The War Memorials

The War memorial in Silksworth Welfare Park has the names of first and second war casualties inscribed on it. The 152 are first war and it is striking just how many names there are. Many of the names survive in Silksworth today. The names are nearly all of soldiers but there are two in the navy. There is only one officer, a second lieutenant (He enlisted as a soldier and was promoted in the field) , the others are enlisted men mostly privates with a smattering of NCOs. There are gunners and bombardiers, tunnellers, medics and in supply services. There are various regiments, I had assumed that the Durham Light Infantry and the Northumberland Fusiliers would be predominant.The memorial is an important symbol and it wasn’t erected by some official body. In the 1920s unofficial small memorials sprang up all over the country when the public realised that the remains of those lost would not be repatriated. People made memorials at their workplaces or at the end of a street for the residents of that street. Eventually the whole War Memorial movement swept the country, with committees set up to commemorate a whole town or village. They raised funds to build the structure and inscribe it. The memorial was first erected on the Tunstall village green in 1922 and was later moved to the Welfare Park in the thirties. The committees appealed to the public to get the names to be to commemorated and this leads to a potential problem. Some people, for various reasons, did not want the name of a loved one displayed. Wives may have remarried and moved away. Parents may have passed on. It must be remembered that some people in the village had no roots there, they had moved from or to other parts of the country for work or simply lived nearby in Sunderland or Ryhope but worked at the colliery. It is also common that men don’t always use there given Christian names and are universally known by another name. All of this results in errors of initials, spelling and omissions on all memorials. St Matthew’s church has its own memorial. This is a carved wooden tablet listing many names and a carved altar screen. The church memorial has some additional names, it has omissions, different initials and spellings to the park memorial. There are more officers and NCOs recorded on it. With both memorials there are no defining the criteria for a name to be recorded on that memorial. Not everyone was born or lived in Silksworth. However there must have been some connection somewhere and finding it is a challenge. I have collected together all the names and added some that are not displayed , as they all should be remembered.

This poster was designed by the Sunderland artist Septimus Edwin Scott

SILKSWORTH AND TUNSTALL

In The Great War