Sharing a Family’s Grief with Posterity: The Personal Messages Carved on WWI British Headstones

By James Patton

Many readers of Roads to the Great War have toured the British battlefields in Europe and visited some of the hundreds of British cemeteries, perhaps to the point of ABC (“Another Bloody Cemetery”) fatigue. A visitor’s Frequently Asked Question is about personal inscriptions on headstones.  

After the war, the  Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC), now known as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), allowed the family of those with a known grave to have a short personal inscription engraved on the headstone. The following set of instructions were transmitted to the Next of Kin of record in an official letter from the IWGC’s Vice Chairman, Maj. Gen. Sir Fabian Ware  KCVO KBE CB CMG (1869-1949). 

• The headstone will have engraved upon it the naval or military inscription, the badge of the deceased’s naval or military unit, and an emblem of his religious faith. 

• The Commission would be obliged if you could kindly assist them by saying whether the above particulars, name, initials, honours, etc. are correct, in order that the naval or military inscription may be absolutely accurate.

• A space “a” is provided on the opposite page for any corrections that you may desire to make.

• If you wish the age to be engraved, will you give particulars in the space on the opposite page after the word AGE.

• In addition, a space has been reserved at the foot of the headstone, below the emblem of religious faith, to allow the engraving, at your own expense, of a short personal inscription or text of your own choice.

• It is regretted that special alphabets, such as Greek, cannot be accepted.

• The length of the inscription is limited by the space available on the headstone, and should in consequence not exceed 66 letters, the space between two words counting as one letter.

• For instance, if you choose twelve words the total number of actual letters should not exceed 55, there being 11 spaces between the words.

• If you desire to use this space, would you kindly write (clearly) the inscription or text that you select in the space “b” opposite.

• A claim for the amount due from you in respect of the engraving of the selected inscription, will be sent to you in due course. The present price is 3 ½ d per letter, but this may be subject to future fluctuations of cost.

• Unless you express a wish to the contrary in the space “c” opposite, a cross will be engraved in the centre of the stone.

• The above rules didn’t apply to headstones in the cemeteries at Salonika and Gallipoli;  those markers are substantially different in size, style and composition, and won’t be discussed here.
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According to the CWGC, there are more than 229,000 headstones with a personal inscription such as those shown above. Many families chose terse expressions of duty or loss, like “He did his Bit” or “My Darling Husband”,  KJV Bible verses, snippets from the Anglican liturgy or hymns or even famous quotations, often from Rudyard Kipling.

However stern Maj. Gen. Ware’s instructions may have seemed, in practice deviations  were allowed. For one thing, Victoria Cross holders have the image of that honour inscribed in the place of the religious emblem. In another instance, in spite of Ware’s ban on special characters, Indian Army and Chinese Labor Corps headstones have inscriptions in the native language, and there is even a stanza of music inscribed on a British one.

Furthermore, there was no cost to the family for personal inscriptions on Australian and Canadian graves as those governments picked up the bill, and New Zealand families couldn’t order personal inscriptions due to their government’s policy.  

But by far the most significant deviation was the relaxation of Ware’s ‘strict’ 66 letter limit. 

Visitors will no doubt have come across some headstones where that limit has obviously been exceeded. The following are the three longest personal inscriptions that have been found by the Western Front Association (WFA).

The record found thus far is 388 letters, for Private Edward Rust, in Hazebrouck Communal Cemetery. He is also one of only two Other Ranks found thus far to have a non-standard inscription on his headstone – at a cost annotated on the schedule in the IWGC files of £4/13s – a considerable sum at the time. A member of The Green Howards (Alexandra, Princess of Wales’s Own Yorkshire Regiment), Edward had joined the Territorials whilst still at school and volunteered for foreign service in 1914. He had been at the front for only one week before he was wounded. He died six days later, aged 19 years. His inscription is:

SERIOUSLY WOUNDED WHILE ADVANCING WITH HIS REGIMENT IN THE FIGHTING NEAR ST. JULIEN SAT. APRIL 24. 1915 HE WAS TAKEN TO THE FIELD HOSPITAL BUT WAS SO EAGER TO UPHOLD THE HONOUR OF HIS REGIMENT AND TO SERVE HIS COUNTRY THAT HE RETURNED NEXT DAY TO THE FIRING LINE AND REMAINED WITH HIS COMRADES UNTIL THEY WERE RELIEVED AND DIED ON APRIL 30TH COURAGEOUS TO THE END AND BELOVED BY ALL WHO KNEW HIM

The runner-up is Lieut. Alfred James Lawrence Evans. He was born in Quebec, the son of Lorenzo and Elizabeth Evans, and after graduation from Montreal’s McGill University, he became a mining engineer in British Columbia. Due to his education, he was rated as a Sapper in the 1st Field Company, Canadian Engineers. He left Canada in the first contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) in October 1914. Promotion was swift and he was commissioned in July 1915. He died of wounds in No. 2 Casualty Clearing Station on 7 December 1915, and is buried in Bailleul Communal Cemetery Extension. He has a non-standard inscription of 318 characters, which reads:

BORN AT QUEBEC DIED OF WOUNDS RECEIVED ON 23RD NOVEMBER 1915 WHILE IN COMMAND OF 1ST BDE. MINING SEC. 3RD BTN. FRONT LINE TRENCHES BELGIUM MENTIONED IN DESPATCHES FOR GALLANT AND DISTINGUISHED CONDUCT IN THE FIELD "THE BRAVE DIE NEVER BEING DEATHLESS THEY BUT CHANGE THEIR COUNTRY'S ARMS FOR MORE THEIR COUNTRY'S HEART"

Since Alfred served in the CEF and the Canadian Government would have covered the cost, the IWGC records do not show that an individual bill was issued. According to the price schedule, the cost would have worked out at just over £3. 

Lastly, there is Captain Guy Charles Boileau Willock, a great grandson of General Sir Henry Willock (1790-1858) a former chairman of The East India Company. After attending Cambridge, Guy was a barrister in London. Commissioned in the 18th London Regiment (The London Irish Rifles), he went to France in May 1915. He fell during the initial attack of the Battle of Loos, where his battalion was the one that dribbled and passed a football as they tried to cross No Man’s Land. The inscription on his headstone in Dud Corner Cemetery totals 257 characters, at a cost to relatives of £2/19s/6d. It reads:

One perhaps unforeseen consequence of putting the private inscription at the foot of the stone is that today, after a hundred years in place, some of the stones have tended to settle a bit, often making the complete inscription hard to read.

Source: Extracted from a longer article by Jill Stewart of  the Western Front Association.  Her full article can read HERE.