Ponteland's War Memorial Obelisk

Standing in front of Ponteland’s Memorial Hall is its War Memorial to the dead of the two World Wars of the twentieth century.

War Memorials started in England to commemorate the Napoleonic Wars but it was the Boer War in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century that they started to become common with ones erected in Blyth, Newcastle and Ashington However this was nothing like was to follow after the end of the First World War.

The scale of the casualties in that conflict and the fact that almost all the bodies were overseas beyond the reach of the working-class families that mourned them, let to an unprecedented demand for public memorials listing the names of the dead. One letter writer to the Blyth News in 1921 wrote; “There seems to be a very extensive desire, almost amounting to a mania for the erection of war memorials in every nook and corner of the country”. And Ponteland was no exception.

The first official discussion took place in July 1918, even before the war was over. A committee was formed to organise the fund raising to pay for a suitable monument. It was decided that the main focus should be on providing something of practicable benefit to the community, a memorial hall, but in February 1920, the committee also decided on a more traditional War Memorial in addition to the hall.

The design they chose was by William Donaldson, who carried on one of the oldest established monumental sculptor’s businesses in Newcastle and whose work adorned many of the town’s cemeteries. It was for a grey granite obelisk standing on a pedestal inscribed on one side with the names of the forty men from Ponteland who had died in the conflict. The lower section has two draped flags and rifles carved in relief topped by a laurel wreath. It was unveiled in heavy rain.

Following the end of the Second World War, a further 25 names were added at the front of the two steps leading up to the column.