Human societies are, as the philosopher Mary Midgley points out, part of ‘mixed’ or ‘multi-species’ communities. Midgley wrote in her 1983 book, Animals and Why They Matter, that ‘it is one of the special powers and graces of our species not to ignore others, but to draw in, domesticate, and live with a great variety of other creatures. No other animal does so on anything like so large a scale.’Footnote 1 Human lives are intertwined with the lives of many other animal species, in a great variety of ways, and in relationships that range from the exploitative to the affective.Footnote 2 Some humans, notably those who work with animals, might be keenly aware of their community with non-humans. Other people, perhaps those who lead the most urban lives, might forget or not take notice of the mixed community, and it is only in moments of crisis, such as disease or war, that the relationships and dependencies between humans and non-humans can become more apparent.
As institutions, as well as theologically, Christian churches are premised on a clear boundary between the human and the non-human.Footnote 3 Churches are made by humans to minister to human needs. Non-human animals have, for the most part, been excluded from Christian buildings, services, prayers and rituals, and animals have not been regarded as part of the laity. Although this is not problematic in itself (other institutions, such as schools and hospitals, are regarded as human-only spaces), the spiritual mission of churches has at times encouraged cultures of human supremacy and separatism.
Nevertheless, on occasion, people have called on their churches to acknowledge aspects of the mixed community, with varying degrees of success. In nineteenth-century Britain, animal welfarists approached the churches and the clergy to speak about human-animal relationships as anti-cruelty campaigns developed. The Christian churches found these requests easy to accommodate because the anti-cruelty sermons did not challenge human superiority to animals, and focused on the moral character of human worshippers. Other demands were more troublesome. Churches have historically viewed companion animals with suspicion, and clergy were not keen to accede to a growing demand (which tracked the growth of a culture of pet keeping) for services that included pets.Footnote 4 Not until the 1950s did ‘pet services’, featuring blessings of living animals, become common in the Church of England.Footnote 5 Churches also struggled to respond to demands that arose when outbreaks of ‘cattle plague’ – namely rinderpest in the nineteenth century and foot-and-mouth in the twentieth – threatened rural livelihoods. Cattle disease was another awkward subject for Anglican and other churches, because it was animals – creatures, according to orthodox religious teaching, which lacked souls – that suffered and died. To avoid these difficulties, the Church of England and other churches issued prayers in times of cattle disease that said little about the sick and dying animals, and which instead focused on the humans who suffered because of lost ‘livestock’ and scarce and expensive food.Footnote 6
This article considers a fourth instance in modern British history when people pressed the churches to acknowledge the mixed community: the First World War. This war, in which hundreds of thousands of military animals died, made special demands on the Christian churches to mark animal suffering and, more challengingly, animal service and self-sacrifice. Animal welfare organizations kept military animals in the mind of the British public, and memories of the treatment of horses in previous conflicts – notably the South African War (1899–1902) – did much to prime civilians to take notice of the suffering of animals in the British armies.Footnote 7 From early in the conflict, civilians called on the churches to acknowledge and mark the service and death of animals, horses especially. Much was expected, in particular, of the two national churches – the Church of England and the Church of Scotland – because, as national institutions, these churches were expected to represent what around this time was coming to be called a ‘nation of animal lovers’.Footnote 8 The Church of England, for example, was frequently asked to include prayers for animals in Sunday worship, and on the ‘national days of prayer and intercession’ that congregations across the United Kingdom observed during the war.Footnote 9
This article argues that, and discusses why, the Christian churches struggled to accommodate these appeals, and to address animal service and suffering in wartime. This difficulty stemmed, in part, from the distinctive mixed communities that emerged in the context of war. Soldiers developed partnerships – sometimes friendships – with the horses and other animals alongside which they lived, worked and served, and on occasion soldiers asked chaplains to mark the passing of these animals with rough funerals.Footnote 10 It was for chaplains to judge whether it was appropriate to offer a prayer over the graves of horses and mules killed in the fighting. The churches in Britain faced a more difficult task when large numbers of civilians appealed to the clergy to refer to military animals in prayers and church services. A key problem was that military animals tended to be represented differently to pets and diseased livestock. In much wartime animal welfare publicity, British military animals – horses especially – were depicted in similar terms to human soldiers. Military animals also seemed to embody Christian themes. Service animals appeared as innocents, but also as patriots, that unhesitatingly served the nation and sacrificed their lives.Footnote 11 Jane Flynn has studied the romantic portrayals of military horses that circulated during the war and afterwards in poems, stories and works of art. In the interwar period, concern for military animals broadened to include a wider range of species that had served, and depictions of innocent and selfless animals appeared in a variety of publications, notably in books on ‘animal war heroes’.Footnote 12 The war, then, raised large questions for the churches about how they should recognize and mark the service and death of military animals. After 1918, the churches faced the problem of how to remember and commemorate the animal war dead.
This article tells the story of the Christian churches’ difficult relationship with military animals and the wartime mixed community through two case studies. Part one considers the war years and the laypeople who pressed the clergy and the leaders of the national churches to keep the wellbeing and service of animals in mind in church services. This part of the article considers a prayer for suffering horses that was widely used during the war, both by laypeople and by some clergy who were sympathetic to animals. Although the prayer has received some scholarly attention,Footnote 13 this article provides a fuller discussion of the civilian contexts in which it was used, and the extent to which authorities in the two national churches encouraged and then restricted its use.Footnote 14
Part two turns to consider animals and community acts of commemoration after the war. In the 1920s and 1930s, animal charities, private citizens and some churches founded animal hospitals, installed drinking troughs, and erected monuments to commemorate a range of military animals, and not just horses. Chelsea Medlock, a scholar who has written on representations of animals as military ‘veterans’, has studied the changing character of animal war memorials, while Hilda Kean has shown how the memorialization of military animals was shaped by the stories that nations told about the meaning and significance of war.Footnote 15 What has not been noticed is that the drinking troughs and other memorials that referred to military animals often had a religious character, and might include biblical references and Christian symbols. At the same time, the memorialization of military animals, like the commemoration of human soldiers, was contested,Footnote 16 and difficulties in representing military animals in religious spaces meant that memorials sometimes had only faint religious associations. Animals might also be ignored or only partially represented when clergy brought communities together to remember those who had served and died. The story of the national churches’ awkward relationship with animal service and death in wartime is, then, an example of how religious leaders struggled to meet the needs of a traumatized and grieving people in war and peace.Footnote 17 It also illustrates how the Christian churches – particularly those with established or national status – have struggled to deal with what have been called ‘animal-friendly’ traditions in Christianity.Footnote 18
Prayers for Military Animals
In August 1914, some churchgoers wrote to newspapers regretting that there had been no mention of animals in the special services that had been observed in crowded churches on 9 August, the first Sunday of the war.Footnote 19 On 10 August, Montague Fowler, a former army veterinary surgeon and the secretary of the largest British animal protection organization, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), urged Archbishop Randall Davidson of Canterbury to encourage the bishops and clergy of the Church of England to include ‘the horses and other animals’ in the ‘special intercessions’ that congregations offered to alleviate the sufferings of those caught up in the war. Fowler said ‘many animal lovers’ and ‘thousands of churchmen’ wanted Davidson to suggest a suitable prayer for animals for use in wartime.Footnote 20 On 3 August 1914, and again later the same month, Davidson issued forms of prayer that included intercessions for a range of groups of combatants and sufferers, as well as thanksgivings for victories, prayers for the forgiveness of enemies, and memorials for the fallen.Footnote 21 The forms of prayer issued in August 1914 did not mention animals, and although Davidson had told the RSPCA at the end of August that he would consider adding a prayer for animals, he wrote again in October to tell Fowler that he could not provide ‘an exhaustive manual of prayer for all that arises in connexion with the War’.Footnote 22 Davidson did, nevertheless, recognize the need for such prayers, and he told Fowler that he was happy for bishops and clergy to issue their own animal prayers.
As Davidson hesitated, an animal welfare organization, the Our Animal Brothers’ Guild, circulated a prayer for the ‘humble beasts’ that suffered in the war. This prayer, which was published in numerous newspapers from mid-October 1914, had originally appeared in a litany published by the Guild sometime in September or October, and was said to have been ‘adapted’ from the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church. The prayer was not the usual petition for kinder treatment and it also suggested that animals had a relationship with God. The prayer implied, too, that non-humans might have souls, wills and agency, and might give their lives for their countries:
And for those also, O Lord, the humble beasts who with us bear the burden and heat of the day, and offer their guileless lives for the well-being of their countries, we supplicate Thy great tenderness of heart, for Thou has promised to save both man and beast, and great is Thy loving kindness, O Master, Saviour of the world. Lord have mercy.Footnote 23
This ‘humble beasts’ prayer was, in fact, not Russian at all, but was the work of a Bristol woman, E. M. Hewlett, who said it was ‘in accordance with the best traditions of the Church, East & West, as well as a teaching of a large number of saints’.Footnote 24 Although Hewlett had in mind ‘horses and dogs’ when she used the phrase ‘humble beasts’, the prayer became associated with suffering horses. Horses attracted special concern because they were large, charismatic, and seemed to embody key military virtues, such as obedience, courage and duty.Footnote 25 Ken Inglis has noted how a ‘language of volunteering, offering and sacrificing’ had begun to take root in Britain in 1914 and 1915, before the state conscripted men into the army from 1916, and this language, as Hewlett’s prayer indicates, could be applied to animals, even those who had been ‘conscripted’ into the war effort.Footnote 26
The prayer was readily available, was reprinted in newspapers and elsewhere and, as early as October 1914, it was being reported that it was widely used by clergy in the Church of England and, presumably, other denominations.Footnote 27 The litany could be purchased on a printed sheet for 1d., 6d. for a dozen, or 2s. 6d. for one hundred.Footnote 28 The Guild claimed in January 1915 that they had sold over 100,000 copies of the litany, and had also printed the prayer separately for ‘private use’ on cards.Footnote 29 In addition, the prayer was included in two collections of wartime prayers published in 1914, both compiled by laypeople.Footnote 30 Laypeople and clergy wrote to newspapers to urge worshippers to use the prayer, and such letters continued to appear in the press through to 1916.Footnote 31 One who welcomed a prayer for ‘our noble, innocent, four-footed friends’ said that ‘surely the least we can do in reparation for their undeserved sufferings is to include them in our prayers and to implore the common Creator of us all to alleviate their sufferings as well as those of men’. Dyce Duckworth, a prominent physician, thought the prayer reflected the ‘British conception’ that animals had souls and afterlives.Footnote 32 A Middlesex woman believed the prayer was justified on both spiritual and practical grounds. ‘Our Redeemer has promised to save them [the animals] as well as mankind’, she told a local newspaper; ‘where would the cavalry and transport be without them?’Footnote 33
The churches took notice of the public concern for suffering horses and, for a short time, church leaders made some effort to represent animals in religious services. The Committee on Aids to Devotion of the Church of Scotland included the ‘humble beasts’ prayer among the psalms, lessons, sentences and prayers that it published in a form of service for the ‘day of prayer and intercession’ that the Christian churches observed across Britain on Sunday 3 January 1915.Footnote 34 By the end of the year, eleven Anglican bishops had issued notices encouraging their clergy to use the prayer.Footnote 35 Davidson, as already noted, did not add an animal prayer in an official wartime form of service, but he included ‘the animals that suffer in the war’ in lists of ‘suggested subjects for intercession’ that were published in pamphlets in 1914 and 1915.Footnote 36
The rapid spread of the prayer early in the war – numerous newspapers reprinted it, and most asserted that it was Russian in origin – is striking, and it could be that the extensive propagation of the prayer had much to do with the distinctive atmosphere engendered by the war. Owen Davies has noted how the early months of the war were understood – even at the time – as encouraging a peculiar ‘psychology of communication’ in which rumour and false news spread rapidly. This was also a moment when new prayers spread quickly, through various means, for instance by ‘chain letters’. Clergy spread fictions such as the ‘Angel of Mons’,Footnote 37 and they also encouraged take-up of the ‘humble beasts’ prayer and the belief that it was genuine and Russian. Church of England clergy used the prayer in their local services on the national days of prayer in January 1915 and January 1916.Footnote 38 At St Margaret’s, Westminster, the prayer was used daily.Footnote 39 The prayer was portable and useable in a range of contexts and it may well have been said in quiet moments in regular church services, and perhaps even in family worship and in domestic settings, although finding evidence for this is difficult.
Prayers for animals were popular and met public needs, but they raised difficult theological questions and troubled some Anglicans. Some clergy also had difficulty with how the ‘humble beasts’ prayer represented animals and human-animal relationships. One clergyman, in a letter to the high church Guardian, implied that the prayer reflected the viewpoint of urban animal welfarists when he said the term ‘humble beasts’ was inappropriate in ‘country districts’ as farmers associated the word ‘beast’ with cattle, not horses. This writer had substituted the word ‘preserve’ for ‘save’ when he offered the prayer in his church. He also reworded the prayer so that it referred to animals ‘whose guileless lives are offered for the wellbeing of their countries’, and placed less emphasis on animal will and agency. Other commentators pointed out the inconsistency of restricting prayers to just horses. One who made this point suggested that use of the prayer would lead to ‘awkward consequences’: ‘for what right have we to kill animals for eating for whose safety we pray?’ Moreover, why should people not ‘pray also for noxious creatures and reptiles’.Footnote 40
Other, more senior, Anglicans sought to prevent use of the prayer in church services. The most prominent critic, a Russophile named William J. Birkbeck, pointed out to Davidson and other Anglicans that no such prayer existed in the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church, and that it was the work of an amateur. For Birkbeck, the circulation of such bogus prayers would alarm Russian churchmen, and put back the progress he and others had made over decades to promote closer relations and better understanding between the Anglican and Russian churches.Footnote 41 Birkbeck also told Davidson that the prayer’s description of animals as ‘offering their guileless lives for the wellbeing of their countries’ was ‘not at all in accord with Eastern theology on the subject of free will, which they regard as peculiar to man and not shared by animals’.Footnote 42 Birkbeck repeated these warnings in Anglican newspapers in late 1914.Footnote 43 Importantly, Birkbeck also objected to the prayer because it misrepresented military animals and what he called ‘the psychology of animals’. Rather, he regarded the military animal as comparable to the animal that laboured on farms, telling the Guardian that farmers in his part of Norfolk – even those who had lost horses to the army – would consider it ‘silly’ to offer prayers that represented animals as giving their lives for their countries.Footnote 44
Following Birkbeck’s revelations, several bishops ‘vetoed’ the use of the ‘humble beasts’ prayer in their dioceses.Footnote 45 In early 1915, the Convocation of York – one of the Church of England’s deliberative bodies – took a similarly negative view when it briefly considered prayers for animals as part of a wider discussion about revision of the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer. Before the war, a committee of the Convocation of York had suggested that special suffrages for missionaries and teachers be added to the litany (which was usually sung or said after morning prayer), and when the war began, the committee produced a report that suggested the addition of further suffrages, including for the armed forces and ‘animals serving man’.Footnote 46 Convocation backed away when, in a debate in the lower, clerical, house in February 1915, a member pointed out that the proposal to add this suffrage had come about because of the ‘humble beasts’ prayer and the ‘Russian’ litany which, by this time, Birkbeck had discredited. This member said that ‘whilst it was quite desirable to have a petition that men might treat animals kindly’, he did not agree ‘that they should have a prayer in the sense in which it was used in that particular Litany’. The lower house agreed that the words ‘and animals serving man’ be left out of the report.Footnote 47 Nor did the prayer appear in the forms and orders of divine service used in either the Church of England or the Church of Scotland later in the war.
The wartime episode of the animal prayer reveals something important about human-animal relationships. The initial enthusiasm of church people to offer the prayer suggests that adult humans instinctively take an interest in animals. Mary Midgley’s point is that this instinct (she calls it an ‘innate taste’) to seek out and take an interest in animals is encouraged in childhood, but that it is something that adults are later told they should grow out of as they are taught to give priority to humans and human relationships.Footnote 48 The way clergy responded to Birkbeck and to other critics and quickly abandoned the ‘humble beasts’ prayer is an example of how people can be jolted out of supposedly immature ways of thinking about animals. Nonetheless, some clergy ignored the critics and continued to regard the prayer as both harmless and necessary. Indeed, wartime conditions made it difficult to stop the circulation of a prayer that met the needs of many people. In June 1917, in Shilbottle, Northumberland, the community used the prayer when they unveiled a war shrine to the soldiers from the village. The clergyman who officiated at the ceremony explained to a local newspaper why it was appropriate to offer a prayer to ‘nameless beasts of the field’ alongside those for ‘the noble lads’ listed on the shrine. He reflected on the wider significance of the shared suffering of humans and animals: ‘I think that some benefit must come to them also when the kingdom for which our lads, wittingly or unwittingly, are striving, is established in peace’, he concluded.Footnote 49 The prayer continued to have relevance after the war, and it frequently featured when animal welfarists and others sought to mark the service of military animals in memorials.
Memorials for Military Animals
By 1914, a tradition of memorializing dead animals was well developed in Britain. Private pet cemeteries and statues in public places commemorated companion and special animals. Occasionally a memorial to an individual animal featured religious texts, symbols or references, as was the case in the epitaph on the gravestone that marked the resting place of Copenhagen, the horse that had carried the duke of Wellington through the battle of Waterloo. Composed by Rowland Egerton-Warburton, an Anglo-Catholic poet (and fox-hunter), this referred to Copenhagen as ‘God’s humbler instrument’. Copenhagen’s grave was unusual, however, and most animal memorials had no religious associations.Footnote 50 It was less common for populations of nameless service animals to be remembered, although during nineteenth-century outbreaks of cattle disease farmers had erected gravestone-like memorials for dead cows, and some troughs put up after the South African War commemorated horses killed in the hostilities.Footnote 51 Although there was opposition to the idea of erecting monuments to memorialize the animals of the First World War, representatives of several groups – including clergy, ex-servicemen, humanitarians, architects, and members of Parliament – wished to acknowledge and remember the animals killed in the war, and former soldiers wrote to newspapers in support of proposals for animal memorials that had a practical function.Footnote 52 While horses continued to attract most attention, stories printed after the war in newspapers and in popular histories made the public aware of the contribution that a range of animals – from goldfish to camels – had made to the war effort. In 1922, the War Office also published statistics of the numbers of horses, mules, donkeys, camels and dogs that had served British forces in various theatres of war.Footnote 53 Such accounts perhaps helped to encourage demands for a range of animals to be remembered.
Memorials erected to military animals in the interwar period were of three types. The most numerous were those that ex-servicemen erected to commemorate individual animals. Peter Baker, in his 1933 book Animal War Heroes, compared such memorials to those that commemorated the human dead of villages and towns. According to Baker, the proliferation of such memorials reflected an English preference for ‘local and intimate’ memorials.Footnote 54 However, Baker overlooked two further types of memorial that commemorated populations of animals. The first were those that served a practical function, and which were designed to improve the lot of living animals, either by easing suffering, or by educating humans about the need to treat non-humans with kindness. The drinking troughs that a charitable organization, the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association, erected after the South African War and the First World War, were of this type. The final type was the human memorial that also represented non-human animals. The Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle, unveiled in July 1927, is the largest and best example. This memorial was intended to represent all parts of the Scottish nation that had contributed to the war effort and, along with men and women, it commemorated a range of military animals in carvings, roundels and a bronze relief.Footnote 55
These three types of animal memorial have all received scholarly attention. Jan Toms provides an inventory of existing examples.Footnote 56 In wide-ranging surveys, Kean and Medlock have shown how memorials erected later in the twentieth century tended not to be of the useful kind, but were rather set apart in commemorative spaces, providing places for humans to remember and reflect on the service, suffering and sacrifice of animals in human conflict.Footnote 57 In contrast to these works, this article considers the extent to which the churches were involved in marking and commemorating the service of military animals. It also examines what was possible in terms of representing animals in religious terms and in religious spaces. While no Anglican bishop and few clergy in either the Church of England or the Church of Scotland took leading roles in erecting memorials to animals in the interwar period, some did lead unveiling ceremonies and other remembrance rituals which referred to animals. The Shilbottle case mentioned above is an early example, and the marking of Armistice Day in the interwar period provides others. For the most part, however, such ceremonies were rare and efforts to mark the service of animals generally took place during quiet moments in local community gatherings. Erecting national memorials to animals proved difficult, and when laypeople tried to include animals in national memorials to humans, care was taken that the references to animals avoided religious associations. The examples discussed in the following sections show, then, that the business of erecting animal memorials, particularly at the national level, was as fractious and contested as human memorialization.Footnote 58 These examples show, too, how animals remained at the margins of Christian commemoration of the war dead, and of public remembrance generally.
Local Commemoration: War Memorials and Water Troughs
Commemoration of the war dead had a strongly local focus, and the same applied to animals, even though populations of military animals were not usually associated with places and regions, at least in the British context.Footnote 59 The war memorial at Lake, Isle of Wight, is an example of how memorials and the ceremonies that occurred at them could communicate broader ideas about community and the interdependencies between humans and non-humans. The memorial was designed in 1920 by a local woman, Clara Porter, and consisted of two monuments. The first, a stone cross ‘to the glory of God who giveth us the victory’, commemorated the local men who served and died, and was inscribed with lines from John S. Arkwright’s hymn, ‘O Valiant Hearts’. The second, situated just behind the cross, was a water trough, inscribed with the words, ‘to the horses and dogs who also bore the burden and heat of the day’. This inscription, which referred to Matthew 20: 12 (‘These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day’; AV), recalled the ‘humble beasts’ prayer. Another inscription on the trough – ‘be ye merciful’, from Luke 6: 36 (‘Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful’; AV) – indicates that the trough, like others of its type, was intended primarily not as a place for reflection and remembrance, but to educate humans, and to remind people of their duties to treat ‘beasts’ – and thirsty transport animals in particular – with kindness.
The unveiling ceremony represented animals in a fuller and richer sense, and this occasion suggests that practical memorials could provide sites for remembrance of the sort that Medlock associates with a later period. The unveiling, which took place on Sunday 6 February 1921, was attended by a ‘large gathering’ of clergy, servicemen and local people, and featured prayers, lessons and hymns. The bishop of Southampton dedicated first the cross and then the trough, after which wreaths were laid on the cross. The newspaper report noted that the bishop also offered a special dedicatory prayer for the trough. What the bishop said is not known, but the report said it included ‘a reminder of the promise to save both man and beast’, so presumably he used part or all of the ‘humble beasts’ prayer.Footnote 60 The gathering at Lake was an example of the kind of ‘community of suffering and solace’ that Jay Winter has discussed, and the ceremony and the trough indicate how animals might be included in this bond of solidarity and kinship.Footnote 61 The trough – like others of its kind – also provided a fountain for human use and so did something to encourage a sense of connection and equality between the mixed community’s human and non-human members. According to Kean, such objects communicated the idea that people, horses and dogs inhabited the same environments and communities, and by satisfying a common need – water – that was shared by all, such troughs did something to challenge the assumption that there was a ‘hierarchical division’ separating people from animals.Footnote 62 The Lake monument, then, suggests that the mixed community could be acknowledged and represented in Christian mourning and commemoration.
Other communities erected memorials that marked the service of animals, but the ceremonies that took place at these sites did not always reference non-humans. In November 1920, a memorial was erected in Newton, Cambridgeshire, that combined a column with cross that listed the men of the village that had served and died above an animal drinking trough inscribed with the words ‘to the memory of the horses who helped our armies to victory. They also served.’ The local vicar made no mention of the trough or of the horses when he dedicated the memorial.Footnote 63 Elsewhere, however, living animals attended local and regimental remembrance rituals. The dedication ceremony for the Royal Artillery war memorial in London in 1925, which was led by the chaplain-general, featured two horses that had, apparently, seen action in August 1914.Footnote 64 Similarly, at Shere in Surrey in 1932, the ‘local war horse’ joined a procession of ex-servicemen to the village war memorial. A woman who attended wrote to The Times, recounting that the horse ‘stood very patiently’ through the religious service at the memorial. The sight of the animal, she said, ‘brought many memories, and happiness that it is spared to live its last years in a peaceful Surrey pasture’.Footnote 65 These images of veteran horses at remembrance rituals nicely demonstrate how local people and animal advocates believed that commemorative acts should acknowledge and encompass the mixed community. They also reprised a set of assumptions about patriotic, obedient and self-sacrificing military animals that had been expressed in the ‘humble beasts’ prayer.
National Commemoration, the RSPCA, and the Scottish National War Memorial
In December 1919, as plans for a permanent cenotaph in Whitehall were underway, Colonel Burn, the Conservative MP for Torquay, suggested that the government erect a memorial to military horses.Footnote 66 The suggestion was ignored, but, in 1921, the RSPCA started raising money for a national monument that would pay tribute to a range of military animals, not just horses. Announcing the fund, the RSPCA said that it wanted a memorial ‘to commemorate in a lasting manner the sacrifice of the animals in the war and to benefit the living animals in some practical way’.Footnote 67 Within a year, £2,000 had been raised and the RSPCA, working alongside the Cattle Trough Association, prepared plans for a ‘national memorial’ that combined a ‘group of statuary by a well-known artist’ with a drinking trough for horses and dogs. Initially, the Society wanted the memorial to stand outside Westminster Abbey, in the triangular space next to the Sanctuary. To site the memorial at this place, close to the abbey that hosted coronations and national services of prayer and worship, was a striking proposal, as the intention was to incorporate the service and sacrifice of non-human animals into the centre of the nation’s religious life. However, when the RSPCA approached Westminster City Council in late 1921 for permission for the memorial, the council replied that while they did not object to the idea of a memorial, they ‘could not see their way to approve the erection of the proposed memorial on the site indicated’.Footnote 68
The RSPCA abandoned plans for a memorial close to a prominent sacred site, but it made three further attempts to erect an animal war memorial in a busy London thoroughfare. The first was a bronze statue of a wounded horse and a dog that the Society planned to erect at Hyde Park Corner, near two existing drinking troughs. This proposal was blocked by the Royal Fine Art Commission, a newly-formed body, made up of establishment figures in architecture, planning and the arts, that advised local authorities on the appearance of public statuary and amenities. Although the statue had been designed by Walter Gilbert – whose work included the reredos in Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral – the Commission considered the proposal – which included a scale model maquette of the horse and dog bronze – as ‘not of a style or character which would justify them in recommending its acceptance’.Footnote 69
For its second attempt, the RSPCA employed a member of the Commission, the architect Reginald Blomfield, to submit new designs for the Hyde Park Corner memorial, which were to take the form of a multi-species drinking facility. This time the proposed monument was a triumphal arch situated between the two existing troughs. Blomfield had designed the Cross of Sacrifice for the Imperial War Graves Commission, and while his design for an animal memorial was not an overt Christian symbol like the Cross of Sacrifice, it featured two inscriptions that had Christian associations.Footnote 70 The first, ‘They died for us’, could be interpreted as comparing the deaths of military animals to Christ’s sacrificial death. The second, a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘For the dear God who loveth us | He made and loveth all’, had often featured in animal welfare literature. The line suggested a sense of commonality between human and non-human, and reminded people to treat animals with kindness. The Royal Commission accepted Blomfield’s design, but the RSPCA was prevented from building the memorial because the local authorities planned new traffic arrangements at Hyde Park Corner, and the future of the troughs was uncertain.Footnote 71 The RSPCA made a final effort in 1926 when they approached Chelsea Council to erect the memorial at Sloane Square, another busy thoroughfare, and a site that had a Cross of Sacrifice war memorial. Chelsea Council blocked this plan. Again, considerations of transport and traffic provided the justification: the council planned to alter the layout of the square following the introduction of a new roundabout traffic system.Footnote 72 Finally, the RSPCA opened an animal clinic – the War Memorial Dispensary – in an out-of-the-way street in Kilburn, north London, in 1932. A plate on the front said the building was ‘dedicated as a memorial to the countless thousands of God’s humble creatures who suffered and perished in the Great War’.Footnote 73
Although the RSPCA struggled to find a place to commemorate animals, particularly at a point in time when service animals were slowly disappearing from streets, and as motorized transport was beginning to predominate, this episode reveals that the public supported, and local authorities did not in principle oppose, the idea of a national memorial to animals, and one that featured Christian symbols and texts.
It proved easier to find a place for animals in pre-existing national memorials, such as Scotland’s National War Memorial. This memorial takes the form of a hall of honour, but as Jenny Macleod notes, the elite men who conceived the idea for a national memorial intended it to be a sacred site and a place for prayer. Another aim was to represent the many Scottish communities around the world that had contributed to the war effort. A bronze frieze in the shrine depicts a representative of every rank and type of unit that served in the war, and a window shows women nurses, ambulance drivers and agricultural workers.Footnote 74 The bronze frieze also includes horses, mules, dogs and a carrier pigeon. In each of the two bays are four carved roundels, sculpted by the artist Phyllis Bone, each of which depicts a representative of the animals that served in various theatres of war, alongside the inscription – which recalled the ‘humble beasts’ prayer – ‘remember also the humble beasts that served’. These roundels are located quite high up the wall in each wing and the visitor who does not look upwards might fail to notice them. Lower down in the west wing, a carving on a pillar shows the small birds and mice (‘the tunnellers’ friends’) that died to alert miners of dangerous gases.
It is revealing that the decision to include the carvings and inscription to animals was taken late and quite close to the official unveiling in July 1927. Sir Robert Lorimer, the memorial architect, said in January 1928 that the whole idea had occurred to him ‘one night in bed, only a few months before the opening’.Footnote 75 In April 1927, a former Church of Scotland military chaplain, James Soutter, minister at Whitekirk Church, Aberdeen, had suggested to Lorimer that the memorial might include ‘the beautiful prayer of the Eastern Church’ which Soutter said he often used ‘to quote in France’.Footnote 76 Lorimer told the duke of Atholl, one of the driving forces behind the memorial, that the inclusion of the prayer, alongside carvings to representative animals, was a ‘delightful idea’. Lorimer suggested, too, that an inscription with lines from the prayer should be displayed prominently in the west bay, on a pedestal, opposite the panel that commemorated the ‘padres’ who had served, and which depicted a chaplain administering the sacrament to kneeling soldiers.
Atholl was prepared for military animals to be remembered in carvings in an out-of-the-way corner of the memorial, but he was not keen on Lorimer’s plan to include the prayer, and it was because of Atholl’s objections that the references to animals that appeared on the memorial were short and secular. In his reply to Lorimer, Atholl repeated familiar Christian ideas about the distance separating ‘beast’ and ‘man’:
The animals have not done badly by having their own features sculptured and shewn in a memorial commemorating the souls and spirit of men. We have to remember that there is a difference made in the Bible between the man of understanding and the ‘beasts that perish’. I think talking about the humble beasts who gave their guileless lives for the wellbeing of their country is going a little far, for (1), they did not give their lives voluntarily, and (2), their guilelessness was not deliberate.
Atholl did not want animals filling up ‘space suitable for men’s memorials’ and he was opposed to ‘putting a definite memorial text about giving their lives etc. down amongst the memorials’. The carvings were to be placed high up and out-of-the-way, and if there was to be an inscription next to the animal carvings, then he insisted the wording should not ‘be of a religious character’ and should be kept ‘in scale’, for, he wrote, the death and service of animals was ‘not on the same plane’ as the service of humans.Footnote 77 Additionally, in a revealing and comic comment, one that perhaps communicated the sense that Christianity excluded non-humans, Atholl insisted that the inscription be placed high up in the west bay, far from the memorial to chaplains, because ‘we should have to be careful not to confuse parsons with the humble beasts’.Footnote 78 Lorimer gave up his earlier enthusiasm for a religious inscription, situated in a prominent place,Footnote 79 and the words chosen for the shortened, higher up, and less noticeable inscription – ‘remember also the humble beasts that served and died’ – had no religious associations and only recalled the so-called Russian prayer in the way it referred to animals as ‘humble beasts’.
Non-humans, then, would only occasionally feature in local and national acts of remembrance, and in Christian memorialization. Basil Bourchier, vicar of St Jude’s, Hampstead Garden Suburb, unveiled a plaque to military horses in his church in 1927, but this seems to have been the only memorial to animals that was erected in a consecrated place in the interwar period.Footnote 80 Those who wished to remember animals did so in other, more understated ways, notably in quiet moments at Armistice Day observances. At Edgware, Middlesex, observances of Armistice Day in 1929 included a multi-denominational religious service that featured prayers and hymns at the town’s war memorial cross. After the service, local representatives of the Peoples’ Dispensary for Sick Animals laid a wreath for animals that had fallen in the war.Footnote 81 At Loughborough in 1938, clergy joined the civic officials beneath the town’s war memorial tower, and after the two minutes silence a wreath, ‘in memory of birds and animals that served’, was laid by a local woman on behalf of the RSPCA.Footnote 82
Conclusion
All humans inhabit ‘mixed communities’. But it is not obvious to some people – perhaps those who live in the most urbanized and post-industrial contexts – that they are members of ‘multi-species collectives’. Only occasionally have Christian churches and Christian clergy done much to remind churchgoers and worshippers that they inhabit the same communities as non-humans; more commonly, the Christian churches have encouraged humans to think of themselves as separate and removed from other species. But at certain times, our community with non-human animals becomes very difficult to ignore, even for Christian leaders. Crisis moments, such as epidemics and wars, have a tendency to make salient the relationships and interdependencies between humans and non-humans. During the First World War, humans and a range of non-human species worked together for a common object and shared similar experiences and deprivations.Footnote 83 This article has shown that in Britain during the war, as well as after it, a vocal public of animal welfarists, clergy and laypeople pressed the churches to give fuller recognition to this mixed community, notably through worship and remembrance rituals. What gave these appeals force was the idea – expressed in prayers and in animal welfare publicity – that animals too had served the nation and sacrificed their lives for their countries.
This article has argued, however, that the churches of England and Scotland struggled to accommodate the distinctive character of the wartime mixed community. Part of the problem was that animal service and sacrifice were difficult subjects for Christians. It was straightforward for religious people to express feelings of sadness and gratitude for the deaths of military animals. However, the English bishops’ veto of the ‘humble beasts’ prayer in 1915 and the Scottish National War Memorial episode in 1927 suggest that it was difficult for both clergy and laypeople to acknowledge animal service and to represent this concept in memorials and prayers. These episodes show, too, that church people might be uncomfortable with forms of remembrance that presented military animals as exercising ‘agency’. As a result, efforts to recognize the contribution of military animals tended to happen at the margins of institutional religion, and often took the form of ephemera, such as prayer cards and litanies on thin paper, or the wreaths in memory of animals that animal welfarists quietly laid on war memorials.Footnote 84 The ephemeral material discussed in this article illustrates the extent to which the inclusion of animals in Christian prayer and ritual has been fleeting and fragile.
In Britain, animals remained at the margins of prayer and remembrance for much of the twentieth century.Footnote 85 The few memorials erected after 1945 were discrete, functional and largely secular, such as the bird baths in public gardens in London and Worthing which commemorated carrier pigeons.Footnote 86 Recently, prayers for animals and church services involving living animals have become more common. Memorials to military animals are more numerous too.Footnote 87 In 2004, a monument to the animals that have supported British forces in war was unveiled on the edge of Hyde Park. In similar ways to the prayer and memorials discussed in this article, the ‘Animals in War’ memorial presents mules, elephants, camels and dogs as acting out of patriotism and a sense of duty.Footnote 88 However, the differences between the modern memorial and the examples discussed in this article point to important changes in animal advocacy and human-animal relationships, the role of the church, and perhaps ideas of community too. The secular Animals in War memorial shows how far modern animal advocacy has lost much of the Christian character that was such a feature of earlier animal protection activity.Footnote 89 The modern memorial has no practical function. It is set apart, and unlike the drinking troughs of the past, it is primarily a space for reflection and remembrance.Footnote 90 Kean may be correct that such places ‘privilege an animal presence’ and can help encourage humans to think about animals as animals, and not as the tools and constructs of humans.Footnote 91 Nonetheless, such memorials take us away from the mixed community and return us to a sense of separation between species. What is lost is the sense of community and connectedness that was communicated when humans in earlier periods of British history drank water alongside animals, remembered non-humans in prayers, or stood alongside a horse or a dog at a remembrance ceremony. The question remains whether it is good or healthy for humans to keep in mind that they inhabit mixed communities, although to address that question would require a philosophical, as opposed to a historical, discussion.
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