Military History | Great Western Railway War Memorial, Paddington — The Roll of Honour Under the Statue

The bronze soldier on platform 1 at Paddington is not standing to attention. He is reading. Charles Sargeant Jagger put him in a greatcoat with a sheepskin jerkin under it and a scarf wound at the throat, helmet tipped back, and gave him a letter from home to hold in both hands. The Great Western Railway unveiled him on 11 November 1922. The company's chairman, Victor Spencer, Viscount Churchill, performed the ceremony; T. S. Tait designed the granite and Portland stone around the figure, and A. B. Burton's foundry at Thames Ditton cast the bronze.

Not one name is cut on it. The memorial says instead where the names are — on a roll of honour deposited beneath the bronze figure, sealed in a casket under the statue. That line is transcribed by the Imperial War Museum's War Memorials Register; no photograph consulted here resolves it on the stone. The company had shown a printed roll of honour on this platform since 1915, and the same register lists that earlier roll as lost.

What the stone gives is arithmetic. The 1922 dedication recorded 25,479 Great Western men in the forces and 2,524 who did not come back, the figures the IWM register and War Memorials Online both transcribe, against 2,254 in Historic England's list entry. A second dedication was added after the next war. The pedestal now reads IN HONOUR OF THOSE WHO SERVED IN THE WORLD WARS, and below it two pairs of dates, each pair divided by a small cross; on the black tablet under that, 3312 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR KING AND COUNTRY.

Standing indoors, the memorial cannot be listed on its own, and is named inside the station's Grade I entry instead. An eagle with outspread wings is carved into the stone at the soldier's right, and a second device faces it from the left. Each November the wreaths and banks of small wooden crosses cover the flagstones in front of him, and the platform works round them.

📸 Cover: the memorial on platform 1 after Remembrance 2021, the pedestal and the eagle relief legible, no people in frame. Second image: the same memorial face on, both carved devices visible. Irid Escent, 22 November 2021, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.