‘Splendid patriotism and heroic self-sacrifice’: First World War memorials in Welsh metalworks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of the academic attention on issues of Great War mourning and commemoration has focussed on the civic memorials, particularly given that they are designed to be public, visible reminders of the local community’s contribution to the war effort. The focus of this article is on a different subset of memorials, in that they refer specifically to workers from particular companies who served in the war. As such they were not always public memorials, being located in many cases within the works and thus only on display to fellow workers. Yet neither were they entirely ‘private’ memorials, such as the ones established in so many family homes to those they had lost. This article considers twenty five metalworks memorials in the south Wales counties of Monmouthshire, Glamorgan and Carmarthenshire. Taken as a whole, these memorials convey a number of messages about south Wales society in the immediate aftermath of the war. In most examples these were commissioned within three years of the Armistice, and the terms they deploy show that the ‘language of 1914’ was still in vogue. Patriotism was ‘splendid’; self-sacrifice was ‘heroic’; the memory of the fallen was ‘glorious.’ Death was preferable to dishonour. In naming these men, the metalworks companies claimed them as their own and by extension laid claim to a share of the glory. The men’s identity as employees was highlighted in the numerous memorials which noted their position within the company. They had an identity as steelworkers or tinplaters, as well as their identities as men of their hometown, and as Welshmen, Britons and sons of the Empire.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".