Remembering on Armistice Day

A telling anniversary: a century ago, the guns of the Western Front of the First at last fell silent.

We mourn 20 million dead and 21 million wounded on this anniversary. Well, quite a lot of us do, though I note that President Donald Trump only does so if the rain holds off. A fair-weather mourner I suppose we’d have to call him.

That multitude of dead included four I’ve mentioned before: George Edwin Ellison, Augustin Trébuchon, George Lawrence Price and Henry Gunther.

They were, respectively, the last British soldier killed, the last Frenchman, the last Canadian (and last Commonwealth soldier) and, finally, the last American. Indeed, Gunther is generally believed to be the last soldier on any side killed in that war: he died on 11 November 1918 charging a position held by Germans who were shouting at the attackers to stop, since the Armistice would come into effect a minute later.

Maybe it was all down to poorer communications than today, but it seems an extraordinary waste that five hours were allowed to elapse between the signing of the Armistice agreement at 5:10 am and its start at 11:00, however ringing a tone that ‘eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ may be.

American soldiers celebrating the end of the fighting

As well as Ellison, Trébuchon, Price and Gunther, the time gap cost going on for 3000 lives. Which pretty much sums up the futility of the whole war.

Clearly, I know too little about the life of David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister of the time. I learned from the ‘Guardian’ that he, like US President Woodrow Wilson, argued that imposing excessively hard conditions on Germany would only mean that ‘we shall have to do the whole thing over again in 25 years.’

Harsh conditions were imposed, and indeed the whole thing had to be done again not 25 but 21 years later. With the additional spice of totalitarianism and a Holocaust.

I’m not quite sure what my relatives were doing on Armistice Day in 1918.

One grandfather may have been working with other members of his unit to dismantle an artillery emplacement, preparatory to heading home and demobilisation. He would be taking shrapnel with him, embedded in his hand, as well as the memory of falling victim to a gas attack.

His brother, on the other hand, would soon leave for Russia, to continue fighting, this time with the small British contingent supporting White Russian forces battling the newly-installed Bolsheviks. His experience provides a vivid illustration of the fact that fighting in Europe didn’t end on 11 November, it merely ended on the Western Front.

That great uncle of mine had joined up, illegally, at the age of 15. His mother wrote to his colonel to demand that her son, far too young to serve, be sent home. The reply came from a junior officer informing her that Private Beeson had assured him he was nineteen, so they wouldn’t be sending him back.

Next time you meet a fifteen-year old boy, try to picture him in uniform with a weapon he’s been trained to use to kill people.

As for my other grandfather, he must have been thinking that he’d be released from prison quite soon. He’d been sent there because he refused to fight, but with the war over he could get back to ordinary life, his career as a lithographer and even to finding a possible wife with whom he could start a family.

She, however, would not at that stage have been a potential life partner for him. She was already engaged. However, many of the men returning from the war barely had time to feel relief at having survived the carnage before they were caught up in one of the world’s worst epidemics, Spanish influenza. He’d survived the shelling and the gas, but my grandmother’s fiancé succumbed to the flu. So in the end she married my grandfather instead. Leading to several lives, including my own, which wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.

Like many others, they picked up the threads of a civilian existence. That meant facing different problems: finding jobs, finding housing, educating families. Barely over ten years later, with the great crash of 1929, that became a great deal harder. And ten years after that, each in their own way, my grandparents were doing it, as Lloyd George said, all over again.

An experience worth remembering as we celebrate the centenary of that Armistice. The war it ended wasn’t the war to end all wars. Just the beginning of a lot more problems that persist to today. And between then and now, there have been plenty more wars.

Which is perhaps the most important thing to remember on Armistice day.


Postscript: the First World War was by no means the first world war. Arguably, that would have been the Seven Years War (called the French and Indian War in America) of 1756-1763: it pitted European powers against each other, but alongside combat in their own Continent, it was fought in the Americas, West Africa, India and the Philippines, as well as at sea in many parts of the globe. That seems to fit any sensible definition of a world war, doesn’t it?

Progress of a rebel freed from gaol

The young man who was released from Dartmoor Prison at the end of the First World War, and who would later be my grandfather, had been a radical even before he went in. It was what led him to the pacifism for which he was gaoled. And he emerged, after a year or two in the company of such men as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, even more radical than he went in.

Radical Nat on the right. On a postcard from
'yours rebelliously Henry B Offell'

A radical though not quite a Communist. My grandmother, Yetta, had joined the Party and had become quite an activist. My grandfather, Nat or Norman, did attend some meetings though he never joined. One of the meetings he went to was chaired by Yetta. She was an attractive young woman and he decided he wanted to get to know her better.

She had, however, emerged from the aftermath of the war a woman saddened well beyond her eighteen years. She’d been engaged to a young man who managed to survive the entire war, only to come home and succumbing to the terrible flu epidemic that followed. So,  when Nat approached her, Yetta was still recovering from a devastating loss. 

Did that make her more or less open to his advances? Perhaps a little of both. They were engaged relatively soon, but the road to marriage was a stormy one. She told me that on one evening they had such a row in a street on the way home that she tore off her engagement ring and threw it on the pavement at his feet, before storming off.

He, instead of following her at once, got down on his hands and knees and searched for the ring. It was a good ring and he wanted her to accept it. He could settle the argument later.

They were married in 1921. On 8 September, just one week before Yetta turned 21. A week later and she wouldn’t have needed her parents’ consent, but she insisted on getting it, though they were more than a little reluctant: Nat was from a far poorer background than hers, daughter as she was of a skilled craftsman, a shoemaker specialising in orthopaedic shoes for injured or otherwise deformed feet.

Yetta and Nat at their wedding in 1921

He’d picked up the profession in which he’d started before the war, lithography, and had reached a level of expertise such that his company asked him to go into sales and represent them to clients rather than simply do the lithographs himself. It meant that he was able at last to emerge from the backbreaking poverty in which he’d spent his childhood. He still got off his bus from and to home a stop early to save a penny on the fare, but he was soon earning enough to be able to clear the mortgage on a house within four years, something that’s practically unthinkable in England today. He moved his family into a modest house in the new outer London district of Hampstead Garden Suburb, where many Jews entering a middle-class existence were moving.

A Jewish boss of mine once said that to make a man a Conservative, you had to give him something to conserve. Rebellious Nat may once have been, but as the years rolled by, he found himself in ever greater sympathy with the British Establishment. Besides, when it came to the Second World War, he felt that the nature of an enemy led by Hitler meant that a Jew had to abandon pacifism and do what he could to overthrow that violently anti-Semitic regime.

He was too old for combat, but he could volunteer for the Air Raid Protection service, which he enthusiastically did. He knew what Air Raids meant, if only as a result of attempting to travel in to his office in the City of London one day, only to be turned back four stops before his on the Underground. The city had taken a pasting the night before and most of the buildings had been burned out, his company’s included. There was no way through to it.

So, at the end of the Second World War, unlike the First, Nat was far closer in sympathy to the mainstream of British society. And the process continued, notably after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. My grandparents were never practising Jews (a more religious uncle refused to visit them because they’d allowed bacon into their house), but their sympathies were with the Jews of Israel nonetheless. The result was a continued drift away from the radical Left to which they had both belonged at one time.

A good grandfather with his grandsons in the fifties
Just a bit more staid...

‘I’ve given up reading The Guardian,’ Yetta once told me to explain why she was taking the Conservative Daily Telegraph, ‘because the Guardian keeps writing pieces so critical of Israel.’

I haven’t the hard data to support my view, but it feels to me that this has been a trend in the Jewish community. Radical in the 1920s, strongly pro-Labour in the fifties and sixties, its centre of gravity is with the Tories today – perhaps their more liberal wing, but Tory nonetheless.

I’m not sure where they would stand on the scandal over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party today. I imagine it would only have been the last straw for them. Among those of us who remain linked with the Jewish community, however tenuously, only a minority stay loyal to Labour.

For my part, I wish we could recapture the time when Jews like my grandparents could be counted on to support the Left. But I regret still more that many Jews no longer feel comfortable in the Labour Party. I’d like to see the first problem solved, but I believe something will have died in Labour’s soul if it can’t solve the second.

The banality of death

They tell you about death as dire but inevitable, a dread we all must face.

They tell you about death as bereavement and loss, as a pain to suffer and mourn.

They don’t tell you about death as an endless procession of bureaucratic tasks, turning a moment of sorrow into a litany of monotonous administrative chores.

Take arranging a funeral.

Is there going to be a service? If so, who will conduct it? Does the crematorium have a slot available (my mother had asked to be cremated) at the same time as the celebrant (he was about to go on leave)?

What style of coffin did we want (given that it was going to be burned…)? What colour of flowers? How should the press announcement be worded? How about the Order of Service booklet – which should contain what photos, to represent 94 years of life in just five images?

Then there’s the will. The lawyer was kind enough to phone me.

‘You need to contact your mother’s bank.’

‘Done.’

‘You need to contact the Department of Work and Pensions.’

‘Done.’

‘You need to make arrangements for the cremation.’

‘Done.’

Have you noticed how helpful lawyers are? How they’re happy to provide all the advice you could possibly need and more? At £280 an hour, wouldn’t you be?

But the worst bit is clearing the flat. My mother was living in sheltered accommodation, in what was in effect just a bed-sitter with its own kitchen and bathroom. But it never ceases to amaze me just how much someone can cram into a small space if they really set their mind to it.

Trolley load after trolley load of books went down to the charity shop. Great piles of clothes. Bits of bric-a-brac. And that’s without counting the items of furniture which the organisation that runs the place has decided to keep.

Or, come to that, the bits and pieces my brother and I simply couldn’t bring ourselves to part with. I came home with my car full. But not just of those objects – above all, what I had was boxes and boxes of photos and correspondence, not just my mother’s, but my father’s, even my maternal grandmother’s and grandfather’s.

Leonard, my father, amateur writer who generated another

Strangely, both my maternal grandmother and my father were keen amateur writers, as I am. I now have a box file labelled in my mother’s hand as her mother’s writings, as I have another of my father’s. My grandmother’s papers included several sealed envelopes marked ‘Before destroying these manuscripts, have a little patience, and read them. Your relative had a questing mind, and a certain literary facility.’

Well, I shall be the first to fulfil that wish since she died. I shall break the seals on those envelopes. That will be a time of some emotion. I’ll have a reminder that death is about loss and bereavement and not just about a banal and tedious bureaucratic process.

Sadly, before I can get around to that, I still have to get through some correspondence with the public authorities, a meeting with a lawyer at £280 an hour, to say nothing of dealing with any outstanding payments due for utilities, phones or, indeed, funeral services.

It’ll be a poignant moment when I can turn my attention to my grandmother’s writing. And my father’s. But oh, what a relief that will be.

Yetta Bannister, a while before she became my grandmother
An amateur writer in the making