One hundred years ago this week, Andover war memorial, known even then as the cenotaph, was dedicated in the town centre.

The ceremony attracted huge crowds which stretched all the way down to the bottom of the High Street, with the Advertiser reporting that people “swayed backwards and forwards in an endeavour to catch all that was being addressed to them.”

The memorial had been the subject of much discussion in the town for some 18 months prior to the unveiling on May 5, 1920. The town’s mayor, Alderman Thomas Webb, had chaired two rather chaotic public meetings, held to decide upon what form the memorial should take.

Many suggestions were made, including a swimming pool in which soldiers could exercise, a stained glass window for the Corn Exchange (the lower floor of the town hall or Guildhall today), recreation rooms for war veterans, a new bandstand for the recreation ground and even a larger sports field for the town to name but a few.

The town council, however, preferred the option of an extension to the town hall, taking in further down the High Street, and it was this idea that was passed, somewhat surprisingly to many of those in attendance, at a public meeting held on January 10, 1919.

However, plans for the extension had to be quickly shelved after the Treasury refused local authorities permission to enter into competitive borrowing. So, after weeks and weeks of toing and froing, with seemingly no agreement in sight, it was left to Mr Edmund Parsons, proprietor of the High Street department store Parsons and Hart and secretary to the cottage hospital, to suggest to a meeting of the town council that a new hospital for the town might form a suitable memorial for those that had died in the war.

This scheme was agreed with unanimously at a second public meeting on May 7, 1919, with the addition, at the suggestion of councillor Robert Moore (coach builder), that a suitable memorial also be erected in the centre of the town. Committees for both the hospital, which would open in 1926 as the War Memorial Hospital on Charlton Road, and war memorial were quickly set up, with donors indicating to which they wished to donate using the letters ‘H’ or ‘M’. More than £14,000 was raised in total (equivalent to perhaps £730,000 today) which allowed both schemes to go ahead without the need for additional loans.

On the day of the unveiling, crowds began to arrive in the High Street around noon.

Reserved seating for relatives of the dead had been placed each side of the memorial, which stood shrouded with union fags and white sheeting, while an enclosure to the front was set-aside for the town’s school children.

The ceremony began at 3pm precisely, with Mayor Webb leading the commemorations, during which a full ‘roll of the dead’ was read to the crowd. The cenotaph was unveiled by Major-General John Edward Bernard Seely, lord lieutenant of Hampshire, whose horse - which had gone right through the war with him - was later the inspiration for Sir Michael Morpurgo’s book War Horse. The Advertiser later reflected that almost every mourner laid a wreath at the foot of the new memorial that afternoon.

The cenotaph remained in the High Street until August 1956 when it was removed to St Mary’s churchyard to allow the then borough council to resurrected plans to extend the Guildhall down the High Street. However, once again those plans were thwarted by the Treasury, which directed local authorities to cut spending in the wake of the post-Second World War economic slump.

A hundred years after it was first erected in the High Street, the cenotaph continues to be the subject of debate within the town, with many people wishing to see it returned to its original town centre location.