Many towns and cities began to erect war memorials after the armistice, but Manchester did not get underway until 1922. As a result of pressure from the local branch of the Royal British Legion, the city council convened a war memorial committee of 12 persons, chaired by the mayor and consisting of "Aldermen and Councillors [and] representative men connected with diﬀerent aspects of Manchester business, with the military forces and other sections of Manchester life", to explore options for commemoration. The committee limited the budget to £10,000 and very rapidly raised this sum; donors being assured that local firms would benefit from the construction and resulting employment. Nonetheless, the letters pages of local newspapers featured several missives from ex-servicemen who felt that the cenotaph was a waste of money and that the funds would be better spent on the survivors and war widows, many of whom faced extreme hardship as a result of high levels of unemployment in the aftermath of the war. For a civic memorial to the Great War, £10,000 was relatively modest sum; the counterpart public appeal in Rochdale had raised nearly £30,000, and the resulting Rochdale Cenotaph, then just completed, had cost £12,611. The proprietor of the Daily Dispatch newspaper, Edward Hulton, offered to cover the entire cost of the Manchester memorial, but the committee declined, feeling that the funding should come from the people and city of Manchester. Subsequently, the committee resisted all suggestions that the memorial budget might be increased, or that the list of donors might be extended. Constitutionally, the memorial committee was a committee of the City Council, but acted throughout as having independent discretion and funds.