ON this the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele I have been checking the list of names of the fallen which we read out on Remembrance Sunday to make certain that nobody is missed.
Along with other things this has involved visiting the war memorials throughout Swaledale and Arkengarthdale, some of which are located within churches and chapels.
This highlighted a problem - both of the Methodist chapels in Reeth and Arkengarthdale have now closed and any memorials potentially lost.
A fine World War One memorial was in Reeth chapel and a photograph of it can be found in Keith Taylors’ “Swaledale and Wharfedale Remembered.”
This and any other memorials need to be retained in the communities to which they relate to have any significance, and probably they need to be relocated to village halls or community buildings so that they can be seen by future generations and not cast onto the scrap heap as so much rubbish.
I was deeply saddened to learn from a source that the Reeth chapel memorial had been offered to a public building in Reeth but had been rejected because it contains religious wording.
Am I the only one who thinks this is political correctness gone mad? Even more so when you realise that the building in question is the Reeth Memorial Hall.
Martin Sunderland, Reeth
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