First World War (Commemoration)

Damian Collins Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dr Murrison]

I certainly agree. The BBC has a difficult balance to strike. In my view, it is doing that extremely well. I particularly commend its efforts to shine a light on some of the perhaps least well explored elements of the great war. We all know about the mud and the trenches. We know rather less about the home front. I hope that, as we proceed through the four-year centenary, we will have a more holistic view of what it meant to be alive between 1914 and 1918.

The UK’s commemoration will begin on Monday 4 August in Glasgow, where the JoyFest of the Commonwealth games will be replaced by the solemnity of Glasgow cathedral and remembrance in George square. In the evening, the evocative Commonwealth War Graves Commission site at St Symphorien near Mons has been chosen for an event based on reconciliation, which we know the public want and expect to see. German and Belgian representatives will join us, as will Heads of State and Government and the families of those interred, irrespective of nationality.

On the same day, the Step Short project in Folkestone will unveil its memorial arch over the road of remembrance, down which troops marched to embarkation. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) on bringing that important project to maturity. It is a flagship for thousands of independent projects up and down the country that have been inspired by the centenary.

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his kind words about the Step Short project. Does he agree that the debate is timely because the memorial arch is being erected today in Folkestone?

[Dr Murrison]

I am pleased to hear my hon. Friend’s news. I have been watching the project with much interest. I know that it will be an important part of our commemoration. As I said in response to the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden), it is important to commemorate all elements of the centenary. The magic of Folkestone is the ability to plot the course of that final trip for so many thousands of servicemen as they embarked for France. Many, of course, never returned but many did—the majority did. Folkestone in those years held a particular place in the hearts of the service community, either because it was the point of embarkation or because, more happily, it was the point of return.

At 11 o’clock, the hour at which Britain entered the war on 4 August, the day will be closed with a vigil centred on Westminster abbey, which will run in parallel with similar services at St Anne’s cathedral in Belfast, Llandaff cathedral in Cardiff and other churches and faith communities across the country. At the same time, public buildings, workplaces and homes will be encouraged to participate in Lights Out to refer to the observation by Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey on the eve of war that the lamps were going out across Europe and they would not be lit again in his time. As part of that, the Royal British Legion plans to sell a million candles to remember a million fallen, each one extinguished at 11 pm. Here is the clever bit. In the darkness, a single lamp will be left burning, since hope never dies, and it never did.

The centenary is a marathon, not a sprint. Following 4 August, we have the 2014 season of remembrance, Gallipoli in April next year, Jutland and the Somme in 2016 and Passchendaele in 2017. In 2018, Amiens to Armistice will mark the last 100 days of the war. Interspersed will be myriad anniversaries from Coronel to Cambrai marking the waypoints of war, each commemorated appropriately with international participants and national units and their successors.

Big anniversaries, with their attendant large-scale national events, are pegs on which to hang the clothes of the centenary. The richness will come from 1,000 projects, from the flagship rebirth of the Imperial War museum on 19 July, to the Woodland Trust centenary forests to be planted in each of the four nations, to the small local initiatives that I heard about a week ago in Norfolk, as the guest of my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson). Many of those are funded from the £56 million already allocated by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Many are part of the First World War Centenary Partnership, which now has 3,000 member organisations in 50 countries, and many already have the active involvement of constituency MPs.

The 14-18 Now cultural programme will add granularity and texture to the centenary and bring it alive. May I pick out its letter to an unknown soldier project, a literary memorial centred on the enigmatic statue of a soldier reading a letter on platform 1 at Paddington station? The statue makes us wonder what is in the soldier’s letter. Members of the public are now invited to write that letter. All sorts of celebrities have already done so, and MPs certainly should.

I recently sent a note to all right hon. and hon. Members about the centenary poppy campaign, which is a great way for MPs to get involved locally and in the process both proliferate wild flowers and raise money to help the Royal British Legion to support today’s service community. I urge colleagues to take up the Commonwealth War Graves Commission offer to visit its sites in this country. There is most likely to be at least one such site in or close to each UK constituency. There are at least two Commonwealth War Graves Commission commissioners in the House today. I know that they will underscore that point. It is a revelation to many of us how many Commonwealth War Graves Commission sites there are in this country. They are not by any manner of means all on the western front.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright), who reminded us in his excellent speech that the losses of the first world war occurred not just in Gallipoli or in the trenches, but at home as well. The raid on the Hartlepools was a terrible story that is well remembered now and had a huge impact on people at the time. In Folkestone in 1917, more than 60 people were killed in a single air raid. German planes that were looking for London dropped their bombs on the way back to the continent, killing innocent women and children—including children who were only a few months old—in the process. That was a tragic and terrible incident, and we should remember that there were important losses at home, as well as those on the western front. One important thing we will find during this centenary period is that we have forgotten lots of things about the war. I am talking about stories of individual heroism and of the way communities worked together, which were not part of the big narrative and are not found in the history books, but which are very important local, community stories. During these centenary years we will have the chance to tell them again.

My main focus as the MP for Folkestone and Hythe—I also declare my interest as chairman of Step Short, the first world war centenary charity in Folkestone—has been to mark the role that Folkestone played in the war effort as the main port of embarkation from these islands to the western front. There were more than 10 million movements of service personnel through Folkestone port during the war; those were people from all around the world, as well as from all corners of these islands. During this centenary we should remember that more than 1 million men from the Indian subcontinent, as well as people from China and south America, fought in the allied war effort and cause during the war. As part of Folkestone’s commemorations, we are certainly remembering those people, too.

We should also remember that we not only sent people out to fight, but gave comfort to people seeking refuge. Folkestone received tens of thousands of refugees from Belgium in the first weeks of the war; these people were fleeing for their lives, fleeing persecution and fleeing the advance of the enemy troops through their country— through their homeland. They came to this country and we gave them a home. These people went all across the UK, but tens of thousands of them stayed in Folkestone during the war. A great painting, painted in 1915, commemorating the arrival of the Belgian refugees sits in the town hall in Folkestone, and they are a very important part of our community’s story about the work people did during the war.

The main community effort we have supported to mark the centenary has been the building of a memorial arch that will stand over the route that those millions of soldiers marched to the ships waiting in the harbour to take them on their journey to France. The walk down the Slope road, as it was known then—after the war it was renamed the Road of Remembrance—to the harbour was for many the final journey leaving this country. Wilfred Owen spent his last night in England at the Grand hotel in Folkestone, billeted there before making that journey. So we wanted to do something that marked that route and that journey, and we are building a memorial arch over the route they took. As I mentioned earlier, this debate is particularly timely because that arch is being assembled today and will be in place by the end of the evening. On 4 August, His Royal Highness Prince Harry will be coming to Folkestone to dedicate the arch as part of the centenary commemorations and that centenary day itself.

I remember going on a battlefield tour when I was at school, 25 years ago, with my history teacher Mr Fitzgerald, who is still head of history at St Mary’s Roman Catholic high school in Herefordshire. He has been running exactly the same battlefield tour for 25 years, taking schoolboys and schoolgirls to Tyne Cot and Vimy ridge to see things for themselves and walk in the footsteps of the soldiers. That trip had a profound impact on me; one has to stand on the site and experience it. Our school always went in the autumn. Typically for that part of Europe, it is often blowy, cold and wet. Visitors get the tiniest insight into and glimpse of what it might have been like to have been standing there during the war. We could never truly know what it was like; we cannot imagine, in our lives today, what it must have been like to fight in that war. There is something sacred about these places, which is why it is right that the Government are supporting schools and encouraging them to take such trips, in order to get more schools to go to the battlefields to see them for themselves.

That is why we in Folkestone also wanted to dedicate a space that was relevant to the war and the experience of the soldiers—the place they marched down. They marched down the Road of Remembrance, they could see the ships in the harbour waiting to take them; they could see France, where they were going; and, in the distance, they were probably able to hear the guns at the front, which were only 100 miles away. They were not looking with wonder across the channel at the boats crossing; they were looking across a frontier to a very hostile place they were journeying to.

Throughout this debate we have heard stories of people who won great awards for their gallantry—Victoria Crosses and other military medals. Many of them were not servicemen before the war. They were not professional, trained soldiers. They gave up their lives at home, their families and their livelihoods, and they sacrificed themselves. They demonstrated incredible bravery, fighting for themselves, their communities and their families to defend their homeland. They demonstrated the incredible depths of resilience and bravery that probably everyone has. When we consider this first world war centenary period, we must ask ourselves whether we could make those sacrifices today. Could we do as people did 100 years ago? Are we too cynical? I think the answer is absolutely not. What the first world war demonstrated was the incredible resilience of people and the sacrifices that they were prepared to make in a good cause. The same is true of the 9/11 attacks in New York. Did those firemen wake up that morning thinking that they would have to run into a collapsing building while people were running out of it? They did their job out of duty and at the moment in time they were called to do it. People did the same in the first world war, and that is one of the things that we remember.

Another important reason for remembering the first world war is the message that emerged, which was that we were all in it together. It was a war fought not just by armies but by societies and nations. We relied on everyone’s efforts. There was mass conscription into the armed forces. We had a field army of more than a million people, all of whom were trained and fit. They had a diet and an education that enabled them to take part in the war effort. The people who could not fight in the war worked in the munitions factories and in the fields. Everyone was part of the war effort. The ability to put an army in the field and to win such a war required the participation of the entire population. It also required people of genius, inspiration and ingenuity to design new weapons, new techniques and new technologies that would make winning that war possible. To fight and win such a conflict required the resources of the entire population, and the entire country had to be strong.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an impressive speech. Will he join me in saluting the work of the charity Never Such Innocence, which is marking the massive contribution made by the Dominions, as they then were, towards the great war? It is ably led by Edward Wild and Lady Lucy French, whose great-great grandfather was Field Marshall Sir John French.

[Damian Collins]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. I was about to mention Never Such Innocence. The charity, which has been working closely with Australia house, has done a fantastic project of work this year, and I hope that it continues. I know that, like me, the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) is also a supporter of the charity. I am grateful that the charity made a contribution to the Step Short project in Folkestone, and that it provided support to military charities such as Combat Stress.

It is interesting to note that Combat Stress marks its own centenary in 2019. It was formed to deal with the unique challenges, injuries and needs of people coming back from the war. It was only after the first world war that we really understood the nature of stress—mental stress from the battlefield—and the fact that it required special treatment. Combat Stress is a very relevant and important charity in its own right, and it is significant that it should be linked to the good work of Never Such Innocence.

I also want to underline the role of the Commonwealth in the war effort, especially that of the Anzac troops. Anzac day is marked now in increasingly growing numbers in this country as well as around the world and is of huge significance and importance to the history of the Commonwealth as well as to Australia and New Zealand.

I want to come back to the point about how there was this sense during the war of us all being in it together. The lesson of the war was that we need a strong society, and that to function properly there should be rewards and benefits for the whole of society coming out of that war. We also learned that the ability of a nation to fight wars in the future would depend on the strength not just of the armed forces, but of the whole country, and that our duties and responsibilities lie beyond our shores. We should fight not just wars of defence but wars to uphold the values of democracy and freedom that we have in our country. We went to war not just to defend ourselves but to liberate other people from oppression. There can be no nobler cause than that.

The first world war changed the whole of this country; it changed society. Anyone who had lived in the 20 years before the war would not have seen a huge amount of change before 1914. If they had come back to this country 20 years after the war had ended, they would have noticed that society had changed for ever. That is why these centenaries are so important. It is to remember that period of change.

Finally, I thank the Minister and the Government for the support they have given to the Step Short project. I also thank the Ministry of Defence, which is providing parading soldiers and the band of the Brigade of Gurkhas for the commemorations in Folkestone on 4 August. Soldiers will march through the memorial arch in the steps of the soldiers who went to war. It is right that the armed forces should be involved in the commemoration of the war. We are in no way seeking to make this a military occasion or to glorify war; we just want to remember that it is the servicemen who made the sacrifice and got on the ships to go and fight, and they did so in the service of their country and in the service of others. It is right that they should be involved in the commemorations that day.

I am also grateful for the support of Shepway district council and Kent county council, who provided financial support for the project. More than half of the money that has been raised by Step Short has been given as private donations. Private organisations have raised money. It is right that local authorities should support heritage projects in their areas, but also that we should seek broader support. It is right to recognise that the greater part of the support that we have received has come from other sources.

I thank the property company Lend Lease, which has provided its services for free to build the memorial arch in Folkestone. They have given a dedicated team to project manage it. That is an enormous contribution on its part. The company exemplifies the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) that this is a Commonwealth effort. Lend Lease is based in Australia, but it is giving its resources to support the project in Folkestone. It has also led on the work to restore the Imperial War museum.

I would also like to thank—this is a bit of an Oscar thank you speech, but I would like to get it on the record—the large number of organisations that have helped us with our centenary project in Folkestone. The National Army museum has brought an exhibition to Folkestone that tells the story from enlistment to embarkation. Parts of their collections have been brought to Folkestone and the museum has worked with local historians and history groups to put on the exhibition, which opened on Tuesday this week and will run for 10 months. It provides an excellent educational resource telling the story of going to war. I hope that the people who come to Folkestone to see the memorial arch will also take a look at that exhibition and that it will complement the exhibition that will be put on in the Sassoon room in Folkestone library shortly, which tells the story of the Folkestone community during the war in pictures.

I also urge all my Kent colleagues to look at the excellent online resource called Kent in World War One. We are asking people to share their data and information, pictures and stories. Such local projects and the online work of the Imperial War museum are merging official data—war records, service records and medal records and charts—with personal data such as diaries, letters, stories and photographs. That will create a wonderful resource, bringing those stories together.

It is fantastic not just to hear a citation for bravery and read someone’s war record but to hear a personal story. The Kent in World War One project maps that on local streets so that people can see what people who lived in the road where they live now did in the war, bringing the stories alive in the community. It is an excellent way of marking the centenary of the first world war.

I am sure that 4 August will be a day of moving, fitting and appropriate commemorations right across the United Kingdom, but in many ways it will be the start of a process. We will see more and more such commemorations on the important anniversaries that fall throughout the four and a half years up to the centenary of Armistice day in 2018. It is a programme that we should all celebrate and be proud of.