The ephemera of remembrance.

Abstract

This article is one of scale, from small pieces of paper meant to memorialise an individual to the gargantuan question of how the British government was to memorialise over half a million war dead. Overall, an estimated 722,785 British and Irish soldiers died during the First World War and over 45,000 died in the service of the Royal Navy. Given the extremity of loss, Britons had to re-learn how to grieve. Many families were not reunited with a body, nor was a grave guaranteed or a permanent resting place known about before the 1920s. Memorialisation often focuses on stone monuments to the dead, but before they were built, families remembered their dead within their homes through paper and other small items. In the absence of material markers of mourning, ephemera became crucial to the mourning process.