Introduction

This special issue on ‘Silenced Mourning’ explores the emphases and omissions in mourning the war dead in twentieth-century Britain, a focus which permits a multi-faceted exploration of bereavement within a single cultural context over time. Six articles consider the complexities of grief and loss as experienced or represented, with a specific emphasis on that mourning which could not easily find a public space for expression. The focus of this journal ranges from the bereaved individual to the immediate family circle, to the local community, and to the national community. The articles by Kate Kennedy and Oliver Wilkinson focus on the First World War and its aftermath; those by Linda Maynard and Lucy Noakes on the Second World War; and the contributions of Corinna Peniston-Bird and Wendy Ugolini trace memorialization from each war to the present day. Together these articles illustrate how coming to terms with absence and death was a cultural as well as a psychological activity.

Silence is inextricably linked with, and situated within the cultural processes of remembering and forgetting (Passerini, 2006; Winter, 2010). Jay Winter defines silences as hidden deposits which are ‘concealed at some moments and revealed at others’ and insists that they must be examined as ‘part of the cartography of recollection and remembrance’ within twentieth-century history (2010: 3). The Italian oral historian Luisa Passerini has been at the forefront of theoretical reflections which acknowledge the importance of silence and omissions when addressing the construction of personal narratives (1987, 2006). Passerini describes the variety of silences that historians can discern, which range from the repressed memories of the silence of a people to those of personal remembrance. There can be no study of the emphases of history without a concomitant awareness of the silences that distort and dislocate, in narratives, in sources, in archives, in individuals and peoples. Michel-Rolph Trouillot explored the interdependence of the creation and silencing of historical narratives in his study of the Haitian Revolution (1995). Further recent engagement with the place of silence within cultural memory includes Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory. Armistice Day, 1919–1946 (1994), Efrat Ben-Ze'ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter (eds), Shadows of War. A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century (2010), and Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy, The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory After the Armistice (2013). As part of the new history of emotions, there are also an increasing number of publications addressing grief in wartime, most notably the work of Joy Damousi (1999; 2001), Carol Acton (2007), and Pat Jalland (2010).

This volume addresses groups of the bereaved which have traditionally been neglected or overlooked, paying particular attention to sibling experience, both brothers and sisters, the place of the mother and father within mourning rituals, and the experiences of prisoners of war (POWs) and the ethnic ‘enemy’ other. All the articles here identify a silence created by a gulf between personal experience and public convention, and explore if and how that experience found expression, turning in particular to personal testimonies. They seek to understand dominant narratives that encompassed or silenced these experiences, as reflected in popular culture, the media, and official policies. The affiliation of war with silence was established in 1919 when the 2-minute or ‘Great’ silence was first observed (Gregory, 1994). That silence was intended to acknowledge, perhaps also contain, the multiplicities of experience of loss. As Catherine Moriarty argues, ‘Silent action […] opened up a fragment of space or time that could be universally respected as containing the essential significance of commemoration where no explicit significance could be agreed’ (1997: 161). This affiliation was paralleled by a shift in attitudes towards the public expression of grief that made the choice of silence particularly pertinent. As Jalland argues, the overwhelming experience of death during the First World War caused people to turn away from external and expressive displays of grief that had characterized the nineteenth century: there emerged a ‘marked tendency to privatise the subject of death and to minimise the expression of grief and the rituals of mourning’ (2010: 13). As underlined in Lucy Noakes’ article, which explores gendered dimensions of mourning, emotional control is essential for social order, and in wartime, it is essential specifically for the continued waging of the war effort, and, in its aftermath, for the processes of rebuilding. Hence, perhaps, why the President of the Royal Institute of British Architects praised Lutyens’ cenotaph in Whitehall, London as ‘austere yet gracious, technically perfect, it is the very expression of repressed emotion, of massive simplicity of purpose’ (cited by King, 1999: 161). And yet alongside such emphasis on emotional restraint we read of grief that threatens to leak, burst, rage, the ‘awful helpless agony’ as one bereaved brother, James Driscoll, puts it (cited by Linda Maynard in this issue).

Underlying this special issue is an engagement with the interactive nature of private or local discourses with public and national rhetoric. Individual experience and the public and collective expression of grief is not a simple binary. On the one hand, the grief of the bereaved in these pages can struggle to find expression because it lacks cultural space. Individuals sought to construct a discursive framework through which to make sense of the specificity of their experiences because there was none readily available upon which they could draw (Summerfield, 2004). The cultural legacy these attempts left behind form the bulk of the source materials drawn upon in these articles: ego-documents and testimonies, creative prose, private memorials, and rituals. This exclusion from the dominant narrative of the nation at war is particularly striking in the case of the sections of the Italian population of Britain in the Second World War who had to mourn the dead of the Arandora Star as newly defined ‘enemy aliens’ in their chosen but hostile country of residence, as discussed by Wendy Ugolini. On the other hand, however, individual responses could also draw upon and derive comfort and meaning from popular constructions of the significance of self-sacrifice and victimhood in war: Corinna Peniston-Bird's article examines how fathers mobilized the language of duty, for example, to reassert their masculinity in grief, and that of their sons in death. As Linda Maynard shows, brothers were both acutely aware of their overwhelming grief and the expectations that they should contain it; Oliver Wilkinson contrasts the contradictory descriptions of POWs as heroic victims and dishonourable cowards that they and their families had to negotiate; and Kate Kennedy explores the ‘bizarre manifestations of guilt and grief’ in literary women who had to reconcile their survival and ability to create with the temerity of their continued existence in the light of the death of their brothers and lovers. The sexual dimension of these manifestations is the only silence within these pages that followed from a societal taboo, not merely dominant narratives or public containment. Indeed, the theme of sibling incest in the First World War has recently been explicitly explored in fictionalized form in Pat Barker's novel, Toby's Room (2012).

Inextricably intertwined with this cultural circuit is the gendering of mourning. In wartime, this gendering cannot be disentangled from the anomic impact of war specifically in the context of the gender order and societal responses to the opportunity for or threat of change. When the most exalted form of hegemonic wartime masculinity is military masculinity (Connell, 1995) and femininity is defined by domestic vulnerability, when the war dead are construed as male and the mourners of the war dead as female, representations of both genders are distorted: how to accommodate the civilian male, the military male excluded from combat or women serving in uniform? This wartime gender contract between the warrior male and the domestic female was rendered particularly visible when literally set in stone, in Britain's figurative war memorials erected after the First World War, which emphasized the noble sacrifice of the fallen Tommy mourned by the weeping mother. These also clearly illustrate another theme that appears across the articles: the public hierarchies of both suffering and grief. As Wendy Ugolini cites, in a Commons debate on alien internees, Rear-Admiral Tufton Beamish MP propounded the existence of a hierarchy of war victims: ‘Will the right hon. Gentleman convey to these aliens that they can perform no higher service to this country than to compare their lot with that of our own dead, our wounded, our missing and prisoners, and of the men of our own Forces, who have fought, and are fighting, their battles?’ (Hansard, 1940). Within that list lurks a hierarchy, with the dead at the apex. It excludes those who worried for and mourned the military men and women alluded to, omitting from the community of suffering the individuals whose lives were defined not least by the absence of loved ones. They too fall into a hierarchy, defined primarily by gender, but also by the status of those whom they miss or mourn: the combat soldier and the civilian child, for example, holding a different status from drowned enemy aliens or sheltered POWs. Oliver Wilkinson illustrates how one POW internalized the hierarchies of suffering when he tells the tale of Major P.W. White, who took his own life after the war asking in his suicide note how he could justify his survival to ‘people who had given their husbands, sons or brothers, whilst I escape?’ His article shows how families of the POWs had to negotiate the alignment of prisoners with other ‘heroic’ war dead with competing notions of unmanliness and the dereliction of duty which the fate of captivity implied.

The relationship of grief to time is an overarching theme of this issue. In one sense, the articles demonstrate how stories which once remained unspoken can find new conditions for expression (Passerini, 2006: 238). As Winter puts it, ‘silence, like memory and forgetting, has a life history and—when new pressures or circumstances emerge—can be transformed into its opposite in very rapid order’ (2010: 5). In another sense, these articles highlight how feelings of grief for those lost in the war endured over time, were endlessly revisited in subsequent years and, indeed, could re-emerge many decades after the event. For example, when the best-selling author Richard Llewellyn made a guest broadcast on BBC Woman's Hour in April 1974, it triggered correspondence from people who had known his immediate family, and remembered the death of his sister, two young nieces and stepmother in a V1 bomb attack in June 1944. These emotional letters indicate how the impact of that loss reverberated beyond the family unit, its tragic dimensions still resonating three decades on. Indeed, the correspondents seem to demand that Llewellyn himself acknowledge the profundity of their own grief, one former associate writing: ‘I shall never forget … the shock I experienced when Mrs Lloyd, Gladys and the children were killed’ (National Library of Wales, 1974).

It is current to reiterate the idea that every family in Britain had experienced bereavement in the First World War, either of a loved one, or at very least an acquaintance. This was iterated in the aftermath of the war itself: Barbara Cartland commented that ‘an atmosphere of gloom, misery, and deep unrelenting mourning settled on practically every house in the British Isles’ (cited by Nicholson, 2009: 4). Adrian Gregory has sought to challenge the statistics on which that estimation has been made but such an emotive summary is difficult to counter (2008: 253). Yet despite that emphasis, we know remarkably little about the impact of that grief at the time or as it resonated across the years. As Van Emden and Humphries argue of the First World War, more and more children were bereaved, for example, ‘although in a world in which children were seen and not heard, their own sense of bereavement and confusion was often ignored or played down. Their story has often been forgotten, leaving many children to harbour feelings of guilt and insecurity for their entire lives.[…] Yet understanding the feelings of over 340,000 children who lost one or both parents in the war, with perhaps a greater number losing a brother or close relative, has been overlooked’ (2003: 100). The testimonies offered by adults remembering their childhood bereavement for Wendy Ugolini are marked by vivid psychological and physical memories of the war, the child and the adult, the past and the present cohabiting the testimony. The way in which grief ricochets across and down generations is a theme that resonates on many of the pages of this issue: the responses of bereaved parents who had thought to outlive their offspring; the responses of siblings losing their peers and with them a unique part of themselves; the responsibilities placed on children and grandchildren to remember, the choices made by generations beyond living memory when looking back.

Both World Wars were quickly marked by the community of mourners they created, with the tensions between individual grief, unique and personal, possessive even; and collective grief, shared, externally structured, and publically represented. Both sought to bestow meaning and to find a way of facing a bereaved future. Acton asks how the ‘wrenching experience of loss’ at the private level engages with public discourses that must “manufacture consent” to the inevitable massive bereavement that accompanies war’ (2007: 1). It is hoped that this edited volume begins to make a contribution to answering this question. As the articles of this issue show, the experience of wartime loss is marked by this tension, the paradoxes to be negotiated of grief that is both individual and collective, meaningful and futile, remembered and forgotten, articulated and inexpressible.

Notes on contributors

Corinna Peniston-Bird, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YT. Email: [email protected]

Wendy Ugolini, Lecturer, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AG. Email: [email protected]