Liverpool Honours Heroes

1916-01-22
Silent
1m

Poignant scenes as a public roll of honour for Liverpool and Merseyside's war dead is unveiled.

Public ribbon-cutting is a routine mayoral duty, but this occasion - the unveiling of a 'Roll of Fame' containing the names of those who had fallen in the war - was no cause for celebration. 13,726 servicemen from Liverpool and Merseyside died in the four years of WWI, and as this Topical Budget newsreel shows, by the start of 1916 the human toll of the war was already strikingly apparent.

War memorials had been erected in earlier times, usually to celebrate a glorious victory rather than to remember individual soldiers. But it was in response to the almost inconceivable scale of losses during WWI that rolls of honour listing the fallen became commonplace in communities across Britain. The memorial featured here began as a list of names at Exchange Flags, where people queued to add the names of their loved ones. It is now in Liverpool City Hall, part of a Hall of Remembrance inaugurated by the then Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) in 1921.

The First World War: Remembrance

These poignant films return us to a time when the war was still fresh.

The First World War came to an end at 11am on 11 November 1918 - the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month - a day that was immediately commemorated as Armistice Day (Remembrance Sunday was an innovation of the Second World War). The annual parades and wreath laying became a staple of the newsreels, and subsequently television.

But the act of remembrance began long before the guns stopped firing. During the war, cinemas across the country regularly screened 'Roll of Honour' films, paying tribute to members of the local community who had been killed, captured or wounded in the conflict. And of course, while the war itself faded into history, filmmakers would revisit those world-shattering years for generations after.