80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan

Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch Excerpts

Friday 9th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords, it is an honour and a privilege to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Peterborough in this important debate. She brings not just a deep and abiding faith and a passion for community development, the growth of parish congregations and the pivotal role of young people in communities, in two dioceses, but her own personal experience, having been brought up in a rectory, and of working as a manager in the NHS. I have no doubt that she will make a hugely valuable contribution to this House.

This week and these proceedings are very much about memory and commemoration. It is my privilege to chair the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust and the Memorial Gates foundation and Memorial Gates Council. We in the trust are very much about ensuring that Sir Winston Churchill’s personal papers are available and accessible to the nation and the world. Many Members of this House will recall that the Memorial Gates was founded by the late and much-loved Baroness Shreela Flather, who sat for so long on the Benches opposite and who gave so much to our nation’s life. But her enduring gift was the Memorial Gates, which highlight and commemorate the particular contributions of the Commonwealth—and the Asian, African and Caribbean Commonwealth in particular—to the service of this nation. They need to be remembered. But both the archive trust and the Memorial Gates Foundation are not just about remembering of individuals, their service and in many cases, their ultimate sacrifice; they are also about remembering the cause which they served and the reason for that sacrifice.

That cause was most succinctly laid down in the Atlantic Charter, to which reference has already been rightly made. We hold in the archive trust—you can go and look at look at it on the website at any time; it is available generally and globally, and is particularly accessible to schools—the original documentation and the writings of Sir Winston around the charter. The charter represents the causes of self-determination, sovereignty, freedom and justice—the very causes that are at stake in so many places in our world at this time, and particularly on the continent of Europe.

We need to remember that cause. One man who did and who never forgot it was a member of the Royal West African regiment. His name was Joseph Hammond and he has written of his experiences in the 14th Army—our 14th Army of Great Britain in Burma. He served in that army; this weekend, he will be 100 years old, and his life and service will be commemorated in Ghana. I have had the privilege of meeting him—I grew up in the Gold Coast, which is now Ghana—and he has established a foundation, the heart of which is the cause of peace, development and education.

In memorialising, as we have done this week, surely one of the best things we can do is to make sure that, in the review of the curriculum that is currently taking place, the history and sacrifice, and above all the values that we are commemorating, are not lost for generations to come. That is something positive and practical we can do, and I hope that Ministers in responding will indicate that that will be their response to the review.

Joseph Hammond remembered the charter—self-determination, freedom and justice—and he, with other ex-servicemen of the 14th Army, coming back to the Gold Coast, then took part in the struggle for independence, because they took Churchill at his word. They fought for independence and they won, after a demonstration on 28 February 1948. Today in Accra, marking the spot where they demonstrated, there is a marble arch, and emblazoned on that arch are the words “Freedom and Justice”. That is what they fought for, what they won and what we must never forget, and we remember Joseph Hammond and all those others who died and who served.

[Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to take part in this debate today—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

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[Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to take part in this debate today, and I am so grateful to the noble Earl for his graciousness and generosity—I am afraid that I was just a little too keen. I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Peterborough on her excellent maiden speech, and it is always a pleasure to listen to my good friend, and old friend, Lord Boateng. When I looked at the list of the great speakers in this debate, I thought how lucky I was, and I look forward to hearing from you all.

Like many in your Lordships’ House—and, indeed outside it—I have been moved by the fly-pasts, the street parties, the concert last night and the King’s speech, among the many wonderful events in recent days to commemorate VJ Day. As other noble Lords have said, the Second World War did not of course end until what is now known as VJ Day, following the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

I commend this opportunity—unprecedented, I am advised by the House of Lords Library— to mark VE and VJ anniversaries at once. I wish to address VJ Day for personal reasons. I was born in Kuala Lumpur, a colonial child. My father, mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles, their many friends and work colleagues in Malaya, where they all lived, all served, and some died, in the Asian theatre. Many were killed or captured in the fall of Singapore, incarcerated in the notorious Changi prison or, worse, forced to work on the so-called death railway.

My father, Mac Hunter, a second-generation rubber planter, joined the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force at the outbreak of war and was called up following the Japanese invasion in December 1942. He fought his way down the Malay Peninsula to Singapore, chased by the formidable Japanese army. Of the 160 men in his unit, only 40 survived. He escaped in a fortuitously flat-bottomed fishing boat. In a letter a few weeks later, he wrote, “Five days out and up comes a sub, 100 yards in front of us, and looses off three torpedoes. Although I had been in action, ambushed, bombed, shelled, mortared, machine-gunned and several times almost captured, these were easily my worst moments. I honestly thought it was the end. But no, one passed in front and two went clean underneath. I arrived in Colombo in the clothes I stood up in and with 60 cents”. He spent the rest of the war in Force 136, the Far East branch of the Special Operations Executive, fighting behind enemy lines in the jungles of Burma and Malaya, training resistance units in intelligence-gathering, sabotage and hand-to-hand combat, and finally liaising with the forces parachuted in to negotiate the Japanese surrender in Kuala Lumpur. Meanwhile, my mother worked with her sister in the SOE cipher department, decoding signals in the allied HQ in Colombo. I salute the extraordinary courage of the men and women of the SOE in all theatres of the war.

I encourage everyone here, if you are ever in Thailand or Singapore, to visit the cemeteries and memorials in Kanchanaburi and Kranji and the museums in Hellfire Pass and the Ford factory, where the many thousands of military personnel and civilian prisoners who died are honoured. The walls of the Kranji memorial in Singapore are inscribed with the names of over 24,000 allied personnel whose bodies were never found, including the name of my mother’s first husband. I join other noble Lords in thanking the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the extraordinary work it does.

We are all the beneficiaries of what the Second World War generation fought for in Asia, Africa and Europe. We have had 80 years of relative peace in a world bolstered and protected by the international institutions which they put in place—the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, GATT, the WTO and the EEC—a world of enduring alliances built on dreadful sacrifices by both sides in that war. As beneficiaries of their courage and sacrifice, and in their memory, we should keep this in the forefront of our minds.