Introduction
After the Great War it was decided that the memorial to the fallen
from the Administrative County of East Suffolk should take the
practical form of a new wing attached to the East Suffolk and
Ipswich Hospital in Anglesea Road, Ipswich. The building was funded
by public subscription and opened on 28 July 1924. Unlike most war
memorials the names of the men and women who had given their lives
were not recorded anywhere in it. It was therefore decided that a
list should be compiled of the dead - not just of East Suffolk but
of the two Administrative Counties of East and West Suffolk,
because contributions to the Hospital extension had been received
from both counties.
A circular letter was therefore sent out in January 1923 to the
Chairmen of Parish and District Councils, inviting them to 'procure
the names of the men and women belonging to, or having associations
with your Parish', and to submit them, with details of rank, 'name
of Regiment or Ship or description of service' and 'honours or
distinctions'.
In July 1924, after a number of reminder letters had been sent, the
organisers felt that the list of names was as complete as it was
likely to be. The information received was sorted alphabetically
and written up in a volume by Graily Hewitt of Treyford (near
Midhurst) in West Sussex. Hewitt also designed the glass-topped
case in which the book was to be displayed. The case and the book
were handed over to the custody of the East Suffolk County Council
on 7 October 1930 and are now on display at Endeavour House, the
headquarters of Suffolk County Council. The Roll and its case were
paid for from the money raised for the hospital extension.
Most parishes sent in all the information they had been asked for.
However a number of places, including a large number of the
middling-sized market towns - Beccles, Haverhill, Southwold,
Newmarket, Woodbridge, Mildenhall, Felixstowe, Leiston, Framlingham
- sent in only the names, without any information about rank or
regiment. What seems to have happened was that the persons
responsible had simply copied the names from the war memorial. In
fairness to them this course of action had been suggested in the
first reminder letter sent out by the organisers:
'If your parish has a war memorial we would suggest you might
send us a copy of the names and other particulars which appear
thereon. We are aware that in some instances all the information
indicated in the form is not given on the local memorials, but we
believe that parishes would prefer that the names of all should be
included in the County Record, rather than that any should be
omitted merely because the fullest details are not
available'
Perhaps the local officials took the line of least resistance: but
we should also bear in mind that the War had ended over four years
earlier; families had moved away; the people who remained had
either forgotten or might not want to remember details. We probably
have to accept the assertions made that it would be
'
difficult' or '
impossible' to collect the
required information.
As soon as the lists of names started to be collated into a
composite list, another problem became apparent. There were many
cases where identical names occurred in the lists of more than one
parish. The compilers of the Roll decided that no man should be
listed more than once, even though he might have equally valid
connections with more than one place: he might have been born and
gone to school in one place but moved house and joined up from
another. Therefore where two or more places had submitted what
looked like the same name, they were written to and asked to
explain the connection with their town or village. When the replies
were received by the Secretary to the County War Memorial
Committee, he decided which place had the most plausible claim on
the man in question. He left no written guidelines as to how he had
reached his decisions, each case seeming to have been decided on
its merits.
The response to the appeal for names and information about the
Fallen was nearly 100%, in East and West Suffolk. When the
compilers decided that they would not send out any more reminders,
returns had been received from all the towns and villages in
Suffolk except three. These were Kirkley, Leavenheath and
Wissington. In order to make the electronic version of the Roll as
full as possible, the names of men from these parishes have been
taken from the local war memorials and added to the Roll - just as
happened with many places at the time. In the case of Kirkley, many
of the names on the war memorial had already been sent in by
Lowestoft, Pakefield or Kessingland, and these names have been left
under those places. Similarly some of the names on the Leavenheath
memorial had been submitted by Assington or Stoke-by-Nayland.
There was one other place that did not feature in the County Roll
of Honour- the county town, Ipswich. Ipswich was a County Borough,
and quite separate from the Administrative County of East Suffolk.
The County Roll therefore did not include any Ipswich names.
Instead they were recorded separately on the Borough War Memorial ,
which was unveiled in Christchurch Park on 3 May 1924. The bronze
panels behind the cenotaph contain all the information requested by
the compilers of the County Roll of Honour, and this data has been
incorporated into this electronic version of the Roll, so that the
names of men and women from the whole of the modern county can be
accessible in one database.
One result of doing this is that names appear on the Ipswich list
which seem to be identical with some submitted by parishes on the
edges of the town but just outside its boundaries - Whitton,
Westerfield and Rushmere St Andrew in particular. As there is often
no way now of proving that the names related to the same men, the
two versions have been left in the database, on the grounds that it
was better to have a man listed twice than for him not to appear at
all.
Apart from the data relating to Ipswich, Kirkley, Leavenheath and
Wissington, this
online County
Roll of Honour contains all the information that appears in the
original book.