Quote:
Originally Posted by Retlaw
Those who compiled the original 1922 Roll of Honour, and the Greater Accrington Roll of Honour, mainly from lists compiled by the Accrington Observer in 1918, thats why some men are named twice, if he is recorded as John Thomas Bloggs wounded in one of the issues, and then later as Thomas Bloggs was killed in action, he gets one under each of the Christian names.
Then you've got the type setters in the printing shop trying to read some newspaper reporters scribblings,
and so it goes on and on and on.
Retlaw
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If the collation of names were only on the basis of the Observer records, then I can easily see how duplications and omissions would have been made. Surely, though, there must have been at least some assessment made by the powers that be (council committee?) of the eligability of individual names to go on the memorial.
I suppose this problem would not have been unique to Accrington/Oswaldtwistle. After all, at a national level there is not even agreement on the duration of the war; some memorials date it as 1914-18, others 14-19 so if that could not have been agreed upon it is no surprise that the methodology in obtaining and the criteria in listing names would differ from memorial to memorial.
I wonder if the Accy Observer would have had, in it's 1920's correspondence columns, complaints of missing, duplicated and incorrectly spelt names and as such, what was subsequently done to rectify the situation?
One final thought occurs to me. What was the role of the next-of-kin in the process of placing names? At what stage were they consulted, if at all? And is it not possible that in a radical political climate (and in a local tradition of socialist non-conformism) that certain families would not have wanted their loved one's name carved on a monument seen as glorifing war?