This memorial commemorates the employees and students of Queen’s University Belfast who were killed or missing in World War I (253 names) and World War II (155 names). It is located in front of the Lanyon Building at Queen’s University Belfast and was erected in 1924.
The memorial was designed by renowned sculptor was designed by Thomas Brock. Brock was well known at the time for his representations of Queen Victoria, including the one in front of Belfast City Hall.
The memorial depicts a dying soldier, hand clasped to his chest, still holding his sword in his other hand, supported by and leaning upon a tall angel, holding aloft a wreath of victory.
Interestingly, the QUB War Memorial contains the name of one female graduate who died in the Great War, Isobel Addey Tate.
Isobel Addey Tate
Tate was born in Tartaraghan, near Loughgall in Co Armagh, in May 1874. She was the daughter of John Tate, a Portadown merchant, and Isabella Cherry. In 1888 the then Queen’s College, Belfast (the forerunner of Queen University Belfast) admitted its first female medical student and Tate matriculated from the college in 1894.
In 1899, she graduated as a doctor and was registered with the medical regulator, the General Medical Council at Ireland. Tate then worked in Dublin and qualified as a Doctor of Medicine from the Royal University of Ireland in 1902. After that she worked in a series of medical postings until the outbreak of the Great War.
In 1915 she volunteered to join the Serbian Relief Fund that sought to alleviate the serious medical problems as a result of the Austro-Hungarian attack on Serbia. She eventually made it out to Serbia but soon contracted typhoid fever soon after she arrived in Serbia and was evacuated to Belgrade Hospital, before returning home.
In 1916, she volunteered for service with the Royal Army Medical Corps and ended up serving at St Paul’s Military Hospital in Valetta, Malta. Here she treated many of the casualties from the Gallipoli and Salonika campaigns that were transported to Malta.
On 28 January 1917 she died of “congestion of the brain” (due to typhoid fever) in Malta.