Family Mourning After War and Disaster in Twentieth-Century Britain

Book excerpt: Across the twentieth century, the families of people who died in war and disaster were left to make sense of their sudden loss and navigate newfound grief. This book focuses the families of people who died in the First World War and in mining disasters in the early twentieth-century. These bereaved families were often denied access to bodies and choice over burial rights, all while dealing with the increased bureaucracy of death.Families created domestic memorials, which took on additional meaning because of this lack of memorial agency elsewhere. Although the ways that these families were bereaved each took place in different circumstances, the ways that families grieved were recognizable to one another: they drew on common memorial practices, augmented to take on special meaning after sudden death.This memorial material provided a vehicle for families to navigate their loss, but also to communicate the memory of the dead both externally, through donation to museums, and linearly, through ancestral lines. Drawing on a nuanced reading of a wide range of sources - from ephemera to administrative museum paperwork - this book explores family reactions to mass death events in early twentieth-century Britain. The result is a comparative and domestic perspective on mourning at the turn of the century that makes important contributions to the growing field of death studies, and will be of interest to those working on the First World War, interwar Britain, the history of work, the social history of the family, and the history of memorialization. 6 b&w illustrations