War Graves Week

Jeremy Quin Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Jeremy Quin (Horsham) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity not only to hear the erudite words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne), but to thank him and the other members of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for all their work. I look forward to hearing from the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) very shortly. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Allan Dorans), who spoke so movingly about his great-uncle, Corporal Dorans. I am glad that he mentioned the daily commemoration at the Menin Gate. It barely let up until the second world war and resumed as soon as the opportunity was available, and it is wonderful that it continues to this day.

As the hon. Gentleman said—and, indeed, as was said by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard)—this is an issue on which the whole House will stand united, and it is sobering to think that previous generations stood here united in grief. We are surrounded by the commemorations of Members who fell in the wars, and elsewhere in this place are commemorated the sons and daughters of Members—including the sons of the then Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and the then leader of the Labour party, Arthur Henderson, who were killed on the same day in the battle of Loos in 1915.

The scale of the loss in this country and across what was then the empire required a response like no other. It was the hardest of all tasks. How could anyone rise to the challenge of fittingly remembering so many, with different faiths and different traditions, and from so many corners of the earth? The extraordinary legacy of those—including Lutyens, Kenyon, Ware, Baker and Kipling—who applied themselves to that vital work, most of them carrying their own personal grief, lives on. No commemoration could ever be equal to that conflict or those that followed, but it did its best, on behalf of this nation, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and the whole Commonwealth, to remember the sacrifice of all and the sacrifice of every individual, embracing the principle of equality of commemoration. It is vital for us to embrace that principle, novel in its day, at every opportunity in remembering everyone who fell in common cause. In doing so, we must recognise as inexcusable—as did the former Defence Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace)— those occasions when in the past we fell short of that absolute principle.

The engraving that was ultimately not adopted but was initially intended to be inscribed around the Stone of Remembrance was taken from Ecclesiastes:

“Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”

For the fact that where known graves exist, the bodies of those brave men and women do lie in peace and their names, whether commemorated on a memorial or on a gravestone, will be remembered for evermore, we owe an enormous debt to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. As was suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), if we in this House could possibly thank every one of its 1,300 employees in each of the 200 languages that they speak between them, we would feel honoured to do so. For the work that they do to fulfil our sacred obligation—not least, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow mentioned, their work in continuing to uncover remains and bury them with due honour—they have our gratitude and respect.

During my research for this speech, I found it sobering to try to find the number of graves and, of course, to be reminded that that number grows year upon year. Every one of us, I am sure, will have stood before the Comme memorial with its 72,000 names, visited Tyne Cot with its 12,000 graves, and, sometimes even more poignantly, visited the quiet and small cemeteries scattered across Flanders fields. What makes them so poignant is the sheer scale of collective loss, with each individual headstone or name commemorating a person who loved and was loved. They are remembered by their loved ones in the briefest but most profound of epitaphs. How fitting it is that over 100 years since the war to end all wars, schoolchildren from our constituencies make annual pilgrimages to recognise and remember. It is moving indeed to see young people—barely younger than those who fell, and showing the same exuberance and love of life that those who died would once have claimed—falling silent as they recognise the enormity of just one cemetery, which is only one of the 23,000 cemeteries and memorials looked after by the CWGC.

Of course, the commission’s direct duties, or duties working for the MOD, stretch far beyond the western front. I have been immensely moved by the beautifully kept calmness of the cemetery in Singapore, the rising heat of dawn in the commission’s cemetery in New Delhi as we collectively commemorated Anzac Day, and the knowledge that in the blustery South Atlantic, the Falkland Islanders will, with love, protect and commemorate those buried above San Carlos Water, who gave everything for their liberation.

Nor do the responsibilities of the CWGC end with cemeteries. There are many individual graves in British churchyards where the fallen are remembered closer to home. The same is true of the solitary grave of Ronald Maxwell of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, who was buried where he fell on 23 December 1941, aged 22, beside St John’s Cathedral in Hong Kong.

I was pleased to hear the words of the Secretary of State about his personal commitment to the three-year uplift in funding. The commission needs that assurance to ensure that remembrance is a living legacy for our nation, and I welcome it.

We are approaching the 80th anniversary of D-day—a date of specific significance for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which refers to it as the Legacy of Liberation 80. The commission is right to say that the 80th anniversary commemorations may mark a tipping point between first-hand memory and national memory, and that the role of education will be ever more important in the years to come. I would therefore like my last words in this debate to be not my own, but those of Robert Piper, late of the Royal Sussex Regiment and the Royal Signals. He is a 99-year-old Normandy veteran who joined up at the age of 15, and I am proud to have him as a constituent. He retains an excellent sense of humour. When advised by his doctor that he had bad news and that Robert had cancer, his response was to say, “I went to Normandy. What do you mean, bad news? Every day is a bonus.” Robert once said in our excellent local magazine, All About Horsham:

“I have returned to Europe and stood in the middle of cemeteries filled with hundreds of soldiers, and I ask myself the question—why them, not us?”

That is a question to which these cemeteries should always give rise, because it reminds us of our obligation to remember, to be thankful, and to try to be worthy of the sacrifices made.