Abstract
Ann-Marie Foster's Family Mourning After War and Disaster in Twentieth-Century Britain sensitively illuminates family practices of grief and mourning after the sudden death of their relatives in disasters and war in the early twentieth century. Her innovative framing – of putting these violent deaths of (mostly) men in (primarily) industrial disasters and war together, and teasing out how families responded to them over time – allows her to make nuanced observations about both public and private grieving, which observing only one of these groups might miss. In this work, Foster traces how some similarities in experience of bereavement in disaster and in war – of being unable to receive a body, of the bureaucratisation and depersonalisation of funerary rituals, of creating and disseminating memorial ephemera – nonetheless diverged in memory as family experience and practice became enmeshed in larger cultural scripts which prioritised remembering war.
Chapter 1, ‘Receiving Death’, explores the ways families encountered death in the first instance: from receiving word of the death, to identifying the body, to bureaucratic control over the body and its burial. Families of those who died in a disaster might be able to claim the body for burial; those who had lost someone in the First World War could not. Both sets of victims, however, had their deaths registered by the state, moving the onus to do so (and the ownership of the dead) away from the bereaved. This movement towards state control of the dead is further illuminated in Chapter 2. ‘Governing Death’ further examines the ways that ‘the regulation of bodies by people external to them was an experience shared by the families of the war and disaster dead’ (p. 67). Families who could not control the burial of their loved ones, and whose input into official grave markers was mediated through bureaucracies like the Imperial War Graves Commission and was highly constrained, turned to domestic memorial forms.
Chapter 3, ‘Printing Death’, examines print as a medium of memorialisation, including local newspaper death notices, mass cards, In Memoriam cards, anniversary notices and privately commissioned memorial books. While these practices varied by class (wealthier families could afford to commission memorial biographies of their dead or place obituaries in numerous publications), access to local newspapers as a way of announcing and marking grief was broad. Newspapers ‘actively shaped the way that local and national publics understood and engaged with war and disaster’ (p. 95). Notices published by grieving families after mining disasters competed for space in papers which published ‘pathos-laden tales’ (p. 96) of loss sensationalising these tragedies. In wartime, casualty lists were officially published in newspapers alongside official news of the war, as well as private notices of grief in ‘In Memoriam’ columns and privately placed death notices. Foster's nuanced construction of the interaction of public news and private grief is particularly striking here.
Chapter 4, ‘Domesticating Death’, illuminates how families mourned domestically through the creation of memorial sites in the home, displaying ephemera and other objects connected with the dead and creating mourning rituals around them. Individuals and families used these focal sites in the home to grieve or to remember, and to share something of these memories with neighbours and friends. Feelings of grief could take physical form in these domestic memorials, where private memory and communal interaction with memorial objects intersected. Indeed, private memorial objects could in turn become public, as seen in Chapter 5, ‘Building Legacy’. In the interwar years, families donated these objects to national collections established explicitly to memorialise the nation's experience of the First World War. It is here, too, that the divergence in the memorialisation of war dead and disaster dead becomes evident: institutions like the Imperial War Museum were created to memorialise the war dead in this period, but ‘there were no national memorials to disaster dead until the National Mining Memorial for the dead of Welsh mining disasters was unveiled in 2013’ (p. 158). Families of those killed in disasters may have wanted their grief to be preserved for posterity, but there was no institution set up to do so, and similarly, no overarching national narrative in which to inscribe their private grief.
The final chapter, ‘Extending Legacy’, weaves these together in its discussion of family narratives of grief and loss and how they interacted with institutional initiatives to mark the centenary of the First World War. By this time, family memories (or passed-down stories and memory objects) of family war dead had become heavily mediated through broader cultural narratives developed over decades. By this time, as well, family histories of death in industrial disaster had comparatively vanished from national historical narratives due to the privileging of war memory. Memories of war bereavement also passed unevenly through families, with some family members relatively unaware of their family history or uncertain as to what to do with memorial items passed down to them. The interaction of families with online memorial projects further illuminates this unevenness of memory, with some groups much more engaged in ‘emotional performativity’ (p. 206), and a wide variation in the amount and quality of information provided about remembered individuals or donated objects. Did family participation enrich our understanding of the past or merely reinforce long-standing cultural tropes?
Overall, this was an engaging read that carefully considered the ways in which families affected by sudden and violent death developed means of grieving in the context of that death becoming public property. It will interest readers curious about family history, practices of grieving, industrial history, museums and commemoration, and cultural histories of war and memory.
