How people power created Remembrance Day: As millions flock to see those Tower poppies, the remarkable story of how ordinary Britons won the right to honour the fallen

This is from three years ago, but it is an excellent explanation of how Remembrance Day was not a big, planned, PR event to glorify war as many leftists claim.

When Big Ben struck 11 o’clock on the morning of November 11, 1919, nobody quite knew what would happen next. Even the King was nervous.

It was exactly a year since the guns had fallen silent on the Western Front, signalling the end of the ‘war to end all wars’ that had cost the Empire alone nearly a million lives.

And although no official national commemoration had been planned, George V, in consultation with his advisers, had taken it upon himself to propose a ceremony without precedent in British history.

‘I believe,’ he had announced, ‘that my people in every part of the Empire fervently wish to perpetuate the memory of the Great Deliverance, and those who laid down their lives to achieve it.’

He suggested that ‘at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, there may be, for the brief space of two minutes, a complete suspension of all our normal activities’.

Respect: Soldiers pass the Cenotaph in July 1919 - 

four months before Britain's first Remembrance Day

It was a bold idea. But from the outset, the King’s plan had been widely criticised. Some believed that it could degenerate into ‘a sort of cheap theatricalism’. Evelyn Waugh, later a bestselling author but then a schoolboy, wrote in his diary that it was ‘a disgusting idea of artificial nonsense and sentimentality. No one thought of the dead last year. Why should they now?’

Most worrying was that there was little officials could do to ensure the success of the event. Although basic arrangements were made — such as all public transport being halted and the police stopping traffic in the capital — officials simply had to trust the public’s sense of decency and decorum.

In the event, neither they nor the King need have worried. The two minutes’ silence was observed by the British public to a degree that few had even dared dream possible.

Despite the naysayers, the nation embraced the act of remembrance with a depth of feeling that, a century later, has its echoes in the millions of visitors now flocking to the Tower of London’s memorial of ceramic poppies.

Long before the chiming of 11am, vast crowds had gathered at the temporary wood-and-plaster cenotaph — its literal meaning: empty tomb — which had been put up in Whitehall four months previously for an Armistice parade. Although by now somewhat worn, it became the focus for a huge outpouring of national commemoration.

It was a bold idea. But from the outset, the King’s plan had been widely criticised. Some believed that it could degenerate into ‘a sort of cheap theatricalism’. 

Evelyn Waugh, later a bestselling author but then a schoolboy, wrote in his diary that it was ‘a disgusting idea of artificial nonsense and sentimentality. No one thought of the dead last year. Why should they now?’

Most worrying was that there was little officials could do to ensure the success of the event. Although basic arrangements were made — such as all public transport being halted and the police stopping traffic in the capital — officials simply had to trust the public’s sense of decency and decorum.

In the event, neither they nor the King need have worried. The two minutes’ silence was observed by the British public to a degree that few had even dared dream possiblespite the naysayers, the nation embraced the act of remembrance with a depth of feeling that, a century later, has its echoes in the millions of visitors now flocking to the Tower of London’s memorial of ceramic poppies.

Long before the chiming of 11am, vast crowds had gathered at the temporary wood-and-plaster cenotaph — its literal meaning: empty tomb — which had been put up in Whitehall four months previously for an Armistice parade. Although by now somewhat worn, it became the focus for a huge outpouring of national commemoration.

So great was the throng that Whitehall quickly became impassable, as it would remain for the whole day.

Flowers had to be passed over people’s heads to be placed on the monument. When a wreath sent by the King arrived, mounted police had to force a passage so that it could be laid.

As the 11 chimes of Big Ben finally rang out, a stillness descended on the crowd. At the centre of the world’s greatest city, human activity ceased. Some fell to their knees, clasping their hands in prayer. Others stood, heads bowed, weeping. The silence was broken only by the occasional murmur. One small boy, looking up at his mother, clad all in black and gazing at the cenotaph, whispered: ‘Is Daddy in there, Mother?’

In cities, towns and villages across the country, the pattern was repeated. From Cornwall to Caithness, no corner of the land had been untouched by the ravages of the war, and nobody was yet ready to forget.

On the packed platforms at Crewe railway station in Cheshire, former soldiers stood to attention while one elderly man, who had lost four sons, knelt in silent prayer. Workers stopped at telephone exchanges and telegraph offices, temporarily cutting off the country from the rest of the world.

The intensity of the moment, the raw emotions that it conjured up, caught many by surprise. The idea of such a commemoration seemed utterly alien to some, yet when it happened, it appeared instantly British.

‘It is a strong national trait that we do not carry our hearts on our sleeves,’ observed one newspaper. ‘Anything like a display of emotion is, and was, particularly in pre-war days, quite foreign to the British character. But the Great War has changed the outlook on many things.’

Later, the King wrote a letter of gratitude to Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, a pro-British South African author and politician, whose eldest son had been killed in the war and who had suggested to the Prime Minister and Buckingham Palace that the silence observed daily in Cape Town throughout hostilities might be replicated across the Empire on November 11.

Alas, the extraordinary national unity of that two-minute silence was not to last. The enthusiastic response could not conceal the anger and grief of families across the land.
Over the next few years, Britain’s rulers would come into sharp disagreement with the people over how the Great War should be seen; whether it should be viewed as a victory or a disaster, whether triumph, grief or restitution should be the dominant theme and, above all, how it should be remembered.

Even on that first Armistice Day anniversary, a discordant note had been struck.
‘The clergy were in scarlet, and were wearing medals as if in thanksgiving for victory,’ noted one newspaper of a service held later that day in Westminster Abbey. ‘But the people, on the anniversary of the day when the war was won, chose instead to mourn their dead. There was no sense of triumph.’

Nowhere was this more evident than in an unofficial ceremony at the temporary cenotaph, immediately after that first two minutes’ silence.

If the silence had been intended to remember the dead, this, instead, drew attention to the survivors who faced an uncertain future, still recovering from hideous injuries and shattered minds.

A small ensemble of former bandsmen led a parade of several hundred disabled ex-servicemen, the blind being supported by friends, and those who had lost limbs on crutches. The procession made all too vividly real the horrors of the conflict.

‘This touching spectacle brought tears to the eyes of many of the onlookers,’ said one report. ‘Women cried freely. Men stood with faces marked with intense emotion.’

The parade ended with a bagpipe lament and the playing of the Last Post on a solo bugle. The use of the humble, functional bugle — rather than a cavalry call proclaimed with ceremonial splendour by state trumpeters — was a poignant, heartrending lament for the hundreds of thousands of ordinary husbands, sons and fathers for whom the nation grieved.

Although the origins of its haunting melody are unknown, the Last Post had been used since the beginning of the 18th century in Army camps to mark the ending of the day and the sealing of perimeter fences. In hostelries and brothels, it was sounded to alert Army personnel that they should return to their headquarters.

During the previous 50 years or so, however — and particularly during World War I — the tune had taken on a new significance. No longer just a military signal, it had become a powerful symbol for the ending of a life, rather than the literal close of a day.

 During the Battle of the Somme, a tradition arose that the dead were buried at the beginning and end of each day. Morning and evening, a bugler would stand over every grave, playing the Last Post.

Soon the tradition spread to services back home, honouring the deceased. A service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral for those who had died during the doomed Gallipoli campaign was described in a contemporary report: ‘The silver notes of the Last Post, sobbing and echoing through the aisles, conveyed a sense of an open graveside, and caused many women to sink to their seats and burst quietly into tears.’

That first Armistice Day commemoration in 1919 would complete the melody’s transformation from practical signal into the unique, almost sacred, symbol it has become for both army personnel and civilians today.

For the sound of a lone bugler playing the Last Post must surely be one of the most distinctive gifts bequeathed to the world by the British Army. It has spanned the globe, becoming a mournful lament for the dead that has been adopted by governments of all types and groups of every persuasion: by imperialists and pacifists, by conservatives and communists, by Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim and atheist.

No respecter of rank and privilege, it has sounded at the gravesides of millions of soldiers as well as those of kings and emperors, and of world leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

By the end of 1919, although other symbols of remembrance — the wearing of poppies and the construction of war memorials across the country — were yet to come, the Last Post and the two minutes’ silence had already been inextricably linked in the public’s mind with the commemoration of its heroes.

If the plaintive spirituality of the Last Post could be captured in musical form, then the Cenotaph was its physical form — and remains the focus of the nation’s mourning.
As early as July 1919 there had been repeated calls for the temporary structure to become a permanent memorial to Britain’s war dead.

However, there were dissident voices. Sir Alfred Mond, a Liberal MP and the commissioner of works in David Lloyd George’s coalition government, reported to the Cabinet: ‘The monument, although appropriate for the occasion, may not be regarded as sufficiently important and may be of too mournful a character as a permanent expression of the triumphant victory of our arms.’ But he had badly misjudged the mood of the nation, assuming triumphalism to be the keynote, rather than deep, abiding sorrow.
Mond also objected to the floral tributes being laid daily at the Cenotaph. ‘A mass of decaying flowers needs almost daily attention, besides tending to attract crowds,’ he wrote.

The government was finally persuaded, however, that the original structure — simply and strikingly designed by Britain’s most celebrated architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens — should be remade in stone.

Despite concerns about siting it ‘in the midst of the traffic of Whitehall’, the spot was now being treated as holy ground by the public. The Daily Mail took up the campaign, arguing that the place ‘had been consecrated by the tears of many mothers’.

And so, on November 11, 1920, the new, permanent stone Cenotaph was unveiled and Scotland Yard’s deputy assistant commissioner said: ‘We are prepared for the pilgrimage to last three days.’

His prediction proved to be an understatement. ‘Five days after its unveiling,’ marvelled The Spectator, ‘it was estimated that a million people had visited the Cenotaph. As we write the stream still flows on.’

A hundred thousand wreaths were laid ‘in great hedges five feet high’, and, it was said, the crowds were so dense in this ‘solemn pilgrimage’ that ‘you could walk across Whitehall over the heads of the people’. 

The Cenotaph bore no expression of faith and had been unveiled in an act ‘unaccompanied by a religious dedication’ because, as Lloyd George said: ‘Mohamedans and Hindus were among those in whose memory it stood.’

He added: ‘It has become a national shrine not only for the British Isles but also for the whole Empire.’

Even so, some disagreements about remembrance rumbled on throughout the next decade.

In 1921, although the Last Post had been sounded at the Cenotaph the previous year, it was deliberately omitted. The relevant Cabinet committee explained that ‘as Armistice Day is not a day of national grief but rather a commemoration of a great occasion in the national history, it is undesirable to lay stress upon the idea of mourning’.

Worse was to follow. In 1923, when Armistice Day fell on a Sunday for the first time since the war, it was decided that there would be no gathering at the Cenotaph. Instead, a state service at Westminster Abbey, attended by the King, would be followed by a public service in Trafalgar Square.

No sooner had these arrangements been disclosed than there was a storm of protest.
‘This by no means satisfies the sentiments of a large section of the public,’ insisted the Derby Evening Telegraph, while the Dundee Courier argued that the Cenotaph service was ‘an annual custom which has become sanctified into a kind of public sacrament’. The Western Daily Press was less polite: it was an ‘amazingly fatuous suggestion’ to discard so lightly ‘a sacrament with the man and the woman in the street’.

The idea of the Trafalgar Square gathering was clearly inadequate: there was no connection between it and the dead of World War I, nor was there any significance to the hour of three o’clock. The efforts to commemorate the fallen that had been built up over the previous five years were in danger of being ruined by an Establishment that failed to recognise the importance of the British people’s own symbols.

Among those campaigning for an annual event in Whitehall was General Bramwell Booth, head of the Salvation Army, who said that if the established Church didn’t wish to hold a Cenotaph ceremony, he would organise one himself.

In due course the Cabinet declared itself ‘deeply impressed by the volume of public feeling. There was general agreement that the desire of the public should be met.’

And so in 1928, the next year that Armistice Day fell on a Sunday, Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks wrote a memo to the Cabinet: ‘It would be better this year to observe Armistice Day in the customary manner, the main ceremony taking place at the Cenotaph on the usual lines.’

Common sense had finally prevailed. His recommendation was acted upon, and the ceremony was safe for generations to come.

British remembrance of its heroes has long been characterised by simplicity and understatement: the humble, anonymous origins of the Last Post played on the most basic of instruments, the plainness of the Cenotaph; the accessibility and universality of the two minutes’ silence.

The latter ‘is a far more British piece of self-expression than any amount of commemorative oratory’, observed one writer in 1921. ‘It carries into a national rite the individual impulse which made so many partings wordless at the carriage doors of leave trains.’

Now, as the world marks the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the public’s determination to remember its heroes past, present and future — in an understated, dignified and quintessentially British manner — is undimmed.
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