My main source is the "roll of honour" register, available online from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website (
www.cwgc.org).
This website is a totally free resource but if you use it, please consider making a donation to the CWGC at:
The register has many strengths and without it, this project would have taken a lifetime of work in dusty archives to achieve half as much. However, using this source requires an understanding of what criteria were used to assemble the list of names. The CWGC website describes this as follows:
“During the Second World War, the Commission was given the task of compiling as complete a list as possible of Commonwealth civilians whose deaths were due to enemy action. The complete roll of some 66,400 names is bound in seven volumes and kept near St George’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, where a different page is displayed each day.” The list of civilian dead is also referred to by CWGC as a roll of honour; the Debt of Honour Register combines civilian and military deaths.
It’s also worth knowing the Commission “only commemorates those who have died during the designated war years in service or of causes attributable to service.” The date range for World War 2 is 3rd September 1939 to 31st December 1947.
The website of Westminster Abbey
http://www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/people/civilian-war-dead-roll-of-honour-1939---1945
contains more detail:
“By a supplemental charter dated 7 February 1941 the Imperial War Graves Commission was empowered to collect and record the names of civilians who died from enemy action during World War II. Using information supplied by the Registrar-General and local authorities an initial list of 43,000 names was compiled covering just the period of the Battle of Britain in 1940 and the big air raids of 1940-41. In 1942 this was made available to the public for consultation and comment. An understanding that the Roll should eventually be placed in Westminster Abbey was reached with the Dean and Chapter at about this time, but it was decided that this should not happen until the list had been made complete at the end of hostilities. The first six volumes were handed over to the Dean and Chapter by The Duke of Gloucester, President of the Imperial War Graves Commission, at a short ceremony in the Jerusalem Chamber (part of the Deanery) on 21 February 1956; the final volume was added to the showcase in 1958.
The Roll consists of seven leather-bound volumes (the work of the binder Roger Powell) containing printed details of 66,375 fatalities …
One volume covers deaths on board ship and deaths abroad (including civilian deaths in prison camps). This volume also has addenda for the whole Roll.”
So the names were listed at the time by local councils and made available for consultation. A more open debate is needed at some point about the criteria used to assemble the register and how consistently they were applied, but that is not my purpose. For my current purposes, all you need to know are the following:
(i) civil defence workers who died while on duty (or as a result of injuries sustained while on duty) are included, even if this was only in a training incident
(ii) while people in the armed forces are listed by the CWGC, they are not included in the civilian register and there is no easy way to link them to an incident if you do not have details from another source
(iii) criteria for non-UK civilians are not entirely clear - for example, passengers killed when a ship sank only seem to include UK passport holders, yet some foreign nationals killed in the UK are included when they seem to be refugees (maybe they had a temporary passport?)
