For King and Country: Blackmore During the First World War (Part 10): Epilogue

For King and Country: Remembrance and Reflection

The First World War is removed from our experience, and it is true that those who remember service in the Second World War are becoming fewer. I would suggest that we remember these events through the eyewitnesses: accepting readily that our ancestors lived in a different age to our own. However, they were individual human beings with the same mental faculties as us. These people were part of families, local communities, and serve in society as we do.

Blackmore’s War Memorial unveiled in 1920 states that those who served did so for “Their Majesty” and those who fell did so in the service of “Their Country”. Those who lived through the First World War supported the war effort ‘For King and Country’.

This presentation began with an anecdote from my wife’s family of the First World War, and there will be stories in your families too.

Walter Reed and Remembrance

For me, Walter Reed, my great uncle, a late Victorian, born in Mountnessing, became school teacher and later Church of England lay reader in Norwich.

His sermon for Remembrance Sunday 1948, just three and a half years after the close of the Second World War, includes these words:

“We come ... with mingled feelings and if one could see the thousands of men and women in church this morning we should realise how varied are the reactions it evokes. ... To most of us it speaks of loss for 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. But this is not a Remembrance Day for one war only for then it would be observed in May or August but it recalls the First Great War of 1914-18 which took an even bigger toll of our young men. 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.”

The Cenotaph in London was dedicated on the same day as the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey on 11th November 1920, four days after the dedication of the War Memorial in Blackmore.

We are “the younger ones” Walter Reed speaks of when he says “We were all crusaders”. This was a generation that fought for King and Country.

O Valiant Hearts

The opening verse of the hymn would today make us feel uneasy.

“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.”

Britain in 1918 was a different country to that of today. To refer to going to war as being a crusade would be really controversial if preached now. But that was then.

Private Archibald Browne

The sad story of Private Archibald Browne of the 2nd Battalion Essex Regiment, whose mother lived in Green Street, is that he was court martialled and shot for desertion in December 1914.

He was named on the memorial in Belgium but the shame of his disloyalty meant that his name was not included on Ingatestone’s Roll of Honour immediately after the end of the First World War.

Reverend Reeve served on the Ongar Board of Guardians which considered, on 6th November 1917, a case in Keithley was reported where the government deprived the family of national assistance owing to “the soldier’s serious negligence or misconduct ... obliged to resort to the Poor Law for help.

The Chairman said he could not see why if a soldier misbehaved himself and got shot, his wife and family should suffer.

The Revd. E H L Reeve:

“It is an example to others, and there is a question of a deterrent.”

By four votes to three it was decided to support the Keithley proposal.

When a new Ingatestone War Memorial was unveiled in 2006 Archibald Browne was given his place of honour alongside his villagers. Later that year the Government, under Tony Blair, granted a posthumous pardon to all shot for desertion.

Remembering All Who Served

In his address at the RAF Centenary Service in July 2018, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, recalled his family members who had served, one of whom had been killed on active service.

“How fit and proper that we should remember all who have served”.

Some of the 81 named on Blackmore’s War Memorial were among the one and a half million men who were permanently weakened by wounds or the effects of gas, or unseen psychological scars as a consequence of the First World War.

Mental Health and the Legacy of War

Our understanding of mental health being as important as physical health is beginning to change one hundred years on from the First World War.

Natasha Devon, a leading mental health campaigner wrote this in 2018:

“In Britain, in particular we pride ourselves on having a ‘keep calm and carry on’, stiff upper lip-type mentality and seem to be labouring under the illusion that maintaining this through the horrors of the First and Second World Wars meant ‘no one ever used to have mental-health problems’.

I don’t have enough words available to me in this book to convey the extent to which people irrefutably DID have mental-health problems during the wars”.

We Will Remember Them

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 words first published at the beginning not end of the War:

“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.”

Bibliography

The main source used in this talk, ‘Notes for a Parish History’ written by the Revd. E.H.L. Reeve of Stondon Massey can be found at the Essex Record Office, ref. T/P 188/3.

• Baker, Miss G.M. Margaretting. The Village with a Beautiful Name (G M Baker, 1983)
• Best, Nicholas. The Greatest Day in History (Phoenix, 2008)
• Clark, Revd. A. (ed. James Munson). Echoes Of The Great War. The Diary of the Reverend Andrew Clark 1914-1919 (Oxford University Press, 1985)
• Coller, Mary. Blackmore. My 1920s Wonderland (1999)
• Devon, Natasha. A Beginner’s Guide to Being Mental. An A-Z (Bluebird, 2018)
• Fleetwood, John. Reflected Glory (1979)
• Morris, Captain Joseph. The German Air Raids on Great Britain 1914 – 1918 (Nonsuch, 2007) First published in 1925
• Norris, Stephen. From A Borough to A City. A History of Chelmsford 1888-2012 (Bright Pen, 2014)
• Overy, Richard. The Birth of the RAF, 1918 (Allen Lane, 2018)
• Patch, Harry, with Emden, Richard. The Last Fighting Tommy (Bloombury, 2008)
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• Wilde, Mrs E.E. Ingatestone and the Essex Great Road with Fryerning (Oxford University Press, 1913)