This
morning’s (11.11.2020) ‘eleventh hour of
the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ will mark exactly 100 years since King
George V unveiled a new national
memorial to the 'Glorious Dead' of the 1914-1918 war aka First World War.
In UK, Prince
Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall were among a slimmed-down congregation at
Westminster Abbey this morning to mark the burial of the Unknown Warrior on
Armistice Day 100 years ago today. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour
leader Sir Keir Starmer were among those who joined the Prince of Wales in the
Abbey as the country fell silent at 11am to pay their respects to Britain's war
dead. Armistice Day is commemorated every year on 11
November to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and
Germany at Compiègne, France. A formal
peace agreement was only reached when the Treaty of Versailles was signed.
City of Chennai has lots
of vestiges of colonial British – the Georgetown, the statues of Victoria, King
George V and some roads with names :
Whites, Oliver, Patullos, Blackers, Wallers, Ormes, Barnaby, Baker,
Adam, Coat, Greames, Strahans, Sterling, Taylor, Wheetcraft, Mowbrays, Montieth
and more .. Triplicane had Pycrofts road (later renamed as Bharathiyar Salai)
and Besant Road (after Annie Besant statue) ~ have you observed or travelled in
that road branching off Mount Road, called Cenotaph Road. The word "cenotaph" derives from the Greek term
"kenotaphion". Cenotaphs were
common in Ancient Greece, where they were built when it was impossible to
recover a body after the battle, as the Greeks placed great cultural importance
on the proper burial of their war dead. A decision had been made early in the
First World War that the British dead would not be repatriated, and would be
buried close to where they fell. Lutyens remembered the term when working on
Southampton's memorial in early 1919, where he proposed a cenotaph after his
first design was rejected on cost grounds.
Miles away, the monument
spoken off in the starting para is ‘the Cenotaph’, a war memorial on Whitehall in London, England.
Its origin is in a temporary structure erected for a peace parade following the
end of the First World War, and after an outpouring of national sentiment it
was replaced in 1920 by a permanent structure and designated the United
Kingdom's official national war memorial.
Designed by Edwin Lutyens,
the permanent structure was built from Portland stone between 1919 and 1920 by
Holland, Hannen & Cubitts, replacing Lutyens's earlier wood-and-plaster
cenotaph in the same location. An annual Service of Remembrance is held at the
site on Remembrance Sunday, the closest Sunday to 11 November (Armistice Day)
each year. Lutyens's cenotaph design has been reproduced elsewhere in the UK
and in other places of historical British allegiance including Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, Bermuda and Hong Kong.
The First World War
(1914–1918) produced casualties on a previously unseen scale. Over 1.1 million
men from the British Empire were killed. In its aftermath, thousands of war
memorials were built across Britain and the Empire, and on the former
battlefields. Amongst the most prominent designers of war memorials was Sir
Edwin Lutyens, described by Historic England as "the foremost architect of
his day". Lutyens established his reputation designing country houses for
wealthy clients around the turn of the 20th century and became a public figure
as the designer of much of New Delhi, the new capital of British India. The war
had a profound effect on Lutyens and following it he devoted much of his time
to the commemoration of casualties. By the time he was commissioned for the
cenotaph, he was already acting as an adviser to the Imperial War Graves
Commission (IWGC).
Lutyens's first war memorial
was the Rand Regiments Memorial in Johannesburg, South Africa, dedicated to
casualties of the Second Boer War (1899–1902). His first commission for a
memorial to the First World War came from Southampton. Lutyens first
encountered the term in connection with Munstead Wood, the house he designed
for Gertrude Jekyll in the 1890s. Lutyens submitted his final design to the
Office of Works in early July, and on 7 July received confirmation that the
design had been approved by the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, who was
chairman of the committee responsible for organising the victory celebrations. The unveiling,
described in The Times as a "quiet" and "unofficial"
ceremony, took place on 18 July 1919, the day before the Victory Parade.
Lutyens was not invited. During the parade,
15,000 soldiers and 1,500 officers marched past and saluted the Cenotaph—among
them were American General John J. Pershing and French Marshal Ferdinand Foch,
as well as the British officers Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig and Admiral of
the Fleet Sir David Beatty. The Cenotaph quickly captured the public
imagination. Repatriation of the dead had been
forbidden since the early days of the war, so the cenotaph came to represent
the absent dead and served as a substitute for a tomb.
The architects waived
their fee for designing the cenotaph, meaning that it cost £7,325 (equivalent
to £296,400 in 2019) to build. Construction began on 19 January 1920, and the
original flags were sent to the Imperial War Museum. No date was announced for
the completion of the Cenotaph at first, but the government were keen to have
it completed in time for Remembrance Day (11 November). In September 1920, the
announcement came that the Cenotaph would indeed be unveiled on 11 November,
the second anniversary of the Armistice, and that the act would be performed by
the king. At a late stage in the planning, the Government decided to hold a
funeral for an unidentified soldier exhumed from a grave in France, known as
the Unknown Warrior, and inter him in Westminster Abbey, and the decision was
taken to make the unveiling part of the funeral procession. George V unveiled the Cenotaph at 11 am on 11 November, this
time with Lutyens in attendance. The public response to the newly unveiled
memorial exceeded even that to the temporary Cenotaph in the aftermath of the
armistice. Whitehall was closed to traffic for several days after the ceremony
and members of the public began to file past the Cenotaph and lay flowers at
its base. Throughout the 1920s and
1930s, it was customary for men to doff their hats when passing the Cenotaph.
Cenotaph Road is also the
name of a science fiction series by American writer Robert E. Vardeman.
When news of the Treaty of
Seringapatam and Tipu Sultan’s defeat reached Madras, the European residents
organised a fund-raising campaign to erect a statue for Cornwallis. Thomas
Banks, a famous sculptor, was entrusted with the job; the statue arrived in
Madras, and was erected on May 15, 1800, under a cupola on the Eastern side of
parade ground inside the fort. The ground was named Cornwallis Square. In 1805,
Cornwallis visited Madras on his way to Calcutta to take charge of
Governor-Generalship for the second time on May 6. A cenotaph was erected in
Teynampet, and this road was named Cenotaph Road. Later, the cenotaph was moved
to the compound of Bentinck’s Building, then the Supreme Court of Madras, on
First Line Beach Road. Bentinck’s Building was demolished in 1980. In 1925, the
statue was moved out of Cornwallis Square to the cenotaph. It stood there for
three years. In 1928, dust from the harbour and the salt breeze forced it to be
moved to Connemara Library. Till 1950, Cornwallis stood at library and then
moved to Fort Museum.
Interesting !
11.11.2020 @ 11pm.
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