THE DUTY of recording the names of the civilian war dead of the British Commonwealth and Empire was entrusted by Royal Charter, in February 1941, to the Imperial War Graves Commission. These volumes contain the Roll of Honour of those civilians, citizens of the Commonwealth and Empire, who were killed in the United Kingdom by enemy action during the 1939-1945 War, while engaged in household or in business activities, or at their posts as members of the Civil Defence Services. Their graves are scattered throughout the country.
On this Roll of Honour appear some 60,000 names: over 19,000 for London alone. The first German bombs to be dropped on Britain fell on the Shetland Islands in the autumn of 1939; the last V2 rocket landed at Orpington in Kent on 27th March, 1945. Between these dates fell more than 100,000 tons of air missiles of all kinds, killing over 60,000 civilians and seriously injuring a further 87,000. Deaths occurred in people's homes, in offices and factories, in schools and in public vehicles, in air-raid shelters and in the open country. The lists include the names of members of the Peerage and of the humblest labourers, of housewives and of children, of an infant only eleven hours old and of a Chelsea Pensioner over a hundred years old. Sometimes whole families were wiped out together; sometimes an only child was taken and the parents were left to mourn, or parents were killed and a helpless infant spared.
The large centres of population suffered very heavily. London was a target of the first importance, and all the London boroughs show long casualty lists, dating from the days of the Battle of Britain, the subsequent period of almost nightly raids culminating in that of 10th May, 1941, the sporadic raids, sometimes heavy, by piloted aircraft thereafter, and finally the flying bombs and rockets of 1944-1945. Other places in south-eastern England shared London's ordeal, Dover and the neighbourhood suffering the additional trial of long-range shelling from the French coast.
The first industrial town to be struck at was Middlesbrough, in May 1940; but the first full-scale attack on a provincial city was that which smashed the centre of Coventry in the night of 14th November, 1940. Most of the great cities, ports and manufacturing centres suffered in their turn, some from only one or two devastating attacks, others from frequent heavy raids. The list includes the Medway towns, Portsmouth, Southampton, Plymouth, Merseyside, Belfast, Clydeside, Hull, Bristol, Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle-upon-Tyne -- besides the victims of the so-called "Baedeker raids": Bath, Exeter, Norwich, Canterbury, Cambridge, York. Many coastal towns, small and large, suffered from hit-and-run raiders. Even the remotest village was not perfectly secure; the first fatal casualty on land, in March, 1940, was in the Orkney Islands; others are recorded at Land's End and in the Scilly Isles.
To a greater degree than ever before, the 1939-1945 War involved not merely armies, but entire nations. The names of individuals mean little save to those who knew and loved them and mourn their loss, and the number of those who mourn will dwindle as the years pass by. But it is fitting that these names should be enrolled in Westminster Abbey, at the heart of the Commonwealth and among the most illustrious of the Nation's Dead, in commemoration of their suffering and as a tribute to their sacrifice.
HAWKINS, Maud Beatrice, age 31; of 447a Kingsbury
Road, in the Municipal Borough of Wembley.
HAWKINS, Barbara Ann, age 7; of
447a Kingsbury Road, in the Municipal Borough of Wembley.
Wife and Daughter of Charles Harold Hawkins.
Killed by enemy bombing 25th September 1940.
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