Roll of Honour Servicemen
Introduction
The Rolls of Honour presented here are separated into one for servicemen (including the Merchant Navy) and another for civilians (including the Home Guard). These are men, women and children who either lived in, or had a close link with, the Borough of Dartford but who died as a result of enemy action or, in the case of servicemen, sometimes just through accidents or illness while serving.
To Roll of Honour contains an A-Z record system and can be viewed here: Roll of Honour- Second World War servicemen
The story behind the servicemen roll of Honour
At the end of the First World War a list was drawn up of all servicemen from the town of Dartford (not the whole Borough) who had been killed, relying on information presented by relatives. These names were eventually engraved on the plinth of the War Memorial which now stands outside the Library at the entrance to Central Park. Similar efforts were also undertaken in the villages around the town.
However, at the end of the Second World War, while the villages gathered the names of those killed and added them to their First World War memorials, nothing was done for the town itself. Dartford Borough Council minutes record that attempts were made to make a list of residents who had died although it is not clear if this is referring to civilians in the town rather than those serving in the forces. The minutes state that very few people had come forward with information, although we know that a memorial to the civilian dead was later unveiled in Watling Street Cemetery in 1949.
This meant that we had lists of dead servicemen from the villages in the Borough of Dartford but we had nothing similar for the town, in other words no equivalent to the names inscribed on the town’s famous First World War Memorial. In 1982 this situation was addressed by the addition to the War Memorial of a plaque which reads ‘To our Dead of the Second World War 1939-1945’. The Mayor at the time stated that a lack of information had prevented the Committee from providing the memorial with a roll of honour.
In recent years it was decided therefore to attempt to compile a list of the local servicemen who had died as a result of the Second World War.
A list for much of the Borough, excluding the town, could be compiled using the names already added to memorials in the villages. However, the search for information relating to the town itself had to be undertaken by looking at every wartime (and beyond) edition of the local weekly newspaper, the Dartford Chronicle. This had a weekly feature listing local men who had been killed and giving potted biographies for each man. This was the best source available for this task although the drawback is that the newspaper relied on families sending in the information themselves. Some parents or wives may have hoped that someone missing would eventually be found and so did not contact the newspaper while others who had been officially informed of the death of a loved one may have wanted to grieve quietly. Some families may also have moved out of the area. The search did not end in 1945 since some men were still succumbing to their wartime wounds in the following years. Some names were also located in the ‘In Memoriam’ section where families were commemorating lost relatives on the anniversaries of their deaths, even though there had been no announcement of the death at the time.
The other source of information was the website of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission which provided further official information on the men located in the newspaper but could not provide names in the first place since its search facility does not allow the user to search in any meaningful way by home town. Therefore it could not help to find previously unknown residents, only to double-check ones about whom we already knew.
Mike Still - Curator Dartford Museum