This article examines the museum displays and modern memorials that draw on the role of football and footballers in the history of the Great War in Britain. However, with the passing of the last of the veterans, the conflict is now removed from ‘living memory’ and alternative spaces of remembrance have been formed for contemporary society. A century after the outbreak of the war, these spaces of memory remain central in the recollection of the war dead. These sites of remembrance became significant for the bereaved as places of pilgrimage whilst national commemorative activities imbued these locales with meaning for wider society. National sites of memory at the Cenotaph in Whitehall and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey were also constructed as a response to the scale of death.

In the aftermath of the Great War, vast cemeteries and imposing monuments were built across the former battlefields this commemorative landscape was replicated across Britain, as cities, towns and villages saw the erection of local memorials. However, such assessments obscure the emotive bond with the war’s remembrance that has been formed from the cessation of hostilities to the present day. This mode of public connection with the conflict has been criticised by some scholars for its reliance on representations in the media. This chapter uses non-representational theory to examine the way in which the popular memory of the Great War (1914-1918) in contemporary Britain is an emotional engagement formed through a process of ‘witnessing’ the past.

Remembrance film danielle steel