First World War

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I first pay particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, for his memorable contribution to the debate. He mentioned Newcastle, and I know that he will be as pleased as I am that the Renwick memorial will feature on one of the Royal Mail’s new stamps to be published in a few weeks’ time.

In 1976, the late Lord Avon published his autobiography, covering his life between 1897 and 1917. It was a personal account of his younger days and of his experiences in the Great War as an officer. It is a fascinating account of an era long gone. In the final sentence of the book, Lord Avon says:

“I had entered the holocaust still childish and I emerged tempered by my experience and bereft of many friends, but with my illusions intact, neither shattered nor cynical, to face a changed world”.

He used the word holocaust, and it was a holocaust because it was slaughter on a mass scale. He talked about a changed world, which is why he gave his autobiography the title, Another World—for that is what it was.

Many autobiographies were written at the time or shortly after—some of them in the years leading up to the Second World War—and I would like to concentrate on the three themes of legacy, remembrance and reconciliation. First, we have to remember that 9.5 million soldiers died in the Great War on all sides. With all the national fervour in all countries in August 1914, very few understood what they had unleashed until very much later. I do not see our commemoration of those years being just about 1914 to 1918, because the Versailles settlement was in 1919 and most of our war memorials were constructed in the 1920s, so most will have their centenaries between some five or six years and 15 years from now. In terms of public funding to mark their centenary, I hope this can be borne in mind.

I am deeply impressed by the work of the Imperial War Museum and the British Library. The First World War Centenary Partnership by the Imperial War Museum, with its exhibitions, events, digital resources, along with those of the British Library, are extremely important, because they extend the availability of archives across the world. I pay tribute, too, to schools for their work in enabling young people to understand more about the war, which is in part the consequence of the national curriculum. The plans over the next five years for educational visits and funding for conservation projects involving young people—for example, plans for commemorative paving stones where recipients of the Victoria Cross lived—are all good to see, because they are all things that give a local dimension to national commemoration events. I hope that, when commemorations are complete, we will leave as a legacy war memorials, and buildings that serve as war memorials, with secure financial futures. I hope, too, that, with the legacy, there is a deeper understanding of the importance of diplomacy. It was the devastating failure of diplomacy which led to military planning dominating decision-making in the final days before war broke out. I am one of those who believes that, with better, faster and more inclusive diplomacy, the war could have been localised in eastern and south-eastern Europe. However, as we know, Germany invaded Belgium and war was declared.

Much of the remembrance will be spontaneous. We will remember the countries that supported us, the Commonwealth, and countries in Europe that supported us as our allies. But in all of these, can we remember the role of the Chinese Labour Corps, which made an immense contribution to the war effort, particularly on the Western Front?

On the remembrance events, I notice from the Library note that peaks of activity will be based on particular anniversaries and major political and parliamentary moments. That is right—I understand that—but I hope that, as we commemorate those events and moments, we will never forget that it was individuals who died and that individuals should be remembered as individuals, not just as a statistic. So, as an example, when we come to commemorate the first day of the Somme battle, on 1 July 2016, in which 20,000 British troops died, we will remember that each was an individual. I wonder whether in local churches the names of those who died, listed on war memorials in our towns, villages and cities, might be read out on, or close to, the centenary of their death. Their names appear on most war memorials and most can be traced on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website and other similar sites. It is possible to track most if not all of them. Perhaps I might add to the words of warmth for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It does a brilliant job. All the war graves I have visited—recently the First World War cemeteries in north-west Italy—are maintained to the highest possible standard.

The noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, referred to the centenary of the poem “Adlestrop”. I will make a similar but different point. Yesterday the “Today” programme marked the centenary of the writing of “Adlestrop” by Edward Thomas by having it read by his wife, Helen. Of course, as the noble Lord reminded us, Edward Thomas was killed at Arras in 1917. That has provoked me to consider whether there might be plans for all poets, writers and composers killed in the war to have a specific commemoration in the media—perhaps on the “Today” programme in that exact time slot—on the exact centenary of their deaths.

There are many possibilities. Some are well known, such as Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, but others less so; for example, the Scottish composer, Cecil Coles, killed in 1918, whose work “Behind the Lines” was composed on the Western Front and found in the archives of George Watson’s College in Edinburgh a few years ago. Some of his manuscripts still had shrapnel embedded in them. His work “Cortège” was used by Channel 4 in its series on the First World War but his quality as a composer is less widely known. Perhaps there could be a commemoration of such people in the course of the next four years.

Finally, on reconciliation, I am very pleased that a football match is to be held on Christmas Day to commemorate the Christmas truce. It is very interesting that so many letters from British soldiers who witnessed that evaded any form of censorship and describe the events and reveal the feelings of men as individuals, who time and again did not want to be killing other soldiers. I am also very pleased that the event at the St Symphorien Cemetery is being held as an act of reconciliation. As the Minister said, that is where British and German troops were buried close to each other in August 1914. Of course, in 1918 Mons was the site where the final shots of World War I were fired. Might it be possible to give consideration to what might happen in 1918 to mark the closure of the physical conflict?

The nature of war changes. It is too easy to apply hindsight to what happened in the First World War but the lessons learnt in that war are enduring and universal.