The Last Post: British Press Representations of Veterans of the Great War

Harry Patch (1898–2009) was the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches of the Western Front, entering the media spotlight in 1998 when he was approached to contribute to the BBC documentary Veterans. Media coverage of Patch and the cultivation of his totemic status were particularly prodigious in anticipating and marking his death, producing a range of reflections on its historical, social and cultural significance. Focusing on the British popular press, this article examines media coverage of the last decade of Patch’s life. It considers the way in which the Great War is memorialised in the space of public history of the media in terms of the personalisation and sentimentalisation of Patch, exploring how he serves as a synecdoche for the millions of others who fought, how he embodies ideas of generational and social change, and how the iconography of the Great War’s contemporaneous representation works in the space of its memorialisation

Commemorating War: The Politics of Memory

War memory and commemoration have had increasingly high profiles in public and academic debates in recent years. This volume examines some of the social changes that have led to this development, among them the passing of the two world wars from survivor into cultural memory. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, the book illuminates the struggle to install particular memories at the center of a cultural world, and offers an extensive argument about how the politics of commemoration practices should be understood. Commemorating War analyzes a range of forms of remembrance, from public commemorations orchestrated by nation-states to personal testimonies of war survivors; and from cultural memories of war represented in films, plays and novels to investigations of wartime atrocities in courts of human rights. It presents a wide range of international case studies, encompassing lesser-known national histories and wars beyond the well-trodden terrain of Vietnam and the two world wars in Europe. Emerging from this book is an important critique of both "state-centered" approaches to war memory and those that regard commemoration primarily as a human response to loss and grief. Offering a wealth of empirical research material, this book will be important for cultural and oral historians, sociologists, researchers in international relations and human rights, and anybody with an interest in the cultural construction of memory in contemporary society

Memory-making 'from below': Rescaling remembrance at the Kranji War Memorial and Cemetery, Singapore

10.1068/a3862Environment and Planning A3961288-130