First World War: Centenary

Lord Cope of Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cope of Berkeley]

“When you go home”, look at your local war memorial. War memorials are our inheritance from those who first resolved that, “We will remember them”. Most are getting close to their centenary now. They belong to us all, and therefore in a way often seem to belong to no one. I am a trustee of the War Memorials Trust. The trust helps to conserve such memorials of every kind in the UK. Jointly with English Heritage, we have just launched warmemorialsonline.org.uk which enables the public—including noble Lords, if I may say so—to register their local memorials and to tell us about their condition.

Another of our programmes helps to prevent the stealing of plaques by metal thieves. Metals at risk can be painted with a forensic liquid called SmartWater which enables stolen metals to be traced, even if they are melted down. It is a great deterrent that is now widely applied to church roofs and other vulnerable metals. Thanks to our partners, the SmartWater Foundation, any war memorial can be protected in this way free of charge. I hope that noble Lords will ensure that their local memorials are recorded and protected.

I hope also that the commemorations will include all the participants in that terrible war. It was not, as it sometimes seems, just Britain v Germany full stop, as it were. My father first served on the Western Front at Passchendaele and elsewhere, partly with colonial troops from the West Indies. After recovering from a wound, he was sent to join Allenby’s force in Palestine, which had a large Anzac element fighting alongside the Arabs against the Turks. En route there his troopship was torpedoed and sunk in the Mediterranean by a German submarine, and he and others were rescued by one of the escorting destroyers from the Japanese navy. It is for such reasons that it was called World War 1, and we should commemorate it in its entirety. However, in my view the real disaster was the Versailles Peace Conference. One commentator at the time said that we had fought the war to end all wars, and he feared that we had just agreed the peace to end all peace.