Commemorating the First World War in Britain: A Cultural Legacy of Media Remembrance

Abstract

One of the often-overlooked legacies of the First World War is how the conflict established the media's role in remembrance. In the years that have followed, media's circulation of iconic images of national and local commemoration have enabled individuals to engage with public remembrance. This article takes a historical approach to First World War remembrance in Britain, looking at how the practices and meaning of remembrance became established, although they were never fixed but instead constantly shifting, reinvented and contested. They are also gendered, in remembrance, as in war, women, are often seen as to be playing supportive roles; yet within media texts, women have always found spaces to exert influence over who is remembered and how, as memories jostle for prominence. KEYWORDS media; remembrance; commemoration; First World War; genderThe First World War coincided with the rise of the tabloid newspapers, film establishing itself as a popular medium and just preceded radio entering British homes (Williams, 2009;Curran, 2012). In the last 100 years traditional and then new media have played a major role in commemorative activities (Schwartz,

Remembrance and ritual in English schools

“…These debates were very much in the public domain during our data collection and therefore might have influenced some of the attempts to nuance aspects of these narratives which we have noted. What we did not see explicitly in our data was the polarisation and overt antagonism over war remembrance, and particularly the poppy, which recur in the public sphere and are rehearsed annually in print, broadcast and now social media (Aldridge, 2014;Andrews, 2019;Iles, 2008). We also did not see explicit reference to critiques of earlier remembrance and memoralisation practices, such as that pertaining to unequal commemoration of non-Europeans, despite its founding principles of equality of treatment in death, on the part of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (2021).…”