WAR MEMORIAL

Taranaki Daily News, 19 December 1930, Page 3

WAR MEMORIAL

SOUTHAMPTON RECORD.

VICTIMS OF SUBMARINES.

The war memorial unveiled at Hollywood, Southampton, on Wednesday by Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson was erected, for the Imperial War Graves Commission to record the names of sailors, soldiers, marines and airmen who were lost at sea or fell in other parts of the world and have no known graves. The memorial is more especially associated. with those who went down in transports' and other vessels topedoed or mined in home waters, but it also includes the names of others who died at home or in distant areas whose bodies it was impossible to recover. In addition to the military units of the United Kingdom, which predominate, those of South Africa, Australia, Canada, India, British West Indies, Rhodesia and West Africa are represented. Thirteen women are commemorated, seven of whom were members of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service and lost their lives on the hospital ship Glenart Castle, torpedoed off Lundy Island on February 26, 1918. Without exception, all those who are commemorated rest somewhere beneath the “unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.” Panel No. 1 records the Empire’s most tragic individual loss in the Great War, namely, the sinking of the Hampshire with Field-Marshal- Lord Kitchener on board. The great field-marshal, his aide-de-camp, Brigadier-General WEllershaw, and his trusty servant, Driver D. C. Brown, are . all commemorated on the same simple panel, equally honoured in their deaths for duty nobly and faithfully done. It is peculiarly appropriate that Southampton should have been selected by the commissioners as the site for this particular memorial, since throughout the Great War it was Britain's principal port of embarkation. The numbers of personnel, guns, horses, vehicles, stores, etc., handled at the port in the four momentous years were:— Personnel, 7,136,797; horses, '822,160; guns, 13,103; vehicles, 153.810; stores in tons, 3,381,224; parcels and mails, 7,436.916; ships, 1,5,661. Not only was Lord Kitchener a freeman af Southampton, but the vast majority of “Kitchener’s Army” sailed from that port for France, Flanders and , other theatres of war.