It will be recalled that last November the rules about indoor social gatherings prevented the holding of the annual Remembrance Sunday Service in the church. Led by the Parish Council, on Armistice Day, November 11th 2020, villagers gathered on Castle Green for an open air ceremony. This was well attended and many people expressed their gratitude to be able to pay their respects to the fallen as a community, albeit dispersed about the Green as the rules required.
It became apparent to the Parish Councillors that there was a groundswell of opinion in the village that this simple open air ceremony should be repeated on Armistice Day this year so that those who wished could stand together in silent remembrance at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month as tradition demands.
During my seventy years of attending such ceremonies all over the district it has always surprised me that Sulgrave never had an open air war memorial in a prominent village location. So it was that last Thursday morning our Great War “Tommy” silhouette was for the second time established on the Green as a focus of attention for the ceremony. It seems to me that we have rather belatedly established a precedent for holding an outdoor ceremony on every Armistice Day, with the traditional readings and the sounding of the last post, as most other villages have done for over a hundred years.
Fortunately, the pandemic regulations allowed the holding of the traditional Remembrance Sunday service in the church on Sunday 14th November to coincide with the national ceremony in Whitehall, when the names of the fallen on the memorial were read out.
The Sulgrave War Memorial plaque in the church.
See next page for more information and some photographs of the ceremony (Click on “Read the rest of this entry”)
The short ceremony was conducted in strict accordance with British Legion guidelines,
The traditional words were spoken…….
……and the last post sounded.
The ceremony concluded with the Chairman of the Parish Council, Richard Fonge, reading the poem “Lest we forget” by Lucille Stafford.
Donald Taylor, ex-serviceman and stalwart of the local branch of the British Legion and annual poppy salesman for many, many years, is currently in a care home at Brackley and was therefore unable to carry out the usual house to house collection or be present at either the outdoor ceremony or the Remembrance Service in the church. Nevertheless, he was foremost in villagers’ thoughts during the event and our memories went back three years to the special commemoration of his Aunt Lilian Taylor, a former member of the Women’s Royal Air Force, who returned to the village from service in France in 1918 only to succumb to the dreadful influenza epidemic which killed millions of people at that time.
Lilian Taylor in 1918
Click here to read the story of the special commemoration in 2018
Those who have not seen it may also like to click here to read the stories of two “local heroes” and also those of all 18 of the men and women of the village who lost their lives in two world wars.
It may be of some interest to see two pictures I took in 1959 of a typical village remembrance march to an outside war memorial, here at Culworth:
Colin Wootton