THE REASON WHY..

Just recently in one of my posts here I mentioned that we were entering the most dismal time of the year and I cited Halloween, Bonfire Night and the `festive period` as giving cause for  my foreboding.   You may have noticed however, that I did not include Remembrance Day in that list and the reason is obvious - it is a special day, one never forgotten especially by ex Servicemen and it deserves to be held with all due respect and dignity.

And I suppose that in all the hullabaloo about Halloween and the rest of it, it is easy to overlook the reasons why Poppy Day really is so special.  So here`s a little history that I hope might put the day in its proper context.

On 7th November, 1920, in the strictest secrecy, four unidentified bodies of British soldiers were exhumed from temporary cemeteries, one at Ypres, one at Arras, one at Asine and one from the Somme.  None of the soldiers who did the digging were told why.  The bodies were taken by field ambulance to General Headquarters at St.-Pol-Sur-Ter Noise and once there, they were draped with the union flag.  Sentries were posted and Brigadier General Wyatt, along with Colonel Gell, selected one of the bodies at random, following which the  three remaining bodies were reburied.  A French Honour Guard was selected and stood guard by the coffin of the chosen soldier overnight.

On the morning of 8th November a specially designed coffin made of oak from the grounds of Hampton Court arrived and the Unknown Warrior was placed inside.  A crusader sword and a shield was placed on top  with the shield being inscribed, "A British Warrior who fell in the GREAT WAR 1914-1918 for King and Country."

On the 9th November the Unknown Warrior was taken by horse drawn carriage through Guards of Honour to the quayside, to the sound of tolling bells and bugle calls. There he was saluted by Marshall Foche and taken aboard HMS Verdun, bund for Dover.  The coffin stood on deck covered by wreaths and surrounded by the French Honour Guard.

Arriving at Dover the Unknown Warrior was met with a 19-gun salute - something normally only reserved for Field Marshals.  A special train had been arranged to convey the coffin to Victoria Station, where it remained overnight and on the morning of 11th November the Unknown Warrior was finally taken to Westminster Abbey.

The concept of the Unknown Warrior was the idea of David Railton, a Padre who had served on the front line during the Great War and the union flag he had used as an altar cloth whilst serving at the front line was the same one which had been draped over the coffin.  It was his intention that each of the relatives of the 517,773 combatants whose bodies had not been identified might believe that the Unknown Warrior might well be their lost father, husband, brother or son.

That is the reason why the poppies are worn and why, on 11th November each year, we remember them.

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A few years ago I remember being on the top of Pentire Point on the north Cornwall coast and happening to discover this plaque which marked the spot where the poet Laurence Binyon composed, "For the Fallen" which was first published in The Times in September 1914.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

A TIMELY REMINDER...

Amongst our frequent visits to south Devon was a week we spent in the coastal village of Torcross.   It wasn`t the greatest holiday we`ve ever had;  the cottage we stayed in was `iffy` and the neighbours were decidedly `unwelcoming,` despite which we were blessed with decent weather and a few decent coast path walks, memorably the hazardous bit between Start Point and Mattiscombe beach.

But Torcross was interesting.  Along with many other villages in the South Hams area, Torcross was evacuated to make way for 15,000 allied troops who needed the area to practice for the D-Day landings.  But in the early hours of 28 April 1944 a tragic accident occurred during a training exercise when nine German torpedo boats intercepted a three mile long convoy of vessels travelling from Portland to Slapton Sands to undertake the D-Day landing rehearsals.   Two tank landing ships were sunk with the loss of 946 American servicemen but poor communications by the allied command led to badly times shelling on the beach, killing about 300 more men.

Over 1,000 lives were therefore lost over the course of that operation, most of them through American `friendly fire.`   So it seems fitting that a Sherman amphibious tank along with several plaques stand at Torcross car park between Slapton Ley and the beach as memorials to those men who lost their lives in such tragic circumstances.

And it also seems fitting, on this 75th anniversary weekend of VE Day, to remember our  week in Torcross as being clearly less memorable than the tragedies that took place all those years ago.   Anyway, here`s a photo I took showing Torcross and that fateful beach as it is these days....... 

FOR THE FALLEN...

This is the Pilgrims Way, the long distance and very ancient footpath that leads from Winchester to Canterbury.   It passes through my bit of Kent and I took the photo above where the path hugs the lea of the North Downs in this part of Kent.  A little further in to our walk, the Pilgrims Way is crossed by another footpath and so we turned left and started to make our way up the slope of the North Downs.....

We came to a field and followed the path until it came to a gateway which led to the higher ground......

And just beyond the gateway something caught my eye......

And I wondered what it could possibly be in this remote spot a long way off the beaten track.   So we investigated by tramping through part of the hillside that is covered with wild thyme and brambles and it became apparent that what we were seeing was some kind of memorial.   It turned out to be something rather special and so I took this close up photo which revealed the story.......

And a little research when we got home showed that Tommy Pinkham was the Squadron Leader of the Royal Air Force No. 19 Fighter Squadron and the youngest Squadron Leader in the RAF at the age of just 25.   According to the Fighter Command Combat Report dated 5th September 1940, eleven members of the No. 19 Fighter Squadron, lead by Squadron Leader Pinkham, took off from RAF Duxford at 09.47 hours to patrol Hornchurch, an area east of London near the Thames Estuary.   Forty Luftwaffe Dornier 215 bombers escorted by 40 Messerschmitt 109 fighters were spotted approaching from the west.   At 10.15 hours Tommy and five others attacked the bombers with the other five aircraft in the squadron attacking the Luftwaffe fighters.  Squadron Leader Pinkham was last seen engaging three Dornier bombers but became a casualty, crashing on this spot on this Kentish hillside, where the memorial is maintained to remember his selfless heroism.

It seemed especially poignant to come across this memorial during this year which marks the 75th anniversary of VE Day.  And so we left this now very special place which now has the peace and serenity befitting its surroundings, thanks to men like Tommy Pinkham and his colleagues, to whom we owe so very much.

No. 19 Fighter Squadron at RAF Duxford - Squadron Leader Tommy Pinkham in the centre.

///

60 YEARS ON...

This is an interesting photo - for me, anyway.   It shows the old cottages lining St. John`s Street in Hythe.   Sixty years ago it was but a small village on the western shore of Southampton Water and it`s where I spent my boyhood years.   A good place to be growing up - our cottage was just down the road beyond the big white house and we lived there until the early 1950s when BOAC closed their flying boat maintenance base and we had to leave the village for my father to find alternative employment elsewhere.

But the memories of that place and that time stay with me and 60 years on I still look back with fond memories of happy days and good friends, despite the ravages of post-war austerity.   I wasn`t aware of any austerity as such, as I had only ever known how life had been during the war years after which rationing of all kinds of things was still with us.

One of my good friends was William (`Billy`) Scammell, sadly no longer with us but remembered as one of this country`s finest post war poets, editors and critics.   He and I spent those formative years alternating between school, the Solent shore and the New Forest and maybe it was because of those places that we both developed a kind of inbred affection for what was home for us.   Bill went on to encapsulate those feelings in some of his finest work - his collection of published poetry and prose contains references to Hythe that will be familiar to those, like me, who know it so well.

But Bill was about more than sentimentality and some of his poems are concerned with deeper issues.  Perhaps the best illustration I can give is `Remembering the Great War` which has been used for study in degree courses and which, of course, is very relevant as the nation remembers the centenary of the end of the first world war........

Opaque and resonant as sacred texts 
the names alone sound out a litany:
Passchendaele, Ypres, the Somme. Verdun......

Some dropped perfect but for a sweet
smudge of gas - others, dispersing, spanned
earth in the wildest hug.

Men flashed hissing to their elements
like spit gobbed on a stove.  One officer
in nomansland apologised to his troops

behind for lasting in such loud low screams.
Four men unwound their lives to staunch
his uproar - failed, like the concerted knuckles

hammered round his teeth.  Gowned neutrally
for christenings, deaths, history thumbs
its cheap editions, weltering in echoes.

I think of Sassoon`s tall heart, contracting
fiercest love for his own men, one of whom
shot him from excess of zeal;  of Graves`s

stretched contempts.  The fires they grazed rot down
in village squares.  On memory`s floor words rut
and root, nosing blind and ghastly at the tongue.

The photo above was taken from the churchyard of St. John`s church and its bell will surely ring out in solemn remembrance as I was once, only once, honoured to ring it to call Bill and my other boyhood friends to afternoon Sunday school.   That`s what we did on Sunday afternoons all those 60 years ago.   I wonder if it happens nowadays.

A DAY TO REMEMBER...

This is Dudley, our new golden retriever.  He won`t take the place of Barney or Henry or any of our previous five retrievers but he will be welcomed into our home, our family, our community and our village when he joins us in a couple of weeks` time.   On Saturday we made the journey down to the New Forest where we had to choose which puppy to have from the adorable litter.  We were left with a choice between two and it was difficult to choose between them - I think we would happily have had both - but in the end we chose this one;  I`m sure you can see why.  

We then went on to revisit one or two places that are a little bit special, well to me anyway.   On the way we drove through some of the open heathland areas of the New Forest and I caught this picture of  a new foal and its mum which kind of sums up what the forest is all about:-

Then on to Lepe on Hampshire`s south coast.  I still recall that when I was about five years old in 1944 walking to Lepe beach from the house my mother and I were staying in with relatives during the war.  It was the first time I had ever seen the sea and it was at the time of the build-up to D-Day in June 1944.  I still remember the hordes of American trucks driving through the village and the troops throwing packets of sweets to us urchins as they drove through en route to Lepe where the Mulberry harbours had been constructed.   These days Lepe is a busy country park but still has the views out to the Isle of Wight.  Here`s a photo of that timeless view I took on what was truly a day to remember:-

(As ever, please click on photos for better images)

PLUS CA CHANGE...

Recognise this?   Thought not, for it was written and recorded in 1970 at the time of the appalling loss of civilian and military life as a result of the Biafra War.  The lines above are, of course, from Gilbert O`Sullivan`s `Nothing Rhymed` and it seems that nothing really rhymed for him back then - nothing made sense - the world had gone mad - and he was troubled by the indifference shown by the many to the terrible plight of the few, even though the few in the Biafra conflict accounted for between 500,000 and two million civilian lives lost to starvation.  

It`s a theme that was repeated in 1986 when Neil Finn of Crowded House again witnessed that same indifference.  A few lines from `Don`t dream it`s over` illustrate what I mean:-

`And the papers today

Full of war and of waste

But you turn right over to the TV Page.`

I guess it was forever thus and those, like me, fortunate enough to have our Bonaparte Shandy and our apple pies no doubt still turn to the TV pages and become yet more desensitised to what is really going on in an increasingly troubled world.  

But here`s a shout for the much misunderstood Gilbert who, in a catalogue of genius songs, shone a light on his own bewilderment, his own frailties, his fears, his sensitivities and his own private sense of loss (alone again - naturally.)  So, here`s `Nothing Rhymed` reminding us all that the world is still full of war and of waste and that in reality nothing really rhymes but also that nothing ever really changes:-

A SURPRISING BALANCE..

Earlier in the week, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Extremely Reverend Justin Welby, caused some eyebrows to be raised when he expressed a "profound feeling of regret and deep sorrow" in his speech in Germany on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the allied bombings of Dresden.  He went on to describe how the allies "brought death and destruction on a scale and with a ferocity it is impossible to imagine."

Now I guess that my reaction was similar to that of many others in feeling a sense of outrage at these remarks and it exposed once more the problem that the Omnipotent Being has with his or her representatives here on Earth.  My mind instantly recalled the horrors of the Holocaust, the London Blitz, the destruction of Coventry and my own boyhood memories of hearing the bombing of Southampton every night as I slept fitfully beneath the stairs of our New Forest hovel.  None of these events seemed to have drawn reciprocal feelings of `regret and deep sorrow` from our friends in the Fatherland.

And so it came as an unexpected but welcome surprise to see that the Archbishop`s words had little immediate impact in Germany, where they were overshadowed by an address from the German President, Joachim Gauck, in which he laid the blame for the atrocities of the war clearly with Germany and he rejected any attempt to compare it with any Allied responsibility.  "We know who started the murderous war, we know it," he said. "And that`s why we will never forget the victims of German warfare.  We do not forget, even as we remember here today the German victims."

President Gauck was speaking at the same memorial service which the Archbishop also addressed and it was clear that he had come under no pressure from the German side to express `regret or seep sorrow.`  "A country that is responsible for a monstrosity like the Holocaust cannot expect to go unpunished and emerge undamaged from a war that it has provoked," said President Gauck.

So, rather than employing my usual penchant for hasty conclusions, maybe, just maybe, even after all these years, there are still lessons to be learnt. 

Well, we now seem to heading for yet more conflict in the Middle East with the good ol` US of A having started their concerted air attacks in Syria against IS strongholds, backed by a coalition of Middle East countries.   The British Coalition Government meanwhile is considering its position and will doubtless consult its focus groups and stakeholder partners whilst setting up a set of Conventions and Inquiries to determine whether any action might be considered, probably not taking effect until after the General Election in May next year provided that all-party agreement can be reached.  

In that context it was singularly unhelpful for former Prime Minister Tony Blair to openly state that, in his opinion and given the wisdom of his experience,  all military means especially including ground forces should be used against the IS forces if the West is to retain any degree of credibility and control in that part of the world.  Well thanks, Tone, but we`ve tried that before and the last thing we need is a discredited egotist, posing of all things as the Middle East Peace Envoy, coming out with stuff like that.  A call to arms to be ignored, I feel.

And on Friday of this week another battle will commence in the rarefied surroundings of the Gleneagles Golf Thingy up in Scotland when once again the good ol` US of A will battle it out with Europe for possession of the Ryder Cup.   Now today I see that yet another belligerent retired Caledonian is being asked to give a rousing motivational speech to the Europe Team before they tee off.  Yes, folks, none other than that model of restrained persuasiveness (Sir) Alex Ferguson, late of Old Trafford and the Football Association`s Disciplinary Committee.

In all seriousness, Ferguson will give Team Europe a rousing talk this evening either in his inimitable incoherent mumble or his trademark hair-drying rant and it would hardly surprise me if any errant European golfer stepping out of line ends up with a mashie niblick around his ears.   A call to arms to be feared, I suspect.

Now the above two instances are at the extreme ends of confrontation - one potentially lethal, the other almost certainly irrelevant.  It just seems a pity that both are coloured by the unfathomable calls to arms from two gentlemen who surely by now must have learnt the wisdom of keeping counsel rather than causing disquiet whenever they open their mouths.

IN NAME ONLY...

Like most communities up and down the land, here in Dibley the Parish Council are planning to mark the centenary of World War 1.   And in common with most other communities, we have our very own memorial outside the village church in memory of those service personnel who died in that dreadful conflict.   However, there are possibly six names missing from the war memorial and the Parish Council is attempting to establish a definite link with the village and to seek relatives to obtain their permission for names to be added.  

It`s then proposed to produce a booklet giving brief biographies of all residents of the village who are recorded by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as having perished in the Great War.  This initiative would then be followed by producing a brief history of the village during the conflict and, finally, to include on the war memorial the names of local residents who have died as a result of service in any of this country`s conflicts since the end of the Second World War.

Now for good reason I may have been a tad critical of the Parish Council in the past but this initiative is well founded, wholly admirable and heartfelt and I hope it gets the support it needs to make it succeed.

Now all of this has the effect of making us reflect yet again on the appalling events that beset the world 100 years ago and at this distance it`s impossible to really imagine how things must have been.   But perhaps at least a flavour of those times may have been captured by my old school friend, the late William Scammell, in his poem `Remembering the Great War:-

Opaque and resonant as sacred texts
the names alone sound out a litany;
Passchendaele; Ypres, the Somme, Verdun.....

Some dropped perfect but for a sweet
smudge of gas - others, dispersing, spanned
earth in the wildest hug.

Men flashed hissing to their elements
like spit gobbed on a stove.  One officer
in nomansland apologised to his troops

behind for lasting in such loud slow screams.
Four men unwound their lives to staunch
his uproar - failed, like the concerted knuckles

hammered round his teeth.  Gowned neutrally
for christening, deaths, history thumbs
its cheap editions, weltering in echoes.

I think of Sassoon`s tall heart, contracting

fiercest love for his own men, one of whom
shot him from excess of zeal;  of Graves`s

stretched contempts.  The fires they grazed rot down
in village squares.  On memory`s floor words rut
and root, nosing blind and ghastly at the tongue.

Bill`s poem, like those of so many others, gives us a chilling glimpse of the almost indescribable horror that we, 100 years on, are struggling to comprehend.   And it has long occurred to me as surprising that it is still referred to as The Great War, but perhaps in name only, for in reality it was - and should be remembered as - the Most God-awful Horrific War there has ever been.

Harping back to my recent post concerning the centenary of the outbreak of World War 1, amid fears that the way in which Britain might mark the Great War could affect relations with Angela Merkel`s administration,  a couple of months ago Germany  sent a special envoy to call on Britain `not to celebrate the centenary but to focus on the idea that the European Union brought peace to the continent.`

I got the sense that the German government was almost pleading with Britain not to go on mentioning the war too much.  Now I`m sure we`ll all try our hardest to comply with the wishes of our Teutonic chums but I wouldn`t be surprised if the war isn`t mentioned now and again over the next few years but we`ll just have to hope that we`ll get away with it. 

TREAD SOFTLY..

I think I`m right in saying that HM Gov. is proposing to spend more than £50million over the next four years with a programme to `commemorate` the First World War - The Great War as it became known once it was over.   In making the announcement, Dave Cameron expressed the hope that remembering the `sacrifice` of British troops would "capture our national spirit in every corner of the country, in every school, workplace, town hall and local community in a commemoration that, like the Diamond Jubilee in 2012, says something about who we are as a people." 

Politicians and officials in Westminster and Whitehall are beavering away on detailed plans to mark this pivotal time in our history and already an extensive list of events has been drawn up.   Now it`s clearly true that occasions such as this do provide an opportunity for us to reflect on "who we are as a people" but if the only purpose of remembering The Great War is to provide us with a warm glow of national pride, especially when compared to the Diamond Jubilee by the Prime Minister no less, then I fear that the reality of that conflict will be buried in a welter of sentiment.

In searching for a more realistic reflection of The Great War, I was reminded that my old school chum, the late poet and critic William Scammell, wrote one of the most raw and evocative interpretations of what it must really have been like:-

Opaque and resonant as sacred texts
the names alone sound out a litany:
Passchendaele, Ypres, the Somme, Verdun...

Some dropped perfect but for a sweet
smudge of gas - others, dispersing, spanned
earth in the wildest hug.

Men flashed hissing to their elements
like spit gobbed on a stove.  One officer
in nomansland apologised to his troops

behind for lasting in such loud slow screams.
Four men unwound their lives to staunch
his uproar - failed, like the concerted knuckles

hammered round his teeth.  Gowned neutrally
for christenings, deaths, history thumbs
its cheap editions, weltering in echoes.

I think of Sassoon`s tall heart, contracting
fiercest love for his own men, one of whom
shot him from excess of zeal;  of Graves`s

stretched contempts.  The fires they grazed rot down
in village squares.  On memory`s floor words rut
and root, nosing blind and ghastly at the tongue.

Instead of four years of superficial tub thumping which runs the risk of merely creating a trivialised sideshow, surely our time, energy and resources would be better spent on a truly meaningful celebration of the centenary of the end of the Great War in 2018.   And  in the meantime, we should tread softly and respectfully in memory of the countless millions who perished or whose lives were changed forever.   We should remember them, rather than making the centenary of the start of the Great War an excuse for us to feel good about ourselves.