CAMBRIDGE CITY WAR MEMORIAL - "Coming Home"

Compiled and copyright © 2001 Martin Edwards

The memorial was unveiled on 3rd July 1923 by HRH The Duke of York. The memorial was paid for by public subscription; the architect was George Hubbard and the sculptor Dr Robert Tait McKenzie. The memorial originally stood at the junction of Hills Road (A1307) and Station Road but was moved in 2009 onto Hills Road outside the Botanic Gardens. The returning soldier looks back towards Cambridge Station as he strides purposefully towards his "home". He has taken his helmet off and there is a lightness in his step which sums up his relief at returning from the conflict.

Photograph Courtesy & Copyright © NIWM - 2001	Photograph Copyright © Phil Curme - 2000
Cambridge 'Coming Home' War Memorial unveiling on 3rd July 1923 by HRH The Duke of York from an old postcard

The inscription reads:

TO THE MEN OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE
AND THE ISLE OF ELY, THE BOROUGH
AND UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
WHO SERVED IN THE GREAT WAR
1914-1919

Since this was published in 1992 there have been discovered a series of photographs showing the unveiling of the Cambridge War Memorial - see below.

Extract from Memories of War Days are Revived: Reflections by Mike Petty, Cambridge Weekly News 12 February 1992:

Now that the crowds have left the War Memorial and the Poppy wreaths become battered by wind and rain. the memories of wartime are allowed to dim again. "We will remember them”, but most now never knew, and many others have themselves faded away, just as the stone memorials have become weathered and stained. Yet the story of the memorials themselves has become as forgotten as those they commemorate.

Even by 1924 few Cambridge folk marked the opening of what had been intended as the County’s premier tribute to its dead, a new Nurses' Home at Addenbrooke's Hospital. This took half of the total money raised by the Lord Lieutenant’s War Memorial Fund, collecting from town, gown and county to provide a fitting memorial.

But there were other projects as well. One was the erection of inscribed boards at Ely Cathedral, commemorating parish by parish the names of those who served and fell.

This would leave a farther sum of £3,500 for a celebration of "Victory" in the form of a statute by Canadian sculptor Tait McKenzie. His original proposal had envisaged something taller than the funds would actually stretch to and the memorial had to be reduced in height.

Yet came the day of opening this was not ready so a plaster copy was created to be unveiled by the Duke of York who was in Cambridge attending the Royal Agricultural Show.

Full details of the discussion and arguments, proposals and debates which raged over 70 years ago have just been published by Australian Prof K.S. Inglis in the latest issue of the "Journal of Contemporary History", an article which deserves wider readership than it is likely to receive.

Yet this is not the only unexpected record of wartime activity.

For from Sawston has just come Abe Easey’s account of the impact of units of the United States Army who descended on that village from 1943 to 1945. "A Street full of Sad Sacks" outlines the problems of such an invasion - the overflowing of the sewerage system, the overloading of the telephone, the overcrowding of the buses into Cambridge and the overplaying of the village's first jukebox in the saloon bar of the Black Bull. Many fascinating details are contained in its pages: of sentry duty in blackout, the war-time use of Sawston Hall where wire-fenced towers kept watch over the King and Queen when they paid a visit during the early days of war. Yet only a few dozen copies of the book have been produced, of which the Cambridgeshire Collection has secured two.

Even more conventionally produced items are easy to miss and it has taken two years for us to obtain a copy of another fascinating book, "Spitfire squadron" published by Air Research Publications & available from Duxford Imperial War Museum reprints. Described as "one of the finest first-person accounts of air fighting during the Battle of Britain” the book was first published in 1942. It is the record of Squadron Leader Brian Lane who flew from Fowlmere airfield. Though censorship blocked publication of names of places and people at the time, these are now explained in the second part of the new book which also contains photographs. It goes on to report the death of the author when shot down over the North Sea in December 1942. His body was never found but his name is inscribed on the Runnymead Memorial. It is one of thousands, but this time remembered.

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