Midland Railway Company Employees
A tablet of Portland stone on the concourse of the Nottingham Midland Station (Station Street entrance). The memorial was originally installed on the outer wall of the station building, Carrington Street, alongside the canal. The memorial was unveiled on 25 June 1921 by the Mayor of Nottingham (Ald H Bowles) and dedicated by Mr S Kimbell. Nottingham Evening Post, 25 June 1921: ‘Unveiling of a Nottingham Memorial. Out of 600 employees of the Midland Railway Goods Department, 263 joined the forces during the war, and 45 sacrificed their lives, and a memorial to the latter in the shape of a Portland stone, was unveiled in the goods yard, Carrington-street, to-day by the Mayor (Ald. H Bowles). Mr J Wade, goods agent, took the chair, and the Mayor, in performing the ceremony, asked his hearers to take a lesson from the sacrifice by those whose names were inscribed upon the tablet. Those men, he said, did not go to fight because they desired to fight, in the sense in which they knew fighting. They went because they knew it was their duty to go and serve their country, so that it might be in future a land of peace and prosperity. Remembering that fact, let them ask themselves whether as Englishmen they were doing all they could to benefit their country. He was afraid that as a country we had not been doing everything we could to honour those men, and carry on the object for which they had died. The memorial, he continued, should be a steadying force and an inspiration to all to do something better for the country than had been done in the past. Mr S Kimbell formally dedicated the tablet, and after the sounding of the Last Post, the relatives of those who had died reverently laid wreaths at the foot of the memorial.’ (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk)