God’ supplemented by any other relevant information that could be gathered from the uniform on the body. This left open the question of how to commemorate the names of the Missing. The idea that eventually emerged, promoted by Lutyens and his colleague Sir Reginald Blomfield, was to have the names inscribed on stone walls in the cemeteries, although it was recognised that it would take time to assemble accurate lists of the Missing and reach a conclusion as to which was the appropriate cemetery for each theatre of action. Whilst the Commission was wrestling with this problem, it had been included as a member of the Battle Exploits Memorial Committee, which had been established in 1918 to consider the general question of battlefield memorials. One of the first items that they had to consider was the question of some form of memorial at Ypres, the salient around which had seen some of the War’s most bitter fighting. Lutyens name was suggested by the War Office but Sir Fabian Ware, the IWGC’s founder and vicechairman, did not think that Lutyens was the right man to design it. In a letter to Sir Frederic Kenyon, Director of the British Museum and architectural advisor to the IWGC, Ware said: ‘I took a rather strong line about the matter as I knew that you would feel that Ypres, with its gothic associations etc etc was not the kind of work at which Lutyens would excel. The other memorials will give more scope to the special blend of Lutyens genius’. Kenyon replied that ‘Lutyens might very well have the Somme or Cambrai-St Quentin’.
November 2014
Above: The Cenotaph in London
Below: Goddards near Abinger, Surrey, one of Lutyen’s country houses, now owned by the Landmark Trust.
By October 1921, the Commission had drawn up plans for memorials on 12 sites in France and Belguim which were to act as Memorials to the Missing as well as battlefield memorials. Two memorials (Arras and St Quentin) were allocated to Lutyens. Progress was slow and compromised by the need to acquire the land and secure the consent for the designs from the French Commission de Monuments Historiques. As the Commission developed its plans the French began to be concerned about both the number of the memorials and their size, as they were in danger of overshadowing their own commemorative proposals. The French view was shared by Ware and his colleagues and in May 1927, the Commission endorsed a new plan that saw one memorial move over the border into Belgium and the names of the Missing being split between four stand-alone memorials. Three of the sites were already committed, leaving just one site to be decided. The original list of 12 had included memorials for various phases of the Somme battles, rather than a single memorial. However, with no other Somme memorial planned, it was decided that the final site should be at Thiepval to commemorate the area that, along with the struggle at Ypres, had become one of the most significant areas of the Western Front. By the time that the Commission had undertaken its reappraisal Lutyens had already made substantial progress with the two projects allocated to him. The St Quentin design had been through a number of iterations. When the local commune had first been
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