ABSTRACT
Upon their return to the UK, the bodies of British service personnel who have been killed in operations overseas are repatriated to an airhead at Royal Air Force (RAF) base Brize Norton. Once received by the tailgate procession, they are transported by hearse to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxfordshire for postmortem by a military coroner. During 2007 a runway closure at RAF Brize Norton meant that the landing site for aircraft arriving from Afghanistan and Iraq moved to nearby RAF Lyneham. This caused the repatriated bodies of military personnel to be diverted en route to the John Radcliffe hospital via a small town in Wiltshire, the town of Wootton Bassett. On 1 and 2 April 2007, two British soldiers – Kingsman Danny Wilson and Rifleman Aaron Lincoln – were killed on duty while serving in Iraq. Days later, on 5 April 2007, the bodies of both men were driven by hearse along the high street of Wootton Bassett on their way to be received by the coroner. However unlike the deaths of the 188 British service personnel who perished in the years before them (52 in Afghanistan, 136 in Iraq), this time was different. Townspeople noticed the cortège and stopped by the roadside to pay their respects. For the next four years, the subsequent 167 military repatriations were attended by increasing numbers – at some times thousands – of townsfolk, passers-by, military veterans, bereaved families and military personnel. With these events came national and global media attention, causing Wootton Bassett to become both geographically and symbolically associated with the British war dead. Several years later, on 18 August 2011, Lieutenant Daniel Clack became the last British soldier to be repatriated through Wootton Bassett’s high street. Although the occurrence of these events were never intended to last, the ‘duty’ of publicly receiving the deceased in Wootton Bassett was officially handed over to the nearby town of Carterton on 31 August 2011, following the reopening of the airhead at RAF Brize Norton. For its efforts in hosting 167 military repatriations during this period, Wootton Bassett was awarded royal assent – the first English town to receive this title in over 100 years. This chapter documents the processes that have served to facilitate a prolonged methodological engagement with the military repatriations in Royal Wootton Bassett (locally referred to as Bassett). First, the chapter introduces some of the attendant war literature relating to
the study of military remembrance to find a place to situate this research within the human experiences of those who receive the war dead back into their communities. From here a brief biographical note is observed to indicate the gateway for studying military repatriations, followed by a methodological rationale centred upon ethnographic methods conducted at ‘long’ and ‘short’ range; a form of community-orientated research, engaging with those who lived and worked in the town who experienced first-hand the military repatriations in Bassett. To finish, the chapter reconnects with the theoretical contexts of military repatriation before providing a brief conclusion indicating the uniqueness of this approach for sociological military research.
