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Thank you to Ben B for this article.

The first national act of Remembrance was held at Whitehall on November 11th 1920, when the new Cenotaph was unveiled to commemorate the passing of the Unknown Warrior on its way to Westminster Abbey. The Cenotaph, designed by Edwin Lutyens has become the focal point for the Nation’s Remembrance, with the reigning monarch laying a poppy wreath as a mark of the nation’s respect for the fallen of the two world wars, and all subsequent and ongoing conflicts. The following year, 1921, marked the first National Remembrance Day, then called Armistice Day, when the now familiar two minutes silence was first observed.

The Poppy – the symbol of Remembrance

The poppy was the only thing that grew on the battlefields of Flanders during WW1. McCrae, a doctor serving there with the Canadian Armed Forces, was so deeply inspired and moved by what he saw, he wrote this poem. 

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the First World War ended. Civilians wanted to remember the people who had given their lives for peace and freedom. An American War Secretary, Moina Michael, inspired by John McCrae’s poem, began selling poppies to friends to raise money for the ex-Service community. And so the tradition began.

In 1922, Major George Howson, a young infantry officer, formed the Disabled Society, to help disabled ex-Service men and women from the First World War. Howson suggested to the Legion that members of the Disabled Society could make poppies and the Poppy Factory was subsequently founded in Richmond in 1922. The original poppy was designed so that workers with a disability could easily assemble it and this principle remains today.

Each year over 38 million Remembrance poppies, 5 million Remembrance petals, 900,000 crosses and 100,000 wreaths are made by the Royal British Legion and are worn all over the world as a mark of respect for our fallen servicemen.

Is Remembrance Day relevant today?

2008 marks the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War, ‘The war to end all wars’, but still our service personnel are on active service every day somewhere in the world. Over 16,000 servicemen have been killed since the end of WW2, on average over 250 every year since 1945, with 1968 being the only year that there wasn’t a fatality on active service.

All the names of these fallen are now commemorated at the National Memorial Arboretum. Opened in Oct 2007 by Her Majesty the Queen, the Armed Forces Memorial is a tribute to the nation’s fallen. Carved into Portland stone are the names of every serviceman and women killed in action since the end of WW2, with new names being added as conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq take their toll.

Every day in the Memorial Chapel a service of Remembrance is held at 11am, with The Last Post, 2 Minute Silence and Reveille being observed. The Armed Forces Memorial is set within 150 acres of woodland in the National Forest, just off the A38 north of Lichfield.

WE WILL REMEMBER THEM

Remembrance Day Service at Parwich Church

Sunday November 9th at 10.15am