Holyhead War Memorial Unveiling Ceremony

At the end of WWI villages, towns and cities across Great Britain wanted to remember the millions of our people that had paid the ultimate price for our freedom, and Holyhead was no different.

A War Memorial Committee was voted in, and house to house collections helped to pay for the memorial, the people of Holyhead all pulling together to make the memorial possible. The Vice-Chairman of the committee was William Fox-Russell, who had lost two of his own sons in WWI.

There were casualty lists to compile and the responsibility for their being complete must have been a great weight on the shoulders of the seven members of the subcommittee concerned. Other tasks concerned auditors, treasurers, fundraisers, program sellers, and inscription authors.

As we now know it was completed and opened in front of big crowds, and apart from a few names the list of casualties on the memorial was complete.

Holyhead War Memorial was unveiled to the public on the 15th September 1923 by Sir R.H. Williams-Bulkeley to a crowd of townsfolk and various dignitaries and spouses, children, siblings, parents, grandparents, friends, colleagues and neighbours of the fallen – pretty much the entire town I would guess.

When they all joined in to sing the two chosen hymns – one in english and the other in welsh I doubt there was a dry eye in the square. The hymns chosen were ‘O God our help in ages past, our hope for years to come’ and ‘Cawn esgyn o’r dyrys anialwch, i’r nefol baradwys i fyw’ which roughly translates as:
‘We ascend from the thorny desert to the heavenly paradise to live’.

The Sculptor was Louis Frederick Roslyn, who had sculpted several other war memorials, and he was an ex-serviceman, having served in the Royal Flying Corps during World War One.

I am indebted to Anglesey Archives and their staff for all the assistance rendered, and copyright of the above images is solely theirs.