80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 9th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, the words of His Majesty the King, as reported in the news, focused on the words that we should not forget. It is a privilege to be part of a debate like this where so much has been remembered—such varied and rich memories indeed. I have searched in my mind for how to concentrate or focus on any of the memories that are mine.

My father served in the Royal Navy. He survived the war, but his marriage did not. I would like to remember all those relationships that were victims of the war, whereby lives had to be rebuilt afterwards. At the end of his life, my father’s second family handed me some mementoes of his service, and I lay one in particular before noble Lords. He was a member of the crew of HMS “Duke of York”, which ferried Winston Churchill across the Atlantic in December 1941 for the meeting with President Roosevelt. There were historic pictures, with Lord Beaverbrook, the King, Winston Churchill and other dignitaries, marking the special sense attached to this particular exercise.

I shall not dwell anymore on my father—it is far too painful—but I remember our neighbours, the Hartland family, who had television, where I was able to go and watch from time to time. Their father, Bert Hartland—these are the annals of the poor, and he will never be remembered anywhere, although now he will, because he is in Hansard—would break into uncontrollable fits of rage. He had been a prisoner of war at the hands of the Japanese and had returned a wreck. We all just lived with that; he did what he did, it would go as quickly as it came, but it was a reminder of things that we could only guess at.

Then further afield, I led a little election monitoring group in Eritrea, in 1993, at the moment when Eritrea came legitimately on to the world map. We were assigned duties of overseeing that election in Keren. It was an ordinary exercise with a small team who are now lifelong friends, but to my total surprise, I found two enormous graveyards. In 1942, a battle had been fought in Keren, and there is a huge graveyard for the thousands of Italians who died on that occasion and hundreds of allied troops in their own, separate cemetery—most of them, of course, members of the Indian Army, with Africans and British too, of course. It reminded me of another dimension and detail in the memories that we are sharing today.

By chance, my wife and I in 2005 found ourselves sitting in the Frauenkirche in Dresden, which had only a week before had its restoration programme completed. It was completely rebuilt after the carpet bombing of 1945, because 1945 marks the 80th anniversary of things other than the things that took our people on to the streets in front of Buckingham Palace—and that had to be remembered, too.

In my final memory, I was chair of the Hendon and Golders Green branch of the Council of Christians and Jews, which brought me into contact with another Leslie. When Leslies meet, there is joy in heaven. This particular Leslie was a very special one, because he was born and raised in Glynneath, about 20 miles from Burry Port, where I was born and raised—so we fell upon each other. In the end, he turned out to be an Orthodox rabbi, the senior Jewish chaplain in the forces that liberated Bergen-Belsen, which the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, referred to. I remember him talking to me about it. It is inconceivable. I will not add to what we have heard in bits and pieces ourselves already, except to give a quotation from an interview that he gave to the BBC which I shall never forget. He said that if all the trees in the world became pens, all the seas of the world became ink, and all the heavens became writing paper, they would not provide enough material on which to write the sufferings of the people that he met that day. That says it all, does it not?

Therefore, if your Lordships will indulge me very quickly, I do not settle for “Don’t forget”; it is the flip side of a coin that reminds us to remember. “Remember”, which is hyphenated etymologically, is re-membering what has been dis-membered. That is the task before us. From my conversations with my friend Leslie Hardman, I can only add that in Hebrew “zakar”, which means “remember”, contains not only the injunction to send one’s mind back to a moment in history to recreate a situation that we lived through then, but, on the basis of that, to trigger action that sees that it will never happen again.