EARLIER this week, I stood and watched a moving ceremony in Sighthill in Glasgow. For 60 years or so, the graves of some of the soldiers buried in the area’s old Victorian cemetery have been unmarked, but this week work started to reinstate 85 of them. It was a touching act of remembrance after six decades of forgetting.
The stones erected on Tuesday were at the graves of two men who died almost 30 years apart: 29-year-old Andrew Brownlie who died in a plane crash while serving with the RAF during the Second World War, and James Motherwell, a 32-year-old gunner who died in hospital during the First World War. What was particularly poignant about the restoration of James’s grave was that it happened 100 years to the day after his death on October 18, 1916.
Watching the granite gravestones, beautifully engraved with the men’s regimental badges, being restored was a great privilege, and on a bright autumn morning, an affecting and moving experience. But I have to say it was hard not to have some mixed feelings.
The great positive at Sighthill is that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is restoring graves that were removed in the 50s when the company that owned the cemetery went bust, and over the next few weeks, many more markers of men like James and Andrew will be erected again.
However, the rest of Sighthill Cemetery is in a pretty poor way – the wildlife certainly loves it (I lost count of the number of big, happy squirrels I saw) but the buildings are derelict, the paths overgrown, and hundreds of the gravestones broken and shattered.
And it’s the same elsewhere. The Necropolis, that great cemetery on the hill by Glasgow Cathedral, was built by the Victorians to honour their great men and women. It was also supposed to be a dignified place where people could meditate on death. But decay and vandalism have won and, while some clean-up work has been done, Glasgow City Council is not doing enough to protect and promote the Necropolis and other places like it.
The good news is there has been significant progress on war memorials, thanks to the project at Sighthill and others like it, and the centenary of the First World War. The vast majority of war memorials are well cared for by local people and the belief that they are often prey to disrespectful vandals is something of a myth – vandalism is a tiny problem. Copper thefts, which peaked in 2011, have also fallen away and the Scottish Government has set aside £1million to spend on restoring the memorials that need it.
However, war memorials are only part of the bigger problem we have with decaying cemeteries. Cared for properly, they could be tourist attractions, as well places of learning and contemplation, and while the Scottish Government’s £1m is welcome, much more needs to be spent on cemeteries. The way we honour the dead has changed in recent decades and there are some exciting plans to plant woodland in the Pentland Hills as a tribute to those who died in the First World War. But we must not forget the way we used to die. We must not let it fade away.
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