Brookwood Military Cemetery – The Memorials, Past & Present

We shall start the New Year with the first in a series of posts about Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey and the adjoining, and much smaller – a mere 37 acres – Brookwood Military Cemetery, which is where we begin.

This is the Brookwood 1939-1945 Memorial to the Missing.

The most famous, and largest, of the Brookwood memorials,…

…it remembers almost 3,500 Second World War casualties who have no known grave.

Being a Second World War memorial, however, and this being primarily a Great War website,…

…you’ll have to look elsewhere if you wish to see the names on the panels, although I will show you the addenda panel, on the left above, just to pique your interest, and which contains, among others, two dozen names of Special Operations Executive volunteers, presumably men & women who died on operations in occupied Europe.

If you have been to Brookwood on more than one occasion over the years, you will know that things do not necessarily stay the same from one visit to the next.  The shot above, taken in 2008, looks down the length of the main Commonwealth section of the cemetery from the edge of the American Cemetery,…

Between its construction in 2004 and its demolition in 2017,…

…the inscription on this memorial read, ‘To the glory of God and in the memory of these members of the forces of the British Empire many of whom died at home and whose graves are unknown’.

Today, where it once stood,…

…nothing remains barring this bare patch on which the memorial’s base was once placed.

I always felt that the memorial’s positioning was somewhat suspect.  It probably all looked good on paper, but this is perhaps the nicest photograph I ever took of it, and I dare say that the faerie ring helps.  And at no time, bearing in mind the proximity of trees and bushes immediately behind, did it occur to me that there might be panels of names on the reverse side, which, as it turns out, there were, and which is why I shall only include one of the panels on the front in close-up,…

…so that you at least know what they looked like, and because all the names – over 200 –  on this memorial can now be found on the new Brookwood 1914-1918 Memorial.

And it is the Brookwood 1914-1918 Memorial that we are looking at through the trees here, this photo taken at what you might call an ‘open day’ at the cemetery a few years back.

Inaugurated in 2015, the shots interspersing the following tablet photos take you on a clockwise spin around the memorial, beginning with Panel 1, bathed in sunlight on the left,…

…and seen here in close-up.  These names are of men & women who were invalided home and subsequently died of their wounds, or of illness contracted during service, but whose deaths remained unknown to the CWGC until recent times and who, therefore, had not been commemorated by the CWGC elsewhere.  Each main panel is made up of six smaller panels, the two central ones slightly larger than those above and below.  There are no dates, just name, rank & regiment, and no order to the names here inscribed.

And some, even now, are easier to read than others.  These are Panels 2 & 3, and it is on Panel 2 that you can find the first names from the single panel on the now-demolished memorial we looked at earlier; a point of trivia, no more, but for a short time, therefore, these names appeared on both memorials.

Panels 4 & 5 (above), and 6 & 7 (below).

The building you can see through the memorial is the American Records & Reception Building, behind which is the American Cemetery.

Panels 8 & 9, and at this point, at the top of the right hand side of Panel 9 on the right, the names cease.

At the time these photographs were taken part of Panel 9, and all three of the remaining panels,…

…seen here, from left, Panels 10, 11 & 12, had been left blank.  Since then, as we know, many more names have been added,…

…and Panels 10, 11 & 12 are now full,…

…the additions to Panel 9 seen here on the left, and Panels 10 (right),…

…11 & 12 now also completed, so I have no idea what happens if more names ever need to be added.  The CWGC tells us that there are a total of 314 casualties named on the panels, but the recently added names bring the number to around 400.

The centrepiece of the memorial…

…is inscribed with the words,…

…’To the glory of God and in the memory of these members of the forces of the British Empire many of whom died at home and whose graves are unknown’, the same wording as on the now-demolished memorial we saw earlier.  There are also a number of casualties listed here, soldiers & airmen, who were lost at sea and whose names would be expected to appear on the Hollybrook Memorial in Southampton, except there’s no room, hence their names appearing here.  Where there is now also no room.  Hm.

Leaving the 1914-1918 Memorial, there was once another memorial that stood nearby but that now no longer exists.

Constructed in 1983, during the days of the Cold War, by far the majority of the 662 names on its eight panels were Great War casualties, many of whom died during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1919 and whose graves, or places of commemoration, had become near impossible to visit in later years.

In 2015, the Iron Curtain long demolished, the memorial followed suit.  Perhaps not the smartest move, in retrospect, but it was a pretty ugly creation – there’s an oxymoron for you – in the first place, let’s be honest.

Today, if you search for it,…

…there’s a small plaque which remembers the site of the memorial,…

…and which explains my earlier comment.  The inscription says, ‘This plaque marks the location of the former Brookwood (Russian) Memorial. As graves and memorials located in Russia and the Baltic States are now accessible the memorial has been removed.’  If you say so.

Another look at the 1939-1945 Memorial.  The building beyond, actually the first you encounter on entering the military cemetery,…

…is the CWGC Records & Reception building,…

…which looks out on the huge Canadian Second World War plot and in the distance, one of two Crosses of Sacrifice to be found in the cemetery.

Some of you old-timers will remember that I showed you around the main Commonwealth section of the military cemetery before, over eleven years ago now, and we have also seen the American Cemetery since then (soon to reappear with major updates), but we have only very briefly crossed into the huge adjoining civil cemetery before, and we shall be doing just that this time.  And it’s a very interesting place, let me tell you (or ask a certain Mr. Kilner).  But this post has been a brief look at the Brookwood memorials, and so we shall leave it there.  For the moment.