Sunday 11 November 2018

For King and Country. Blackmore during the First World War (9) Armistice (10) Epilogue


For King and Country.  Blackmore during the First World War

Chapter 9
Armistice

Saturday 9th November 1918.  After a week when the enemy was in hasty retreat on the Western Front, on this day the Kaiser abdicated.  There were rumours spreading around that the war was over.  Chelmsford, on market day the previous day, was full of gossip that the Germans had laid down their arms. 

David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, would have dearly liked to have made such an announcement at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London, it being the second Saturday in November when the new Lord Mayor of London was paraded through the streets of the capital.  All he could do was to allude that it would all be over soon.  Hopefully.

Miss Baker wrote in 1983: “The First World War came to an end at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of November 1918. It was a tremendous relief to all of us to have the fearful struggle brought to a successful conclusion although the price that was paid in human lives and suffering cannot be measured”.

The armistice was signed in a railway carriage at just after 5 o’clock.  The talks were short.  It was agreed that the ceasefire would begin at 11 o’clock. 

News reached Paris about 9.30am, but by then the day’s business of waging war was well under way.  Even when news of the ceasefire was announced there were some British and American units wanted to go on fighting, some to avenge the Germans and some with the ambition to push the enemy back through Belgium to their own border.  It was something of an anti-climax as the clock struck eleven.  On that day the Western Front saw something like 10,944 casualties, including 2,738 dead, nearly as many who were killed in the D-Day landings in June 1944.

People in London had gathered since first light awaiting official news.  At 10.55am the door of No. 10 Downing Street opened and Lloyd George announced repeatedly, “At 11 o’clock this morning the war will be over”.  Bells rang out.  There was no radio, television, or social media to convey the news.

Revd Reeve wrote:  “Some in Stondon heard the distant bells at Brentwood.  But it was not till the afternoon that definite tidings reached the villages and then it filtered through chiefly the form of private messages.  News came to Stondon that flags were being hoisted on the Military Hospital at Ongar, and that the veteran Field-Marshall Sir Evelyn Wood VC had visited the place and communicated the splendid message to the wounded men.  As soon as I had this official intelligence the Stondon Church bells were chimed with all the old vigour by Ernest Baines, our sometime sexton.”

Blackmore’s Church Council met as planned on Monday 11th November 1918. The minutes record that “Discussion took place with respect to erecting some memorials of the Great War.  Mr D Wilson moved ‘That the Church Council desires to express its thankfulness to Almighty God for the establishment of peace and to record its appreciation of the sacrifice to those who served in the forces of the Crown in the war by the erection of a Cross in the Churchyard, a painted Window and a roll of Honour to be placed in the Church’.  This was seconded by Mr Reed and adopted”.

With only three men in attendance, including the Vicar, it was decided to hold a public meeting to endorse support. This was held on the following Tuesday, 19th November.

During the winter of 1918/19, 150,000 people died in Britain as a result of the virulent Spanish Influenza Pandemic. The illness reached Blackmore and Stondon Massey in November 1918.

Reeve wrote:
“Our neighbours at Blackmore and Kelvedon Common were attacked before us, but we were to be no exception.  The School has been closed as from the 15th November and the sickness has found victims in almost every house.  When the fever is followed by pneumonia and complications it becomes of course a dangerous visitor.  The doctors are barely able to attend their numerous patients, and are at a loss to account for the origin of the scourge.  It suffices to keep in check the superabundant rejoicings of Peace”.


Chapter 10
Epilogue

The First World War is removed from our experience but tonight we have considered some of the events through eye witness accounts.  These people were part of families, local communities, and serve in society as we do.

In his address at the RAF Centenary Service in July 2018, the Archbishop of Canterbury used these words: “How fit and proper that we should remember all who have served”.

On our War Memorial those who served did so for “Their Majesty” and those who fell did so in the service of “their country”:  For King and Country.

This presentation began with an anecdote from my wife’s family, and there will be stories in your families too.

For me, Walter Reed, my great uncle, born in 1885 in Mountnessing, became a school teacher and later Church of England lay reader in Norwich.  His sermon for Remembrance Sunday 1948, seventy years ago this week, thirty years after the end of the First World War, includes these words:

“We come … with mingled feelings … There is hardly a family in this land which has not lost someone in the war.  The obvious reason of Remembrance is to remember the fallen. … And there are some women today to whom it recalls poignantly the death of husband in 1916 and of her son in 1944. …

“But it is Remembrance Day in another sense as it recalls to our minds two great deliverances.  Both in 1917 and in 1940 we were nearly crushed; humanly speaking it seemed impossible that we could survive; in 1917 we were within a few weeks of starvation through the sinking of our ships by submarines; in 1940 we were threatened with invasion by a vast army with only one fully trained and equipped division to resist it. …

“The younger ones here cannot appreciate the spirit of our land in 1914 and 1915; we were all crusaders ready to offer our lives to save this world.  All our forces were volunteers for compulsory service did not come in until 1916. In the Battle of the Somme in 1916 they literally offered their lives and gave their lives for this ideal.  These are the Valiant Hearts apostrophised in our hymn which is literally true and not just poetic imagination. They died in their thousands to save all that was best and noblest in the world.  Most of the names are recorded on the crosses of France and Flanders but thousands have no recorded grave or memorial. In London after the First War was erected the Cenotaph to remind us all of the complete sacrifice of all who died in their country’s cause.”

This was a generation that fought for King and Country.  The Cenotaph in London was unveiled and the Unknown Soldier was buried in Westminster Abbey on the same day, 11th November 1920.

Walter Reed’s words reminding “the younger ones” of 1948 that those who served “were all crusaders” would be highly controversial preaching to us younger ones in 2018, as would the opening verse of ‘Valiant Hearts’

O valiant hearts who to your glory came
Through dust of conflict and through battle flame;
Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved,
Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.

Today Britain is a different country to that of 1918 perhaps because of the events of the First World War.

Laurence Binyon, war poet, has a local connection in that he grew up in Chelmsford before the War.  He was the son of Frederick Binyon, curate of St Mary’s Church Chelmsford.  We end this talk with these words:

“They went with songs to the battle, they were young
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow,
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted
They fell with their faces to the foe.

“They shall not grow old, as we are left to grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

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