First World War Commemoration

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Simpson]

With the greatest of respect to the hon. Gentleman, I am not here to debate that. It may well be that at some later date we will have a full-scale debate about commemorating the first world war, either through the Backbench Business Committee or in Government time. I am merely giving two interpretations, and I happen to believe that one of them is correct.

My purpose in introducing this short debate today is to reflect the fact that there has been considerable interest in both Houses in the commemoration. Two of my hon. Friends, here today, have already secured short debates on the subject. On 6 March, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) introduced a debate entitled, “Youth participation: first world war commemorations”, and, on 13 March, my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) introduced a debate on the first world war centenary. Folkestone will be one of the commemorative points next August; it was from Folkestone that many tens of thousands of soldiers went by cross-channel steamer to Belgium and France. There have been oral questions and debates in the House of Lords as well.

The Government have outlined a six-year programme of events around the themes of remembrance, youth and education. I do not intend to go into any details, as many colleagues here will be aware of it. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Imperial War museum are central to the commemoration, but I also want to flag up the role of the National Archives, which have hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of documents and photographs relating to the first world war, specifically to the war service of men and women, and a lot of other things such as operational diaries. People now can get easy access to such information.

The importance of the commemoration is not just the fact that the Government are going to set an overview, but that it will be bottom up. It is the work done already over many decades by individuals and local communities who wish to look at the people behind the names, particularly on things such as war memorials. We have a wide range of interest groups such as the Western Front Association and the War Memorials Trust, which have already done very good work—hon. Members will know that from their constituencies.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I apologise for having missed the first sentence or two of the hon. Gentleman’s remarks; I was attending a Delegated Legislation Committee. I am a trustee of the War Memorials Trust and I am pleased to hear him mention its work. In particular, we have the project In Memoriam to ensure that our war memorials are safe and an education programme to ensure that the younger generation understand the matter. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman wants to comment on how important the younger generation is in all this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

Let me make two quick comments before I come to what I wanted to say. First, we all owe my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson) a debt for initiating the debate. As he knows, my first grown-up job in politics was as research assistant to Maurice Macmillan, which meant I was privileged to spend quite a lot of time at Birch Grove. In my conversations with Harold Macmillan, there was absolutely no doubt that his approach, and that of other political leaders of the time, to Europe, the Common Market and European politics was in large part based on their experience of having gone through two European wars. For people such as Harold Macmillan, it was not just the fact that they had gone through two European wars, but guilt about the fact that they had actually survived—Harold Macmillan was almost the only person from his Grenadier Guards officer cadet group to survive the great war.

To pick up the point made by the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn), I think we all have family stories about the great war. I had an uncle—Uncle Bob—who was gassed in the first world war and who won the military medal, but I cannot remember him ever uttering a whole sentence, because for the rest of his life he lived with the fact that he had been gassed.

The point I really want to make follows from that made by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), and requires me to put on my hat as Second Church Estates Commissioner. As a result of the first world war, there was a need to demonstrate the huge and understandable grief over the loss of the husbands, fathers, sons, brothers and friends who made up the never-ending casualty list from the front line. There are, therefore, now roughly 36,000 memorials to the dead of the great war, reflecting that unprecedented expression of public grief. Not surprisingly, many of those memorials are in churches or within the curtilage of church buildings.

I hope two things will happen between 2014 and 2018. First, I hope every community—every parish, every town and every village—will look to refurbish or restore its war memorials. The recording of names—often simply in alphabetical order, giving no priority in death, because all are equal in death—is an important memorial, and now is the time to ensure that our war memorials are repaired and restored. Some memorials relate to streets or areas, such as those for the Hull pals and the Accrington pals. Others relate to factories, and one will also find memorials at railway stations. Charles Sargeant Jagger, the uncle of Mick Jagger, designed the great memorial in Paddington station, as well as the gunners memorial at Hyde park corner.

The other thing I hope will happen, which my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland alluded to, is that every community will have an opportunity to research the names and histories of those who died.

[Meg Hillier]

Another interesting issue is that a lot of names are missing, because the names were haphazardly collected. The War Memorials Trust does not necessarily fund work on this, but it depends on the circumstances; we have seen some great examples of names being added. I am sure the hon. Gentleman would be interested in work being done in education so that local children could seek out some of the names that should have been added, but which were missed off.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

That is a good point. One is already seeing work on that. Clive Aslet produced a very good book called “War Memorial”, which is the story of the sacrifice of one village, Lydford, from 1914 to 2003. There are 23 names on the war memorial, and he goes through the histories of all of them in the book. In the preface, he says:

“What I would really like to do for the Centenary of the First World War in 2014 is to set up a project for each village to find out about its own dead. There is so much you could do and it would be a fantastic national and local resource. This book threw up such a richness of material and it really got me up every morning because I became so utterly absorbed by the story of these people’s lives.”

In my constituency, in the village of Deddington, Michael Allbrook and Robert Forsyth have written a history of the parish at war. When war memorials were erected in the early 1920s, it was sufficient for the inscription to include simply a name and an initial, because everybody knew the person. Men of Deddington died in Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Sicily, Syria and Turkey, where their graves and official memorials can be found, but their histories are at risk of being lost. The book written by the people of Deddington is a reminder of the lives of those men and of the people they were.

The Heritage Lottery Fund is giving £1 million a year over six years until 2019 to help communities mark the centenary of the first world war. I hope people will look to the war memorials and to the names on them, as well as, in some instances, as the hon. Lady said, to those that are not on them, as a starting point for exploring the history and commemorating the lives of people from their communities who took part in the great war.

When I enlisted in the Sussex Yeomanry in 1970, it had a dinner at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton every year before Remembrance day. In 1970, there were still two tables of 1914-18 veterans. When I, as a young man, asked them what made them leave their farms in Sussex—most had never left their farms before going to war—they simply said, “We went to defend our farms.” Edward Thomas was asked why he went to war, and he picked up a sod of English earth and said, “I went to fight for this.” Every one of the people on a war memorial has a story: they were a person; they had a life. I hope that, in commemorating the first world war over the next four years, we will take the opportunity to recall and commemorate the individual lives of every one of those who fell.