RADC Association

Assisting past and present members of the Royal Army Dental Corps

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The RADC Memorial Stone


The RADC Memorial Stone Front Side
All who have served at or visited the Dental Complex at Evelyn Woods Road (Aldershot) will be familiar with our Corps memorial situated immediately outside the main doors of the building. The memorial stone is dual faced with the badge of the ADC on the front with the inscription:

IN PROUD REMEMBRANCE
OF THE OFFICERS
NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS
AND MEN OF
THE ARMY DENTAL CORPS
IN THE WAR 1939-1945

The names of the fallen
Are inscribed in
A Book of Remembrance

The RADC Memorial Stone Obverse Side
On the obverse face of the memorial is:

The badge of the RADC

With the inscription:

Royal Army Dental Corps
1939 -1945

The Memorial Stone was originally placed out side the old Connaught Hospital Building which was the Depot and Training Establishment RADC. It was originally unveiled by the Adjutant General (General Sir James S Steele) at a memorial service on Monday 16 August 1948.

The Memorial remained at this location for the next 25 years until the closure of the Connaught Building and the opening of the HQ and Training Centre RADC building in Evelyn Woods Road on Saturday 29th September 1973 when it was moved to it’s present location on Evelyn Woods Road.

Wreath laying ceremony Corps Sunday
The Dental Complex building on Evelyn Woods Road is no longer an RADC asset but belongs to the Defence Dental Services (a Tri-Service organisation) This, coupled with the handover of the responsibility of training to the newly formed Joint Medical Command, has resulted in the RADC student and instructor population being moved to accommodation at DMSTG (Keogh Barracks).
The present location around the memorial at Evelyn Woods Road is a building site with Tournai Officers’ Mess having been demolished and the football field opposite the main entrance making way for the construction of new mess accommodation. Even after the completion of this major construction process, the memorial will be left on the heavily used access road to Headquarters 145 Brigade. So what to the future?

The new construction project, the restructuring of the Defence Dental Services unit in Evelyn Woods Road, the loss of training and depot functions and the diminishing presence of RADC personnel would suggest that this perhaps would not present the best location for our Corps memorial. It was, at first considered to simply leave the memorial in its present location. Taking into account, however all the factors listed above and the probability that the site will never again be “fit for purpose” as our Corps weekend parade site, it would simply be left largely unseen and unrecognised.

Running concurrently with this thought process on the future of the Corps Memorial, was an attempt to raise the RADC profile and presence at the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas, Staffordshire, which until now has been woefully inadequate in comparison with other Corps.



Initially considered was the option of leaving the present memorial in situ and raising sufficient funding to commission another memorial for placement at the NMA.This, however proved to be a costly option and still left the original memorial remaining in what is considered an inappropriate location for all the reasons given.

Making decisions for the move to the National Memorial Arboretum
Thoughts then turned to the option of relocating the original memorial from Evelyn Woods Road to the National Memorial Arboretum and a scoping exercise into achieving this was commenced. Having engaged with the authorities of the NMA, The Council of Cols Comdt have secured the guarantee that should the move go ahead then the memorial will be placed in a high profile spot within the arboretum on a main walkway route between the “Shot at dawn” memorial, the Polish war memorial and beside the RAMC memorial grove where it will have the potential to be viewed by tens of thousands (if not more) visitors on an annual basis. The NMA trusteeship have also expressed a desire that any new or additional placements within the arboretum should (without detraction or reduction to the the honour paid to “our glorious dead” ) be living memorials.

To that end, it is proposed to include the additional lettering around the base plinth of the memorial reading something like “Dedicated by and to all who have served in the Corps 1921- Present day) thus providing a living memorial.

It is further proposed to supplement the main memorial with a smaller stone outlining the origins and history of the main memorial. This would be further enhanced by a substantial entry into the NMA guidebook.