Artist Martin Barraud on his project to memorialise fallen First World War soldiers across the country

In Memoriam: Barraud plans to fill the country with perspex figures
Claire Williamson
Melanie McDonagh12 April 2018

They're everywhere you go: parks, churches, railway stations, department stores — there’s one opposite the office of this paper. All over London you’ll find the war memorials for the dead of the Great War, the young men who never returned a century ago. They are the Alfreds, Edgars, Williams, Percys and Edwards who were once office clerks, artists, postmen and shop assistants and are now names on monuments. We pass them so often we’ve stopped seeing them.

Except now the war dead are becoming visible, with a shape and a name. There are ghostly Tommies in St Pancras station, in a chapel in the Tower of London, in a football stadium: either a six-foot aluminium silhouette with head bowed, or a Perspex figure you see, then somehow don’t see, sitting down.

Their creator, Martin Barraud, has given every one of them the name of a real soldier. It’s part of a project called There But Not There, and by November this year, the centenary of the end of the war, he hopes to have sold a figure to represent every one of the 883,246 men from Britain and Ireland who died. From the Commonwealth as a whole, there were 1.5 million.

Like the massed poppies in the Tower of London moat, one for each dead soldier, this has struck a chord. People stop and look at the outlines in St Pancras. “They seem to do something to people,” Barraud says. And the idea has taken off: 24 hours after the project was launched, sales of the figures had raised £1 million for military charities.

Barraud had the idea of “taking the names off the wall” passing the memorial to 50 young men in Penshurst Church, near where he lives in Kent. “I needed to do something. I wanted to get them back into the village,” he said. He went to the vicar and asked to put the lost boys — the youngest was just 17 — back in the pews. “He hadn’t a clue what I was on about but he said yes.”

​Barraud, a conceptual photographer by profession, created silhouettes in Perspex for every one of those men — the 17-year-old a little shorter than the rest — and placed them sitting around the church. Local schoolchildren put the men’s names by each one. Three cousins from the Hardinge family sat together; as did two brothers. And alone in the church he had the uncanny feeling “there was someone there”.

That was in 2016 and from there the project took off. Word got around — other communities wanted to do the same and the Army was interested.

Fallen of the Great War: The figures will raise funds for military charities
Martin Barraud

So came an extraordinarily ambitious plan, to sell the figures to communities, businesses and individuals to raise money for military charities. They’re now everywhere from a mine in Wales to a football stadium in Scotland.

General Sir Richard Dannatt is the patron. “He’s very supportive,” says Barraud. It would be an ideal cause for Prince Harry to back, surely? “Yes!” says Barraud. The title There But Not There came to the artist’s mind. It’s now acquired a life of its own, being applied to everything from the Prime Minister to the England rugby squad.

Funds raised will be distributed by the new charity, Remembered. Beneficiary charities include The Royal Foundation: Heads Together, the Commonwealth War Graves Foundation, Help for Heroes, Walking With the Wounded and Combat Stress.

6 exhibitions you need to see this April - In pictures

1/6

The figures are made by the Royal British Legion Industries in Aylesford. You can get a six-foot aluminium figure for £750 or a 25cm Perspex one for £29.99; a seated Perspex soldier costs £42. “It means everyone can take part,” says Barraud. The Armed Forces Covenant Trust is offering communities micro-grants of £500 toward the cost.

The figure of the soldier in profile is taken from a photo by Horace Nicholls, an official war photographer (Barraud’s own grandfather was a war artist).

Most of the fallen have names but there were 150,000 whose graves have no name. There were 866 women who died, mostly nurses — most famously Edith Cavell. There have been requests for lady figures, for Marines, for silhouettes of the overseas nationals who took part: Barraud isn’t against more diversity but “right now the manufacturers — the veterans at the RBLI — are working flat out to satisfy the present Tommy demand for 42,000 figures. We’ll see.”

The carnage that the figures represent baffles the imagination. “There isn’t a word for it,” said Barraud. “Those soldiers were the same age as my son — 22. He’d have been one of them, no doubt about it. They need to be recognised.” He’s right.

For more information or to buy a figure see therebutnotthere.org.uk

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in