Coventry to honour Triumph soldiers with memorial renovation

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Coventry to honour Triumph soldiers with memorial renovation

Postby dutchman » Sun Jul 15, 2018 10:18 pm

The war memorial, at the London Road Cemetery, was put up in 1921 to honour the men from the Triumph Gloria works

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A memorial to commemorate First World War soldiers from Coventry's Triumph works will be renovated.

The war memorial, at the London Road Cemetery, was erected in 1921 to honour the men from the Triumph Gloria works, which was on the site of the Britannia Hotel and old Priory Hall.

Over 60 men from the factory were killed serving in the Great War , and their names are inscribed on the memorial stone by the promenade at London Road Cemetery.

Nearly a hundred years since Triumph put up the memorial, many of the names have faded due to weathering from acid rain.

The Friends of London Road Cemetery won Heritage Lottery Funding for a repointing and new engraving on the memorial.

A grant of £2million will fund a range of improvements in the Grade 1 listed cemetery, which was designed by the landscape gardener and MP for Coventry Sir Joseph Paxton.

Coventry City Council has planned a wider project to make a '70 hectare Heritage Park', including the Charterhouse, Charterhouse Fields and River Sherbourne.

Ian Woolley, Coventry historian, told CoventryLive: “The memorial was placed in 1921, and it was done by Smith and Sons, still here on London Road, who are now going to do the restorations. It will be cleaned, repointed and have the faces redone.

"There are 66 names on here, there were other men from the Triumph factory but they don’t all appear here. A few of the local historians have been researching them for some years now.

"One of the most poignant names on here is that of Horace McKnight, who was a turner in the factory, but he died of his wounds on Armistice Day.

"The other interesting thing is that the memorial was unveiled by Siegfried Bettmann, the founder of Triumph and the first non-English person to be mayor of Coventry, and he was the mayor when war broke out in 1914, but he was German.

"In hindsight he was treated quite badly, but he was still free and had a lovely house which is still there in Stoke Park.

"The Triumph Gloria works was in Priory Row, and that was lost during the Second World War.

"The good thing about this cemetery is that it is standing on solid ground, but in some cemeteries it is uneven ground, so after it is restored with the engraving it will last."

When World War One broke out in 1914, the dozens of motor companies in Coventry went from producing transport for the public to making military vehicles and munitions.

There was a sudden labour shortage as government needed production ramping up, so many women and rural workers joined the factories.

Existing workers were answering the call of King and Country, but thousands went on to die on the fields of northern France and Belgium, or come home with devastating injuries and trauma.

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