Manchester Cenotaph
Manchester Cenotaph is a war memorial in St Peter's Square, Manchester, England. Manchester was late in commissioning a First World War memorial compared with most British towns and cities; the city council did not convene a war memorial committee until 1922. The committee quickly achieved its target of raising £10,000 but finding a suitable location for the monument proved controversial. The preferred site in Albert Square would have required the removal and relocation of other statues and monuments, and was opposed by the city's artistic bodies. The next choice was Piccadilly Gardens, an area already identified for a possible art gallery and library; but in the interests of speedier delivery, the memorial committee settled on St Peter's Square. The area within the square had been purchased by the City Council in 1906, having been the site of the former St Peter's Church; whose sealed burial crypts remained with burials untouched and marked above ground by a memorial stone cross. Negotiations to remove these stalled so the construction of the cenotaph proceeded with the cross and burials in situ.
Having picked a site, it was originally proposed to choose an architect by open competition, but the memorial committee was criticised in the local press when it reserved the right to overrule the judgement of the independent assessor. A sub-committee therefore approached Sir Edwin Lutyens directly, who produced, in a matter of weeks, a variation of his design for the Cenotaph in London. The memorial consists of a central cenotaph and a Stone of Remembrance flanked by twin obelisks, all features characteristic of Lutyens' works. Raised steps on either side of the Stone of Remembrance provided east-facing tribunes for the colour party in memorial parades. The cenotaph is topped by an effigy of a fallen soldier and decorated with relief carvings of the imperial crown, Manchester's coat of arms and inscriptions commemorating the dead. The structures, based on classical architecture, use abstract, ecumenical shapes rather than overt religious symbolism. In submitting the design, Lutyens stated that he envisaged the crypts and cross as remaining in place; as the cenotaph could stand on the foundations of the former church tower and the cross would serve to "consecrate the site", while there would be no explicit religious symbolism on the cenotaph itself.
The memorial was unveiled on 12 July 1924 by the Earl of Derby, assisted by Mrs Bingle, a local resident whose three sons had died in the war. It cost £6,940 and the remaining funds were used to provide hospital beds.
In 2014, Manchester City Council dismantled the memorial and reconstructed it at the northeast corner of St Peter's Square next to Manchester Town Hall to make room for the expanded Metrolink tram network. It is a grade II* listed structure and in 2015, Historic England recognised Manchester Cenotaph as part of a national collection of Lutyens' war memorials.
Background
In the aftermath of the First World War and its unprecedented casualties, thousands of war memorials were built across Britain. Virtually every village, town, or city erected some form of memorial to commemorate their dead. During the war, only London provided more recruits to the British Army than Manchester. The Manchester Regiment and the Lancashire Fusiliers, which were largely recruited from the city and towns to the north, were swollen by pals battalions drawn from local employers, social groups, and neighbourhoods. By the end of the war, over 13,000 men of the Manchester Regiment, including more than 4,000 from the pals battalions and 13,600 Lancashire Fusiliers, had been killed. An estimated 22,000 Mancunians died and 55,000 were wounded.Commissioning
Many towns and cities began to erect war memorials after the armistice, but Manchester did not get underway until 1922. As a result of pressure from the local branch of the British Legion, the city council convened a war memorial committee of 12 persons, chaired by the mayor and consisting of "Aldermen and Councillors representative men connected with different aspects of Manchester business, with the military forces and other sections of Manchester life", to explore options for commemoration. The committee limited the budget to £10,000 and very rapidly raised this sum; donors being assured that local firms would benefit from the construction and resulting employment. Nonetheless, the letters pages of local newspapers featured several missives from ex-servicemen who felt that the cenotaph was a waste of money and that the funds would be better spent on the survivors and war widows, many of whom faced extreme hardship as a result of high levels of unemployment in the aftermath of the war. For a civic memorial to the Great War, £10,000 was relatively modest sum; the counterpart public appeal in Rochdale had raised nearly £30,000, and the resulting Rochdale Cenotaph, then just completed, had cost £12,611. The proprietor of the Daily Dispatch newspaper, Edward Hulton, offered to cover the entire cost of the Manchester memorial, but the committee declined, feeling that the funding should come from the people and city of Manchester. Subsequently, the committee resisted all suggestions that the memorial budget might be increased, or that the list of donors might be extended. Constitutionally, the memorial committee was a committee of the City Council, but acted throughout as having independent discretion and funds.Three potential sites were considered for the memorial: Albert Square, Piccadilly Gardens and St Peter's Square; St Ann's Square being ruled out as already containing the civic monument to the Boer War. With the support of the British Legion, Albert Square emerged as the favourite. The site proved controversial as the Manchester Society of Architects and Manchester Art Foundation led objections to the removal and relocation of statues in the square, which would have been required to create a suitable space for the war memorial. King George V had consented to the relocation of the memorial to his German grandfather, Prince Albert, but objections persisted and the city architect estimated the cost of relocating the statues at £8,400. The City Council rejected Albert Square in March 1923, and voted by 71 votes to 30 in favour of Piccadilly Gardens as the site for the monument. The City was already considering building an art gallery at Piccadilly on the space left after the old Manchester Royal Infirmary had been demolished, albeit that this was currently filled by temporary huts housing the books from Manchester Central Library. Siting the memorial on this land was welcomed by the Art Gallery Committee, who proceeded to commission designs for a memorial in the form of a 'Hall of Memory'; but would be contingent on also funding a new library. As nothing was yet decided on these wider schemes, any plans for the area would have delayed the war memorial project further and so in May 1923 the memorial committee, acting on its own initiative, disregarded the vote of the Council and switched attention to St Peter's Square. The square was itself a controversial choice; both because it was then much the smallest of the three options, and also due to its being the location of the former St Peter's church, demolished in 1907. The statutory trustees appointed to administer the funds paid over by the city council for the deconsecrated site of the church had been required by the Manchester Churches Act 1906 to erect and maintain a memorial cross on the site, as well as to protect the bodies of the dead still interred in vaults underneath; and they objected to the removal of both. The dispute was only partially resolved, as although the trustees consented to the construction of the cenotaph they refused to allow the removal of the cross while the burials remained in place. Accordingly, discussions proceeded with the Manchester diocese on the basis that the burials would need to be removed individually and reburied on separate plots in one of the City cemeteries; the cross being relocated to the grounds of Manchester Cathedral. However, this would add considerable time and cost to the memorial project.
More controversy surrounded the choice of architect. The Manchester Art Federation and other bodies petitioned the city council to hold an open competition, to which the Council agreed. The war memorial committee appointed Percy Worthington, a local architect, as the assessor for the competition but attracted severe criticism in the local press when it reserved to itself the right to veto Worthington's choice. After further debate, a subcommittee approached Sir Edwin Lutyens, and the competition collapsed. Conveniently, Lutyens assured the committee in August 1923 that his design could accommodate the cross and crypts remaining in place, while clearly distinct; and so this whole issue was deferred until after the cenotaph had been completed and dedicated.
Architect
Lutyens, described by Historic England as "the leading English architect of his generation", was amongst the most prominent designers of war memorials in Britain. Before the war, he had established his reputation designing country houses for wealthy patrons but the war had a profound effect on him and from 1917 onwards he dedicated much of his time to memorialising the casualties. The Stone of Remembrance that he designed in 1917 appears in all large Imperial War Graves Commission cemeteries and in several of his civic memorials, including Manchester's. His Cenotaph on Whitehall in London became the focus for national Remembrance Sunday commemorations and one of the most influential designs for war memorials in Britain. Manchester's cenotaph, a close replica, is one of seven in England based on it.Lutyens designed the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, the largest British war memorial in the world, for the IWGC in 1928. Around the same time he designed his only other commission in Manchester, the Midland Bank at 100 King Street.