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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