Book: The Memorial to the Missing on the Somme - Gavin Stamp (Profile, 2006)

This is a fascinating book about the famous Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval on the old Somme battlefield in northern France. Written by architect Gavin Stamp, it is illustrated with some fine photos of the memorial under construction back in the early 1930s and some of the influences that went into its design.

Lutyens, of course, designed the Cenotaph in London, back in 1919/20. I'm quite proud of myself in that, after a little attempt at my own analysis/deconstruction of the famous slab of white Portland stone in Whitehall - shown in a photograph in this book - I was able to make a pretty accurate account of what its design meant (before reading on further).

The Cenotaph pylon is actually a series of telescopic slabs of stone - Portland memorial stone, as it were - that are designed to be projected right up into the heavens, with, of course, the stone tomb/sarcophagus of the Unknown Warrior at its zenith, sent up to his rightful place with God. According to Stamp, the stone blocks are actually slightly curved, so that they would meet at about 901 ft. How's that for a bit of amateur semiotics?

Stamp covers the entire background to the Memorial to the Missing, with chapters covering the career and background of Lutyens; Memorials to the Missing around the world (of which there are very few, since mass slaughter didn't start until the 20th century); the Commonwealth War Graves Commission; Thiepval and the Somme itself in the British psyche, as it were; and a number of other matters.

Lutyens was a central figure in the new Commonwealth War Graves Commission and it was at his insistence every cemetery should be almost entirely secular. This meant that the famous tombstones had no cross, crescent or any sort of religious symbolism in their shape, but were in fact just a plain slab of white Portland stone. Many stones bore the famous epitaph A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR, KNOWN UNTO GOD. Of Lutyens, that says it all, really: pure class.

The cemeteries are absolutely beautiful, flowering little gardens, manicured better than a concert pianist's fingernails. Little gardens of England amidst the terrible, haunting loneliness of the abandoned battlefields.

Gavin Stamp goes into some detail about the design of the Thiepval Memorial itself, which is a lot more complex than at first seems. Lutyens seemed to be a bit of a neo-Classicist and the design is simple local red bricks (of the kind found in the reconstructed nearby town of Albert, now a sort of Alamo for Britain) faced with white Portland stone for the many (about 72,000) names of the Missing (whose number include a certain J Murray of the 38th Welch Regiment, Cardiff Pals, who died on 7th July attacking Mametz Wood).

One theory is that the Thiepval Memorial is influenced, architecturally, by the nearby Basillica in nearby Albert, the symbolic church with the leaning virgin. They certainly look the same, yet Stamp says this is impossible since Lutyens's design was originally for St Quentin, about 50 miles away.

Anyway, the book is fantastic and well worth reading.