Armistice Day 1945

To mark Remembrance Sunday, this is an extract from my book The Last Post, about Armistice Day in 1945:

Shortly after VE Day on the 8th of May 1945, leaders of various churches, together with representatives of the British Legion, met Herbert Morrison, the home secretary in the wartime coalition government, to discuss the form that national remembrance should take once hostilities were concluded.

Their view was that a single day should be chosen ‘in commemoration of two national deliverances and of the fallen in both of the wars’. This, they argued, should not be the 11th of November, partly because of ‘the uncertainty of the weather’ and partly – a somewhat obscure note – because it tended ‘to collide with Civic Sunday, which follows the election of new mayors’. Instead, they proposed that some time in May might be appropriate, and Morrison seemed sympathetic to their view, being personally inclined towards VE Day itself.

As the coalition dissolved, it fell to Morrison’s successor, Donald Somervell, to bring the matter to cabinet. With no certainty that the war with Japan would be finished by November, he proposed that for this first year, the commemoration of Armistice Day should continue, a decision made easier because in 1945 it fell on a Sunday. The final decision could then be put off until the following year.

And so, for what was assumed in official circles to be the last time, the Cenotaph again became the focus of the nation’s thoughts on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. King George VI, accompanied by his daughter Princess Elizabeth in her Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform, joined large crowds for ‘the sudden well-remembered silence’, and laid wreaths on the monument. It was noted, however, that in some cities and towns, the numbers of those attending were not quite what they had been in the 1920s and 1930s.

It was a world in which peace seemed scarcely sustainable, despite all attempts at reconciliation. In Berlin, it was reported, Germans commemorated the day for the first time, alongside the troops of the occupying Allied armies, and in Jerusalem, Arabs and Jews attended a service in a British military cemetery, where prayers were offered for the future of Palestine. But in Washington, the newly elected British prime minister, Clement Attlee, joined the American president Harry S. Truman and Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King to lay wreaths on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier ‘before boarding the Navy yacht Sequoia to discuss the atom bomb and other grave problems’.

In 1919 the first Silence had been staged against an international backdrop of the Bolshevik revolution and British involvement in the Russian Civil War; now it was held in the shadow of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As one Australian newspaper wrote of the leaders of the free world: ‘They are afraid of a third and worse world war, which almost inevitably would mean the end of civilisation as mankind now knows it...’

The Last Post in the media

My book on The Last Post has now been published and received its first (four-star) review, courtesy of Peter Parker in the Sunday Telegraph.

An edited extract was published in the Daily Mail yesterday and is available online.

I can also be heard speaking on the subject on a BBC World Service documentary about memorialisation.

Sherlock Holmes and the Great War

I'm currently reading Anthony Horowitz's Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk (2011). And very entertaining it is too. There are some flaws - the proof reading is poor, and there's some language I suspect is anachronistic (were people really 'gunned down' in Victorian England?) - but it's a strong, convoluted story and Horowitz has a good turn of phrase.

He also has a nice line in gently reprimanding Arthur Conan Doyle for flaws in the canon: the lack of interest in Mrs Hudson's background and circumstances, for example, or the failure to follow up what happened to various criminals after Holmes's investigations were completed.

There's something that's troubling me, though. The story's set in 1890, but Watson is writing in 1915 at a time when 'a terrible and senseless war rages on the continent'.

I don't think that Watson would have referred to the First World War as 'senseless'. Certainly not at such an early stage. I fear that's a modern perception that's colouring the narrative.

In my forthcoming book, The Last Post, I quote a passage from John Buchan's 1926 novel The Dancing Floor, in which Edward Leithen reflects on the emergence of anti-war literature. 'The vocal people were apt to be damaged sensitives, who were scarcely typical of the average man,' he observes. 'There were horrors enough, God knows, but in most people’s recollections these were overlaid by the fierce interest and excitement, even by the comedy of it.'

I suspect that, as a patriot, as an army doctor and as a veteran of the Afghan wars, Watson would have been inclined to agree with Leithen's sentiment. He would surely not have seen conflict with Germany as being 'senseless'. Unhappy and regrettable, perhaps, but necessary.

A hundred years ago

A hundred years ago today, the bodies of eight men were retrieved from the Thames Estuary.

On the 5th of August 1914 the first British shots had been fired in the First World War, aimed at the SS Königin Luise, a German steam ferry found laying mines. The ship was sunk, but so too was the British light cruiser HMS Amphion, which struck one of those mines early the next morning.

The bodies that were recovered came from both ships, four from each. They were buried together, four coffins covered by the Union Jack, four by the German ensign, and they were accorded full military honours.

At the end of the ceremony, a British bugler sounded the Last Post.

And that, in miniature, is why I've written my forthcoming book on the Last Post. There's something deeply intriguing about a piece of music that originated in the British Army but was so widely adopted that it became a universal, sacred anthem of death and remembrance, applicable equally to both sides in a conflict.

Exceedingly good writing

On the eve of the centenary of the First World War, I rather like Andrew Lycett's piece on Rudyard Kipling in the Telegraph. I re-read a fair bit of Kipling earlier this year, when I was working on a book about The Last Post, and it's still remarkably good stuff.

I would note, though, that it's not true that Kipling 'personally paid for Last Post to be played every night at the Menin Gate at Ypres'. He paid for a bugler to sound the call every night at the cemetery in Loos, where his son was killed.

What I did on my holidays

There was a long gap between my last two posts here, but I wouldn't want anyone thinking I've been entirely idle. Apart from doing my various day-jobs, I've also been writing a book on the story of the Last Post bugle call, due out later this year And the early indications are that it's one of my better efforts. I think.

A press release from Aurum

Sam Harrison at Aurum Press has acquired World Rights in The Last Post by cultural historian Alwyn W. Turner, author of the acclaimed A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s. Through the story of the lone bugle call now used to express grief and remembrance around the world, Turner will explore how the survivors of the First World War sought to honour the memory of the fallen, and how the twentieth century produced new forms of public remembrance for an age of industrial warfare and democracy.
Harrison said: ‘Alwyn is one of the most stylish, thought-provoking and idiosyncratic historians working in Britain today. He’s also the son of an Army bandmaster and an expert on British military music. So, perhaps it should be no surprise that he’s written a delightful ruminative book which approaches the legacy of the Great War in a unique way.’
The Last Post will be published in October 2014.