Remembrance Sunday at Sandwich, Kent, 1964
I went to attend the Armistice commemoration on Sunday in my home town of Sandwich, whence my grandfather set out for Gallipoli in 1915 and whither he fortunately returned from Ypres in 1918. This was the programme:
As you can see, the hearth of events was St Clement’s Church, starting with Holy Communion and finishing with the church’s bells ringing out. I wonder how usual such a religious setting was in the country as a whole. Moreover, the Rector of Sandwich said key prayers at the War Memorial in the language of the Book of Common Prayer and I was staggered that many of the 200 people present recited the Lord’s Prayer in that version, too. Remarkable and most moving.
When I was sixteen, I took the above black and white photograph of the ceremony at Sandwich’s War Memorial. On Sunday I took this one from the same spot:
Remembrance Sunday at Sandwich, Kent, 2018
For me it is fascinating to compare the two photographs and events. My 1964 snap looks almost as though it needs Peter Jackson’s treatment from They Shall Not Grow Old! It portrays another age. At Sunday’s commemoration, of course, there were no veterans of the Great War, and extremely few from the Second World War. There was no live military music (except the two bugle posts, played by a civilian) and no marching. The whole occasion, I fear, would have struck people of fifty years ago as bewilderingly lacking in formality. Yet there was no mistaking the sincerity of everyone involved. Perhaps what we see here is the difference between deference and respect. Another massive difference was the role of women in Sunday’s event. At least half of the C.C.F. contingent from the local grammar school were girls.
Before the wreath-laying, I had placed this cross amongst others in the earth at the side of the war memorial:
The War is over, and personally I find it too early to say what conclusions I draw from the often eviscerating experience of following it (and George Calderon’s war in particular) since 4 August 2014. But the keynote of the service at the war memorial, of a long family message left amongst the wreaths, and of the Mayor of Sandwich’s address at the lighting of the closing beacon, was that to be worthy of our ancestors’ self-sacrifice we must deeply learn the lessons of the Great War and apply them in today’s increasingly unstable world. People are clearly worried by the parallels with a century ago.
For myself, I suppose I have become more certain than ever that truthful remembering is the backbone of a nation’s life. The vital act is the individual’s recall of the dead and all that they meant and mean to us. One may be uncertain about the physical expression of remembrance — gigantic monuments, wreaths, the National Memorial Arboretum, modern art installations — but for once I wanted to mark my mental remembering with an object, a simple wooden cross pressed into England’s earth.
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears here.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears here on Amazon UK.
It is the local, unpolished commemorations that have been the most moving over the last few weeks. The national events, with the exception of Danny Boyle’s sand sculptures, have seemed to me predictable or over elaborate.
On Saturday I went to a small art exhibition in the Arts Centre at Didcot, a town hardly associated with artistic originality. A local artist, Anna Dillon, had painted a series of landscapes of the Western Front as it is now. The exhibition began with landscapes of her village, including the farm Masefield was living in in 1914, then moved to the battle-fields, took us around the most famous sites, and finally returned to the village. The paintings were strikingly bright and colourful with only the outlines of a crater or a cemetery in a far corner to remind us of what had occurred there a hundred years before. Each painting was dedicated to a local soldier who had died and between the paintings the artist had posted an explanatory text and a representation of Nash’s war-time engraving or painting of the location. The exhibition was poignant, creative and fresh, so different from the carefully curated, worthy but stale homages to the old masters that the National Gallery and Royal Academy continually mount.
I have taken two things therefore from the last few months. One is obviously the depth of feeling – the sincere desire among the adult population in all communities to commemorate the centenary. The other is the staggering burst of national creativity and energy the centenary has released at the local level. Every parish, village and town found its own original way of marking the event through drama, song and visual art. Most of the people organising the events knew next to nothing about modernism, let alone postmodernism, but they found non-commercial, simple, original and even daring ways of commemorating the end of the Great War which put the establishment icons of the British arts to shame. For this reason alone, we can be sure that the country has a future! Out of the darkness has come light.
Your comment goes to the heart of the matter. Many many thanks. It illustrates what, with hindsight, I feel was the arc of the commemoration: moving from the big national events, such as the lighting of the lamps on 4 August 2014, the Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation, or official ceremonies at the foreign war memorials, to the increasingly local and personal acts of remembrance, the increasingly individual interest in the fallen as human beings, exemplified by Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old and above all Andrew Tatham’s project A Group Photograph. Inevitably the four years were conceived as a top-down memorial, but that has metamorphosed into a bottom-up act of commemoration. The people woke and the people spoke.