Roll of Honour
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.
The Rolls of Honour are navigated through 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’s minutes record shows that attempts were made to source a list of residents who had died.
They state that very few people had come forward with information, although we know from history 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 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, leading to a decision to attempt to compile a list of the local servicemen who had died as a result of the Second World War.
How the Roll of Honour search was conducted
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 named the Dartford Chronicle, and by use of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
This had a weekly feature listing local men who had been killed, giving potted biographies for each man and 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, 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 privately.
The search did not end in 1945 since some men were still succumbing to their wartime wounds in the following years and some names were also located in the ‘In Memoriam’ section where families were commemorating lost relatives on the anniversaries of their deaths.
Mike Still - Curator Dartford Museum.