Civil Service Rifles War Memorial
The Civil Service Rifles War Memorial is a First World War memorial located on the riverside terrace at Somerset House in central London. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and unveiled in 1924, the memorial commemorates the 1,240 members of the regiment who were killed in the war. It takes the form of a single rectangular column surmounted by a sculpture of an urn and flanked by painted stone flags, the Union Flag on one side and the regimental colour on the other.
About Civil Service Rifles War Memorial in brief
The Civil Service Rifles War Memorial is a First World War memorial located on the riverside terrace at Somerset House in central London, England. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and unveiled in 1924, the memorial commemorates the 1,240 members of the regiment who were killed in the war. It takes the form of a single rectangular column surmounted by a sculpture of an urn and flanked by painted stone flags, the Union Flag on one side and the regimental colour on the other. The base on which the column stands is inscribed with the regiment’s battle honours, while an inscription on the column denotes that a scroll containing the names of the fallen was placed inside. The memorial was designated a grade II listed building in 1987, which was upgraded to grade II* in November 2015 when it became part of a national collection of Lutyen’s war memorials. The regiment was part of the Territorial Force, a part-time reserve element of the British Army. It was in action at the Battle of Loos in 1915, theBattle of the Somme in 1916, and during the Hundred Days Offensive in 1918. After the war, the regiment demobilised and formed an Old Comrades Association.
The association began raising funds for a war memorial in 1920, and the Prince of Wales unveiled the memorial on 27 January 1924. The last known surviving member of the Regiment attended a rededication ceremony in 2002, by which time many former members were in their nineties. It is one of the least controversial of the most famous of the architect’s memorials, as sites and funds tended to be readily available. The Cenotaph on Whitehall, which became Britain’s national war memorial, is the most prominent of his memorials and was designed by Herbert Baker, who was also responsible for the Imperial War Graves Commission’s memorial to the dead. The first design was approved by the Office of Works, which approved the design of the memorial by the architect in June 1922. The design was then approved by a committee chaired by Major W. H. Kirby, who approved it by the end of that year. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Buildings anduments since 1923. The Memorial was rededicated in 1924 and has been in the Somerset House courtyard since the late 1990s, when the civil service vacated the building.
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This page is based on the article Civil Service Rifles War Memorial published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
