Abbas and Templecombe, Henstridge, Horsington and South Cheriton, Milborne Port, Stalbridge, Kington Magna, Buckhorn Weston, Marnhull, North Cheriton. Information from the memorials was gathered and analysed and set into a wider context. This served its purpose and subsequently led to providing details to the National Inventory.
At the same time I began building a database of the information. Having completed this and moved on to study for a Masters degree in History under the watchful eye of Professor Graham Davis, it seemed natural to want to continue the work after academic study. Therefore I continued touring the area recording its memorials. The database increased to around 5,000 entries covering all of the villages in the Blackmore Vale and including many more in the counties of Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire.
Having gathered all the information my dilemma then was which to complete first – an in-depth look at one village’s experience or a broader based study of a region. By 1997 I had decided to concentrate on one village and a few (!) years later, i.e. in 2009, the first book was complete - ‘Henstridge A Somerset Village and the First World War’. Order your copy by accessing the main menu or click here.
Thus having started the research for the book ‘Henstridge a Somerset Village and the First World War’ in 1996 when I was living in Cotton Corner House, Henstridge, it was clear then that the topic of the First World War remained one of the most fiercely debated of the twentieth century. On the other hand the subject of war memorials was still in its infancy and there were few relevant internet sources or major works to be consulted. Much of my fundamental local research was carried out by foot slogging round the parish, visiting and talking to people, looking for, and at, information, photographs and anything people were good enough to find.