Like thousands of towns and villages throughout the United Kingdom, St Ives too has a War Memorial to commemorate the dead from the two world wars. In 2011 the vexed question of custodianship and funding for maintenance of the Memorial was raised by the Society and later that year the Town Council accepted custodianship of it together with our recommendation that this Society should take a lead in raising funds.

The St Ives Memorial was erected and unveiled on Armistice Day in 1920 with funding being organised by a Ladies Committee who went around town getting contributions. The Town Mayor who presided over the unveiling emphasised that the whole cost had come from voluntary contributions. In terms of responsibility for the Memorial, the accepted view is that memorials are something the Council should attend to but in St Ives’s case no formal acceptance was initially undertaken so it was a positive outcome when custodianship was accepted by the Town Council.

The Society arranged for preservation work to take place which was completed in time for the Remembrance Day Service in 2012. It is accepted convention that memorials should be allowed to weather, and repairs were restricted to the legibility of the names and inscriptions, the result being a memorial that will be preserved for generations to come. The Civic Society held a number of funding events and also applied for funds from the War Memorial Trust.

A final word regarding the importance of the Memorial is that apart from being a focus on Remembrance Sunday, we must not forget that it is only in recent times that bodies have been repatriated and tens of thousands lie in foreign fields with no known graves. To the relatives of the fallen the Memorial is very much a gravestone and the significance of the reading of names on Remembrance Sunday must not be forgotten. To this end the Society believes the Memorial must be maintained as a fitting tribute.

This article is an extract from one written by Peter Plowman prepared for the 2011 Civic Society Annual Report.