The War Memorials Trust

Our local community centre (Shrewsbury House) hosts a weekly ‘get together’ on most Monday mornings. It’s aimed at retired people, and the programme includes a mixture of sessions, including ones about local history and charitable organisations.

Yesterday’s ‘get together’ featured a talk by the director of the War Memorials Trust, Frances Moreton. The trust was set up in 1997 thanks to the work done by ex-Royal Marine, Ian Davidson. The purpose of the trust was '… to educate the public and to foster patriotism and good citizenship by remembering those who have fallen in war by preserving and maintaining war memorials'.

The trust’s objectives are:

• To improve the condition of war memorials, in their historic design and setting, to support their long-term preservation in-line with best conservation practice, sustainability and the challenges of climate change.
• To increase the understanding of best conservation practice including how to maintain, protect, repair and conserve war memorials appropriately as well as raise awareness of the support available from War Memorials Trust.
• To enhance public engagement with, and the recognition of local responsibility for, war memorials.
• To sustain access to grant funding to support repair and conservation works in-line with best conservation practice.
• To increase the money raised by the charity to deliver its vision to protect and conserve war memorials.

It gives match-funded grants to local communities who want to clean, conserve, and/or repair war memorials. It also has an online database of war memorials across the England, Scotland Wales, and Northern Ireland that shows their location on a map as well as photographs (where they exist) and a description of the memorial.