This is the story of the small east coast town of Hornsea during and after the Great War. The war touched every aspect of life on the home Front and those who were left behind suffered terribly as the war dragged on. This study meticulously explores the problems, hardships and grief faced by the people of Hornsea and is a microcosm of the experience of the nation generally.
This is the only wide-ranging history of Hornsea and the Great War, it does not focus solely on the war dead but is a history of the civilian population as well. The grief felt by the Great War generation of Hornsea has now mellowed to a distant memory of sacrifice and loss, but at the time of the war the loss of sons, brothers and fathers was crushing in its enormity as ordinary folk tried to come to terms with the fact that loved ones once present were present no more. They looked out onto a world greatly changed from the one they knew. Their viewpoint is impossible for most of us now to share as they came together to cope with the emptiness, the nothingness of loss in war. The smaller Hornsea memorials kept in churches freeze in time a record of human suffering and the harsh reality of life and death in wartime. We now see these memorials with a hurried glance as relics of a bygone age, but after the war they would have been highly visible and arresting to all with their clarion call to the faithful to remember.
The Hornsea Great War generation has now passed into history and with them went the grief and pain felt by all families, their memorials now stand as a silent witness to momentous events that are little known to the majority of the public today. Each day since the end of the Great War the cycle of renewal and healing has continued, the record left by the people of Hornsea stands as testament to that generosity of the human spirit that can, and must, transcend the obscenity of war.
