by Peter Parker
From 1923, those who nevertheless felt that charity balls were somehow not the right way to spend Armistice night could repair to the Albert Hall, where for four years John Foulds’ World Requiem was performed annually in aid of the British Legion. A massive work in twenty movements for some 1,250 singers and instrumentalists, the World Requiem was a lament for the dead of all nations who had participated in the First World War, its all-embracing nature exemplified by the texts it set, which ranged from the Latin mass and John Bunyan to the medieval Indian mystic Kabir. It was first performed on 11 November 1923 and described nonsensically as ‘A Cenotaph of Sound’. The massed chorus was even dubbed ‘The Cenotaph Choir’, but the work, which had always been more of a popular than a critical success, proved less enduring than Lutyens’ monument. Foulds was too unorthodox a figure to enter national life, and soon fell foul of the British Legion, in whose official history he does not even warrant a mention. For a start, he had not fought in the war. He had apparently volunteered, but was told he would be more useful remaining in England as a professional musician. Although already married, in 1915 he had begun living with a musician called Maud MacCarthy, with whom he had two children before she eventually became his second wife. He was both a Theosophist, believing less in the British Empire than in the eternal brotherhood of mankind, and was staunchly left-wing.
Although Foulds donated all the proceeds from performances of his Requiem to the Legion, in 1927 it was decided that something that veterans would themselves enjoy should replace this rather high-minded work at the centre of Armistice night. Sponsored by the Daily Express, the ‘Empire Festival of Remembrance’ was basically a sing-song for Legion members. Before the ever-popular Prince of Wales and numerous military dignitaries, 10,000 veterans belted out hymns and soldiers’ songs, and the entire festival was broadcast on the radio to the farthest corners of the globe by the BBC. Such was the success of the event that it became an annual fixture which still continues. From 1929, a million paper poppies were released from the dome of the Albert Hall at the climax of the evening, each one representing an Empire life lost as it fluttered down. Meanwhile, Foulds and his Requiem sank into obscurity until the piece was revived eighty years later at the Festival of Remembrance in 2007.
From its somewhat haphazard beginnings, Armistice Day had become a fixture in the national calendar. Although it would remain principally a secular occasion for some years, it assumed a ‘sacredness’ of its own, conferred upon it by grieving widows and children. By 1925 the Daily Mail was declaring that: ‘Of all the days in the calendar, excepting Good Friday, it has the most solemn associations.’ The shift in people’s attitudes to warfare caused by the losses suffered between 1914 and 1918 may be judged by the fact that Armistice Day more or less supplanted Trafalgar Day, the annual celebration of Nelson’s great naval victory on 21 October 1805. Throughout the nineteenth century, right up until the outbreak of the First World War, Trafalgar Day had been marked by naval parades and banquets, but its popularity and significance subsequently declined. Just as after 1914 a literary tradition of martial verse extolling patriotism, chivalry and military prowess was usurped by what we now call ‘War Poetry’, which dwelt upon the terrible human cost of war, so Trafalgar Day, which unambiguously celebrated a crucial naval battle, paled into insignificance beside Armistice Day, which honoured the dead of many battles, some of which were a good deal less successful than Nelson’s routing of the French navy. That this shift in attitude persists may be judged by an announcement made by the Conservative MP John Redwood, on the anniversary of Trafalgar Day in 2007: ‘Today we mourn the deaths of 1,663 brave seamen and soldiers who died fighting to preserve the freedom of our country against Napoleon’s imperialism 202 years ago.’ Clearly, this statement has a Gallophobic slant one might expect from one of Britain’s leading Euro-sceptics, but no one before 1914 would have imagined Trafalgar Day an occasion for counting the cost and mourning the dead.
The Cenotaph remained the focus of Armistice Day, though this appears to have been less at the behest of the authorities than in deference to popular sentiment. Indeed, there seems to have been a decision as early as 1922 that the ceremony at the Cenotaph should be abandoned. It is likely that this came from the Church authorities, who no doubt felt that since there was now a representative of the Empire’s dead buried within a Christian church, this should be where the country’s principal act of remembrance should be held. Capacious as the Abbey was, it could not accommodate anything like the number of people who thronged Whitehall, and services continued to be held both in Westminster Abbey and at the Cenotaph. The former was a full service with lessons and a sermon, whereas the liturgical content of the latter was restricted to a couple of prayers and a hymn – and this, from the Church’s point of view, may have been the trouble. But it was also the point: as Lutyens intended, the Cenotaph was a place where anyone, regardless of creed, could pay homage to the dead. People of other religions, or of no religion at all, could stand politely during the brief Christian prayers and hymn and still feel that the greater part of the ceremony was inclusively secular. ‘The ceremony at the Cenotaph has struck the imagination of the Empire,’ The Times reported on the eve of Armistice Day in 1923, ‘and there has been universal gratification that the first decision to abandon the service has been reversed.’ This volte-face had the endorsement of Rudyard Kipling, who may not have been the Poet Laureate but was certainly regarded as a national poet, far more popular than the long-serving official incumbent, Robert Bridges. In the same edition of The Times, Kipling published a bleak poem called ‘London Stone’, placing the Cenotaph very firmly at the centre of Armistice Day observation. Far from making due obeisance to religious sentiment, the poem explicitly took and repudiated a biblical text. It further suggested that in the face of so much loss conventional religion had failed to provide answers or comfort, and that the only solace was a secular sense of community among the bereaved. The Cenotaph is designated ‘the Place of Grieving’, where people will come to lay flowers and take part in the two minutes’ silence:
For those minutes, tell no lie:–
(Grieving – grieving!)
‘Grave, this is thy victory;
And the sting of Death is grieving.’
Where’s our help, from earth or Heaven?
(Grieving – grieving!)
To comfort us for what we’ve given,
And only found the grieving.
Heaven’s too far and Earth too near
(Grieving – grieving!)
But our neighbours standing here,
Grieve as we are grieving.
[…]
What’s the tie betwixt us two
(Grieving – grieving!)
That must last our whole lives through?
‘As I suffer so do you.’
That may ease your grieving.
It is not by any stretch Kipling’s finest poem, but its almost intolerable tolling of ‘Grieving – grieving!’, from a man who had himself lost his only son in the war, and its laying of that grief, as it were, at the Cenotaph rather than in the Abbey, reflected the public mood.
This mood, and the placing of Lutyens’ memorial at the centre of Armistice Day, was echoed by the appearance in 1923 of Cenotaph, ‘A Book of Remembrance in Poetry and Prose for November the Eleventh’, edited by the journalist and poet Thomas Moult. The frontispiece was a drawing by Joseph Pike depicting the Cenotaph on what looks like a rain-sodden English afternoon. Alongside such perennial favourites as Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’, McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’, Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ and Hardy’s ‘Men Who March Away’, as well as many less enduring verses, Mould reproduces extracts from letters written at the front, newspaper accounts of the first Armistice Days, the last reported words of Nurse Cavell, General Pershing’s speech when awarding the Congressional Medal of Honor to the Unknown Warrior, and Joseph Conrad’s salute to ‘the seamen of Great Britain’. Not all the selections are anodyne: Sassoon’s �
�Aftermath’ includes references to ‘the stench of corpses rotting’ and the ‘dying eyes and lolling heads’ of stretcher cases, but is included perhaps because it ends with an exhortation never to forget the dead. There would be no further attempts to usurp the pre-eminence of the Cenotaph in the grieving hearts of the British people for some time to come.
Lutyens’ austere memorial rapidly joined other buildings and monuments as a famous London sight, appearing in guidebooks and on postcards. Souvenir manufacturers such as Crest also provided ceramic models of the Cenotaph so that even those who could not visit the monument in person could display one on their mantelpieces. As its name suggested, the Crest company specialised in ceramics with garish and gilded coats of arms enamelled on their plain white surfaces, as did several other companies, including Carlton, Podmore and Arcadian. The standard model naturally bore the coat of arms of London, but you could often buy one bearing your own local crest, whether you lived in a large city such as Oxford or a small town such as Walton-on-the-Naze. Some manufacturers, evidently feeling that Lutyens’ restrained reference to the Glorious Dead left something wanting, daubed their models with such inelegant if heartfelt slogans as ‘The blood of heroes is the seed of freedom’. Quite what the architect himself would have made of such sentiments, or indeed these often fanciful models of his pure and unadorned design, is not known, but these commemorative gewgaws were evidently popular.
The Cenotaph got a chapter to itself in H.V. Morton’s The Heart of London (1925), Lutyens’ comparatively new monument taking its place beside more ancient sights of London such as St Paul’s, the Royal Mint and Cleopatra’s Needle. Morton describes visiting the Cenotaph ‘on a cold, grey February morning’:
A parcels delivery boy riding a tricycle takes off his worn cap. An omnibus goes by. The men lift their hats. Men passing with papers and documents under their arms and attaché and despatch cases in their hands – all the business of life – bare their heads as they hurry by.
Six years [since the end of the war] have made no difference here. The Cenotaph – that mass of national emotion frozen in stone – is holy to this generation. Although I have seen it so many times on that day once a year when it comes alive to the accompaniment of pomp as simple and as beautiful as church ritual, I think I like it best just standing here in a grey morning, with its feet in flowers and ordinary folk going by, remembering.
The ordinary folk, members of the lower middle class, were Morton’s intended readership, and many of his books started out as columns in the populist Daily Express, where he worked as a journalist throughout the 1920s. Morton became one of the most widely read travel writers of the twentieth century, and although his volumes now crowd the shelves of second-hand bookshops, during his lifetime his influence was considerable, particularly in the interwar period. His most famous book was In Search of England (1927), and all his books are very much concerned with a sense of national identity. The book’s title suggested a spiritual as well as a geographical quest, and the England Morton goes in search of in his Morris Cowley is as much a repository of national values as it is a collection of fields and woods and towns and villages. Morton was himself a veteran of the war – though one whose military career remains something of an enigma – and, as his biographer Michael Bartholomew notes, In Search of England ‘is in many ways the archetypal post-war record of a soldier, home from the trenches, going off to try to locate and define the country he’d been fighting for’.
It opens melodramatically ‘I believed I was dying in Palestine’, which at this period naturally makes the reader think of him as a serving soldier. Morton explains that he was worried that an acute pain he was suffering in his neck might be a symptom of spinal meningitis, but he is careful not to provide a date for these intimations of mortality, which were widely shared by the generation that had been to war. He describes climbing a hill overlooking Jerusalem and, ‘turning as accurately as I could in the direction of England’, giving in to a wave of homesickness.
Perhaps in instinctive contrast to the cold, unhappy mountains of Palestine there rose in my mind the picture of a village street at dusk with a smell of wood smoke lying in the still air and, here and there, little red blinds shining in the dusk under the thatch. I remembered how the church bells ring at home, and how, at that time of year, the sun leaves a dull red bar low down in the west, and against it the elms grow blacker minute by minute. Then the bats start to flicker like little bits of burnt paper and you hear the slow jingle of a team coming home from the fields … When you think like this sitting alone in a foreign country I think you know all there is to know about heartache.
Many servicemen must have entertained similar thoughts when they managed to find a quiet moment to themselves out of the noise and confusion of war. ‘I took a vow that if my pain in the neck did not end for ever on the windy hills of Palestine I would go through the lanes of England and the little thatched villages of England, and I would lean over English bridges and lie on English grass watching an English sky.’ The manner and language might be reminiscent of Rupert Brooke, but Morton was not on active service. He was in fact – as he is careful not to tell us – in Palestine as a tourist in 1923, returning from Egypt, where he had been on a journalistic assignment for the Daily Express to report the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
The sleight of hand practised by Morton in the opening pages of In Search of England is not particularly reprehensible, and it gives the book an added force at a time when war memoirs were starting to appear. Unsurprisingly, Morton also wrote about the Unknown Warrior in The Spell of London (1926), in which jaunty character sketches mingle sometimes uneasily with overblown passages suggesting an almost religious sense of Englishness. The Unknown Warrior, he writes, ‘lies not only at the heart of London, but also at the heart of England, here in magic earth, in this sacred soil, so warm in love, so safe in honour. No noise of traffic disturbs his sleep, no unkind wind whistles over him – no solitude of night. Instead, the silence of a mighty church, a silence as deep and lovely as though he were lying in some green country graveyard steeped in peace, above him a twilight in which the stored centuries seem to whisper happily of good things done for England.’ Of course, the sacred soil in which the Warrior rests was not English at all, but specially imported from the battlefields, which may be why Morton liked to imagine this representative of all that is good about England as if he were in a country churchyard. Indeed, the England Morton came to value and think most representative of the nation was that of the smaller towns and villages. ‘This village that symbolizes England sleeps in the sub-consciousness of many a townsman,’ Morton observed.
A little London factory hand I met during the war confessed to me when pressed, and after great mental difficulty, that he visualised the England he was fighting for – the England of the ‘England wants you’ poster – as not London, not his own street, but as Epping Forest, the green place where he had spent Bank Holidays. And I think most of us did. The village and the English country-side are the germs of all we are and all we have become: our manufacturing cities belong to the last century and a half; our villages stand with their roots in the Heptarchy.
Morton’s England was essentially pre-war, even prelapsarian, but the villages he was visiting and writing about were acutely conscious of the changes wrought by the war. While Morton was extolling a sense of continuity, the radical break in history that the war represented was finding concrete form in the memorials being erected in such places to commemorate their dead. According to the Somerset volume of The King’s England series of guidebooks founded by Arthur Mee in 1930, there were only thirty villages in the whole country in which all those who marched off to war returned. These were known as ‘thankful villages’ or ‘luck parishes’. Morton’s book ends in an English churchyard, where the vicar talks of the generations that have lived and died in the parish. He mentions Crusaders, but surprisingly no mention is made of the more recent dead, who by this time would almost certainly be
commemorated in the church or churchyard. Like the Cenotaph, local war memorials were now added to tourist itineraries in other less rigidly nostalgic guidebooks with, for example, a whole chapter devoted to them in Wonderful Britain: Its Highways, Byways and Historical Places, published in parts between 1928 and 1929. Similarly, local war memorials joined grand civic buildings, picturesque street scenes and thatched cottages as suitable subjects for postcards.
Most war memorials were paid for by public subscription, local committees being formed to raise money and oversee planning and design. While some communities commemorated the dead with public buildings such as a new village hall or cottage hospital, or public recreation grounds, most erected a monument of some kind: a cross or obelisk, or a figurative statue. These were often in addition to the Roll of Honour displayed in churches, where the names of the parish’s dead were listed on a brass wall plaque, a wooden board or occasionally in stained glass, as in the cloisters of Worcester Cathedral, where fallen bell-ringers and members of the choir are commemorated. Schools, universities, businesses and other organisations also erected their own memorials to commemorate former pupils, alumni, employees and other members of communities other than towns and villages. The unveiling of new memorials during services of dedication carried on for many years, right up until the eve of the Second World War. Thereafter they formed a focus for civic pride of a particular kind, not merely remembering the individual dead but demonstrating that each community had played its part and made its own sacrifices in the war.
