I was at the unveiling on Friday, spoke with plenty of the veterans in attendance, and all that I spoke to were happy with the memorial. Many commented that it was good to have a lasting memorial up in Lincolnshire as that was where they flew from, not London.
Regarding the cost, the total is £9.5m, over half of which is accounted for by the Chadwick Centre, which will tell the story of Bomber Command and those who served in it, plus the digital archive which will bring together and make accessible photos, documents, oral histories and so on that are currently either not available or not easily accessible.
These two parts of the project will, IMHO, do more for the memory of those who served in Bomber Command than a piece of (admittedly very nice) statuary on a small footprint in a park in London that can be seen only fleetingly from the road outside the park, that cost just over half the total cost of the IBCC project (£5.6m) and does not record the names of those lost, does not offer any kind of context to the history nor make available anything for research or reading by the families of the veterans and future generations.
I'm in no way denigrating the memorial in London, it's a beautifully-executed piece of statuary and a very poignant symbol of the crews. It serves a purpose as a focus for formal ceremonies with their associated protocols and is a thought-provoking place to visit. The Lincoln memorial may not be a classically-acceptable piece of sculpture, may lack the slightly overawing formality embodied in the London memorial, but the overall project will deliver a lot more in terms of making the history accessible and keeping the names of those lost alive for future generations.
As an example, Joe & Joanna public want to teach Joe jnr about what great-grandad did in the war when he was killed. Assuming great-grandad was shot down over Germany and buried in a CWGC grave, they have the options of:
1) Going to the CWGC cemetery in Germany to see his headstone and maybe getting close to where his aircraft came down and explaining as best they can to Joe jnr the background to what happened;
2) Going to London to see the Bomber Command Memorial and explaining as best they can to Joe jnr the background to what happened;
3) Going to Lincoln, seeing his name on the walls of names to give human-scale context to how many of his contemporaries also made the ultimate sacrifice, then visiting the Chadwick Centre to see documents and photos relating to great-grandfather and his crew and learning about the history of Bomber Command and what they achieved.
For current generations who were brought up in close proximity to the stories and people involved, London is a superb memorial to those we knew and the stories we were told. Once those people have passed, who & what is left to perpetuate those stories, those names, when maybe the intervening generation was so disinterested in what dad/grandad did during the war that they ignored the stories or didn't take them in to sufficient depth to pass the history and family connections on to future generations? Can a family go to the London memorial and Joe jnr go back into school on Monday and say "I put a poppy on my great-grandad's name and saw photos of him"? Will the London memorial show in terms that the general public can understand, what 55,573 names actually look like when engraved permanently into steel, what the sheer scale of the human loss looks like?
The London memorial quotes Pericles, Lincoln will quote the men who took part, and in the case of those still with us, will quote them in their own voices. How many of you wished you could hear your late father/grandfather's voice again, years after he died? To paraphrase one voice heard on Friday: "We weren't heroes, we were young men, and spent a lot of our time being scared". Lofty quotes from classical text seem somehow inappropriate in a place where they become individuals again rather than just a number.
That's where the memorial in Lincoln comes into its own, and that's why there's room for both London and Lincoln when it comes to memorials for Bomber Command - they complement, rather than compete with, each other.
As for the material, I wasn't a fan of the weathered steel for Lincoln, but up close, the light on the rust changes minute to minute, and it almost takes on a life of its own. Having walked around the site early on Friday morning, seen the dew formed on the walls of names, the light on the walls and spire, it really changed my mind. I'd rather have the current material than shiny steel - shiny looks nice briefly then dulls and fades, draws criticism for decay or lack of maintenance.
I'm not part of the IBCC team, but having spent almost 3 years running a project with a team of volunteers to document all aircraft accidents in Lincolnshire during WW2, collating a book from the research and creating an electronic version to be given to schools in the county as an educational resource to aid teaching local history, I understand the importance of being able to relate names to events, and to ensure that those names and their deeds are recorded for future generations. It's not just about the overall number, it's about the individual men involved, their lives, their deaths. The 55,573 were 55,573 individuals, husbands, fathers, sons, brothers. Lincoln personalises them again, deals with the loss at an understandable, human, level, not just an impersonal overall total.
U-M
Last edited by ursa_major; 5th Oct 2015 at 13:56.