First World War: Centenary

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, it is a great honour to be able to take part in this debate. Like others, I thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Clark of Windermere. The enormity and horror of the First World War came home to me in a very personal way when my mother died in 2000. In going through her papers, I discovered something that she had never told me: six of her cousins—six out of eight—had been killed in the First World War.

I would like to make a few suggestions as to our commemoration. At the very beginning of the year, it is terribly important that we focus attention on the horrors that came after. August is a difficult time to have a national commemoration, although we should set aside the Sunday nearest 4 August. However, so that our children can be engaged in their schools it would perhaps be sensible to have something on 28 June because in a sense that day, the day of the shooting of the Archduke in Sarajevo, was the event that triggered that appalling conflict. We need to engage the attention and imagination of our young people throughout these four years.

The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Coity, and I both introduced Bills—I in the other place and he in this place—which would have set aside Remembrance Sunday as a very special Sunday, on a par with Easter Day and Christmas, with all the shops closed. The bells might ring but not the cash tills. I suggest that during the four years of commemoration, we should do that with Remembrance Day. Then, when we come to 1918, we should set aside 11 November as a day of national reflection. Everything should close commercially and we should be able to focus upon what happened then and what has happened in the 100 years since. We should give thanks to those who lost or gave their lives and to those who were mutilated and whose lives were destroyed, even though they might have physically lived on.

In order to focus national attention on this, I would like there to be a competition involving all schoolchildren, on the theme “Lest we forget”. There would be essays, poetry and works of art, and the best of them would be collected into a volume that could then be given to all our schoolchildren. These four years are, as so many have said, four years not of celebration but of commemoration. It is crucial that we do not lose an opportunity to focus on the horror of war and the beauty of peace. I trust that we will be able to do that.