by Peter Parker
Although newspaper reports in the later 1940s and 1950s suggest that Remembrance Sunday had indeed replaced Armistice Day in the national calendar and was marked much as 11 November had been, there remained those who felt that the whole observance had been downgraded now that it no longer had a fixed date. At the British Legion’s conference in Great Yarmouth in June 1949, a call was made for the reinstatement of Armistice Day on 11 November, with Remembrance Sunday maintained as a subsidiary occasion held on the first Sunday after the main event. Four years later, by which time Britain also had casualties from the Korean War to remember, there were still arguments going on about changing the date. A correspondent wrote to The Times to propose that Remembrance Sunday be moved to the second Sunday in May, ‘an approximate date for the end of the 1939–45 war’: ‘The weather in November is often cold and wet, and a great physical strain is imposed on the older men as they stand bare-headed for a period of nearly five minutes during the service of remembrance.’ (Indeed, it was widely rumoured that the death of George V in January 1936 had been the result of his standing bare-headed at the Cenotaph in what Time magazine called Britain’s ‘murderous November damp’.) Those about whom this correspondent was so concerned were in fact the last people to want a change of date. The vice-chair of the Kent branch of the British Legion replied that the notion of changing Remembrance Sunday to what he referred to scathingly as ‘a more convenient date in early summer’ had been ‘fully debated’ at his local conference and ‘heavily defeated’. ‘The older members were adamant that whatever the weather they would continue to pay their homage in November. The younger generation of war veterans felt that they had been steeped in the November tradition since childhood and that in view of the discrepancy between VE and VJ days, they would prefer the present arrangement to stand.’ And stand it did.
Nevertheless, by the 1960s people began to question whether Remembrance Sunday should be observed at all. Once again, the Church weighed in, this time in the shape of a clergyman who was keen to appear attuned to the modern world. In November 1963, Archdeacon Edward Carpenter, Canon in Residence at Westminster Abbey, called for a new approach to Remembrance Sunday, ‘hinged somehow to the hopes of people throughout the world’. He proposed that it might ‘become a day of dedication to idealism’ and expressed the hope for ‘some bold, imaginative move, which would give it a new name’. Meanwhile, at St Paul’s the controversial precentor, Canon John Collins (an active opponent of apartheid and a sponsor of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), complained: ‘We tend always to look backwards to think too much of our finest hour and too little of the purpose for which the sacrifices were made.’ This ‘interference from clerical busybodies’, as one correspondent in The Times put it, gained support in a Hampshire vicarage, from where G.A. Potter wrote that Remembrance Sunday was indeed becoming meaningless: ‘All through the “Silence” yesterday cars were roaring past our church. Parades were attended mostly by local officials, The British Legion (mostly 1914–18 vintage), and uniformed youth organizations who are under orders to attend.’ He suggested that the day should be moved to become part of All Souls’ Day, which he said was kept by Christians the whole world over and on which prayers for the souls of the dead were offered. By contrast, ‘the parades, poppies and platitudes of the present observance can only help the living’.
This was to misunderstand the whole meaning of Remembrance Sunday, which from the very start (as Armistice Day) may have commemorated the dead but was organised for the living. Armistice Day had also commemorated the dead whatever their religion may have been. It was bad enough to move the day to the Christian Sabbath; to align it with All Souls’ Day, recognised only in the Christian calendar, would have been a further step towards appropriating this supposedly inclusive and secular national occasion and marginalising those grieving for the dead of other faiths. The bereaved had always been a focus of the ceremonies, augmented by those veterans who cared to take part. To suggest that the members of the British Legion designated as ‘1914–18 vintage’ were somehow irrelevant was insultingly dismissive, while poppies served a practical purpose, having always been made by severely disabled veterans and sold in order to help those left physically or financially in need because of war service.
The debate continued the following year, when the Reverend N.D. Stacey, rector of Woolwich, declared that Remembrance Sunday ‘should be discontinued before it becomes an empty and meaningless event’. This comment introduced the report of the day’s ceremony at the Cenotaph in The Times under the headline: ‘Memorial Service Losing Grip?’ The paper also reported that a British Legion spokesman had announced that ‘early Poppy Day returns [for 1964] showed a considerable decrease over last year’s figures’. Where once the annual coverage of this event would have been extensive, taking up several columns, it was now reduced to a few inches tucked away inconspicuously among other home news. The following year the report appeared in only one of the paper’s eight editions.
By 1965 even the anonymous correspondent (or correspondents) who every November, year in, year out, contributed a meditation to The Times on the meaning of Remembrance Sunday and what was being remembered began to express doubts about its continuation in the present form. A particularly unenticing headline to this column, which one imagines even in a good year attracted few readers, ran ‘Remembrancetide: Adjusting Observance to Changed Needs’ – an adjustment in which, the correspondent felt, the Church should be leading the way. The intention was to find a way of altering Remembrance Sunday in a way that would ‘be true to the insights of the Gospel, adjusted to the contemporary world-consciousness of mankind’s fundamental unity while still preserving the solemn meaning of a colossal sacrifice of human life on both sides of the conflict in two world wars’. Once again, the ‘traditionalism of the British Legion and the various old comrades’ associations’ was accused of standing in the way of progress, ‘hold[ing] back the proper movement of this solemn remembrance towards a new annual expression of the nation’s resolve to give itself to the task of reconciliation’.
In a 1965 edition of Theology, Britain’s leading journal of religious debate, the Reverend Ronald Coppin suggested that Remembrance Sunday should be quietly dropped from the calendar. ‘Since the passing of the 1914–18 war generation the public desire to remember has slowly withered, and the very different character of the 1939–45 war means that for very many, perhaps the majority, there is no desire to remember,’ he observed.
Perhaps most important of all is the fact that for anyone under the age of thirty Remembrance Day has no meaning and, as it has been conceived, can have no meaning. The observance is in decline and should be allowed gradually to fall away until it becomes as significant or insignificant as Trafalgar Day or November 5th. Any attempt to rescue it or to change it into an occasion for edification on the evils of war or the cause of peace would be doomed to failure, as is shown by the general indifference to United Nations Day, Shakespeare’s birthday, etc.
In the meantime, he felt, ‘it would be quite wrong for us as a Church to pull out of the existing observance’. Indeed, the Church should take an active part in altering the character of Remembrance Sunday, ensuring that while it continued it became ‘much more international in ethos, and much more realistic about the [presumably fallen] nature of man’. Many Church members, he felt, disliked such ‘pseudo-Christian details’ of the observance as ‘the equating of the valiant dead with saints [and] the paralleling of the soldiers’ deaths with Christ’s’ – two notions that had popular currency during the First World War itself, as numerous religiose postcards depicting military calvaries testified. He listed some ‘practical suggestions in changing the form of observance’:
1. In every major city at the Cathedral, parish church or Cenotaph there should be an ex-enemy national taking an official part in the ceremonies. If this were too great a pill to swallow in one go, then at least a national from a non-Commonwealth allied country.
2. The hymns and pray
ers, especially at church services, should be carefully chosen, and certainly they should not draw uneasy parallels between servicemen’s deaths and the cross, as in, e.g., ‘O valiant hearts’, nor assume that death in battle is a martyr’s death.
3. The lessons chosen should have more bite: the Beatitudes would be a good New Testament lesson; for they set forth the ideals for which we were supposedly fighting and they remind us how both the servicemen and ourselves fail to measure up to Jesus’s demands.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is no longer an acceptable motto; perhaps decorum est pro orbe terrarum mori more accurately expresses the feelings and needs of our age. We can only then both expect and welcome the gradual disappearance of Remembrance Sunday; but while it is still with us let us redeem it as far as we may.
This attempted act of redemption would in part take place three years later, when the traditional church service for Remembrance Sunday was picked over by a small committee of churchmen and a single representative of the British Legion. The idea was to bring the service ‘into line with modern thinking now that 50 years have passed since the first Armistice’. The Reverend Coppin’s ambitious notion of inviting ex-enemy nationals to participate in Remembrance Sunday in every church in the land was not adopted, but his advice about hymns was taken up. No specific directions were given to bin John Arkwright’s touchingly chivalric ‘O Valiant Hearts’, written in 1917 to a beautiful mid-Victorian tune by Edward J. Hopkins, but Cecil Spring-Rice’s hugely popular ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’, set to music by Gustav Holst in 1921, was banished. The original meaning of Armistice Day was once more diluted, and while the act of remembrance was retained, it was augmented by ‘an act of commitment to serve God and all mankind in the cause of peace and for the relief of want and suffering’. This widening of the brief to include more general social ills that had nothing whatever to do with warfare was approved in 1968 not only by the Church of England but also by the Free Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. ‘It comes in response to criticism that the older form of service was too patriotic and warlike in tone, and too narrow and retrospective in its import to engage the interest of any but the elderly,’ The Times reported. ‘In general the emphasis is much less on remembrance and much more forward looking with its specific acts of penitence and commitment’. In other words, the interests of the people for whom Armistice Day was inaugurated, the generation of 1914, were once again being ignored in the Church’s attempts to seem youthful and up to date. Some veterans protested in particular at that part of the new service concerning penitence: ‘Having spent four years in the mud and blood of Flanders, they said, not unreasonably, they did not entirely see what they had to be penitent about.’
Rather than a period of reflection and remembrance, the days surrounding Remembrance Sunday during the 1960s had become a time for debates about the nature and future of a date in the calendar that had once been compared with Good Friday. The abolition of National Service at the beginning of the 1960s certainly played a part in shifting attitudes. Conscription, reintroduced at the beginning of the Second World War, had persisted beyond the end of the hostilities in 1945 and was still referred to as ‘war service’. The National Service Act of 1948 obliged all young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, unless they were working in farming, coal mining or the merchant navy, to serve in one of the armed forces for a period of eighteen months. The length of service had been extended to two years at the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, and this remained the term until National Service officially ended on 31 December 1960. For many diehards, the abolition of National Service was when the rot set in and long-haired youths no longer obliged to sport a military short-back-and-sides set out to undermine British society with their amoral views and behaviour – a notion that conveniently overlooks the often violent Teddy boy culture of the 1950s. At the same time as abandoning compulsory military service, Britain also abandoned its policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The decision by the government to manufacture a hydrogen bomb as a nuclear deterrent was widely criticised and led to the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. The inaugural meeting of the CND was attended by 5,000 people and it soon attracted a rapidly growing band of supporters. It became the most prominent and vocal protest group of the period, numbering many leading figures in politics, the Church, education and the arts among its members.
The nuclear threat was given additional force after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union had momentarily teetered on the brink of all-out war. Some idea of what a nuclear strike on Britain might look like was given by Peter Watkins in The War Game (1965). This film was commissioned by the BBC, for whom Watkins had earlier made Culloden (1964), about the notorious Scottish battle of 1746 in which a well-armed English force led by the Duke of Cumberland defeated and subsequently massacred the makeshift Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie, largely made up of sword-wielding Highlanders. An assistant producer for BBC2, Watkins had been given the opportunity to direct a film by the Corporation’s Head of Documentary Film, Huw Wheldon. This highly original drama, made in Scotland using local non-professional actors, was shot as if it were a news documentary, complete with commentary. Few who saw the film would forget the scenes in which the narrator described various sorts of weapons and showed in graphic detail what they did to human beings. If this determination to look war in the face and to show its lethal effects upon individuals seemed reminiscent of prevailing attitudes to the First World War, this is hardly surprising. While a drama student in the 1950s Watkins had acted in a production of R.C. Sherriff’s often-revived Western Front play Journey’s End. He had subsequently and reluctantly done National Service, and after his release had made a seventeen-minute amateur film, Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959). Set in the trenches of the Western Front, it opened with the diarist stating in voice-over ‘Last day of my life’, and showed this day from the doomed soldier’s point of view.
Although Culloden was highly praised, The War Game proved too harrowing and contentious even for the innovative and often controversial Wednesday Play slot, and the BBC refused to broadcast it. Watkins’ film was unashamedly propagandist, once again showing graphically the effects of warfare upon suffering individuals, but also highly critical of the government’s nuclear policy and the utterly inadequate contingency plans the Home Office had in place in the event of what seemed at the time a not altogether unlikely catastrophe. The BBC always denied that any political pressure had been put upon it to ban the film but had in fact arranged a private screening for senior government and military figures before coming to its decision. Instead the Corporation announced that the film had been shelved because it was an ‘artistic failure’ – a statement that was both untrue and looked pretty silly when, after a cinema release in 1966, The War Game went on to win an Oscar for best documentary, a BAFTA for best short film, a Special Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and a UN Award.
It is no coincidence that these films appeared in the same decade as the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. A revival of interest in the war had already been apparent at the beginning of the 1960s, but that interest was now more critical. One of the best-known works to emerge from this period was Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, commissioned for the dedication in May 1962 of the new cathedral at Coventry, replacing the one that had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the devastating air raids of November 1940. In spite of the occasion for which the Requiem was commissioned, and the fact that it was dedicated to the memory of four men who had served in the Second World War, the piece looked back to the earlier conflict. Britten decided to set war poetry alongside the Latin mass for the dead, and although there were many fine poems of the Second World War from which he could have chosen, he went back to Wilfred Owen. A lifelong pacifist, Britten evidently felt that Owen was the principal voice raised against the horror of warfare, as well as the principal elegist for the youth who died as cattle, an
d so a natural choice for a War Requiem. The origins of the work are often forgotten and any illustrations for recordings or performance programmes tend to take their iconography from the trenches of 1914–18 rather than the ruined British cities of 1940.
Britten’s work is not so much an attack upon the war as a lament for its consequences. Some idea of how images of the First World War could be used to subversive effect is given by Ken Russell’s film about another British composer, Edward Elgar, made that same year for the BBC’s flagship arts series, Monitor. Elgar was a celebration of a man not only regarded as Britain’s greatest composer, but one who (whatever his own views may have been) was seen as representing both Englishness and Empire. Such works as the Enigma Variations and the Introduction and Allegro for Strings (played here at the very opening of the film as a small boy galloped across the Malvern Hills on horseback) seemed to sum up a distinctively English strain of rural lyricism, while the Pomp and Circumstance marches had become associated with Britain’s imperial might. It was appropriate, therefore, that Russell’s film should be the 100th edition of Monitor. Even more significant was the date of its broadcast: 11 November.