(page two)
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Lloyd George with Winston Churchill
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In
London the focus of the ceremony was the temporary cenotaph on the Mall.
Early in the morning a wreath from the King was placed there and crowds
began to gather in large numbers.
Just before eleven Lloyd George stepped
forward carrying a wreath of orchids and roses with a background of
laurels and laid it among the other wreaths.
The Manchester
Guardian reported:
The first stroke
of eleven produced a magical effect.
The tram cars
glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume, and stopped dead,
and the mighty-limbed dray horses hunched back upon their loads and
stopped also, seeming to do it of their own volition.
Someone took
off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the rest of the men bowed their
heads also. Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping
unconsciously into the posture of 'attention'. An elderly woman, not far
away, wiped her eyes, and the man beside her looked white and stern.
Everyone stood very still ... The hush deepened. It had spread over the
whole city and become so pronounced as to impress one with a sense of
audibility. It was a silence which was almost pain ... And the spirit of
memory brooded over it all.
Throughout
Britain and across the Empire all activity ceased. Traffic came to a
standstill. In London not a single telephone call was made. Trains due off
at 11 o'clock delayed their departure by two minutes; those already in motion
stopped. J.Thomas gives a vivid account of how silence fell over the North
British Railway:
a
silence symbolic of the stillness that had fallen over the battlefields
when the guns had stopped firing a year ago to the very minute. All over
the system from Northumberland to Inverness-shire, on mainlines and
branches, in sheds and yards, passenger trains, goods trains and shunting
engines stopped wherever they happened to be. Engine crews stood hare
headed at their footplates, passengers sat silent in their compartments.
Great stations fell suddenly silent, travellers froze into immobility.
People had much to remember; few in those trains and stations had not lost
a friend or relative in the recent war. Of the 4,836 NB men who joined the
armed forces 775 had not returned.
from
J.Thomas North British Railway (1975) quoted in A.Gregory Silence of
Memory (1994)
In Nottingham
Assize Court a demobilised soldier was being tried for murder. At 11o'clock the
whole court including the prisoner stood silently for two minutes. Later the
day the soldier was sentenced to death.
 The
following year saw the unveiling of the permanent Cenotaph (right), and the burial
of the Unknown Warrior, and the two minutes silence was now firmly in
place as part of that joint ceremony. The press again reflected the
universal hold the silence had, with the Times reporting that “though
a roadman at Norbiton Surrey had lighted a bonfire early in the morning he
put it out a few minutes before 11 and re-lit it at a quarter past”.
On the other hand
in the same year a Manchester Guardian reporter wrote:
I stood in the
same place I had stood last year. The narrow crowded East End market.
Groups of unemployed ex-servicemen, shabby, sullen-faced, stood at every
corner. Hawkers yelled their wares. Nobody stopped till eleven tolled then
it was all over, quick, and back to work.
It was, however,
usually unwise for anybody to ignore the “sacred” nature of the
silence. One incident reported by The Times showed that strength of
feeling: “because a man who
looked like a foreigner did not remove his hat at Waterloo Station - a
young man took it off and held it till the silence ended.”
And there was some satisfaction in the way
the papers told the story of the violence
meted out to women working for the Worker’s Dreadnought paper who had
allegedly been laughing and joking during the silence. One woman was
reported as saying "We didn't believe in it, but all we did was shake
a duster out of the window and suddenly see all these people standing so
still.” According to most reports the office was stormed by an enraged crowd and its occupants roughed
up.
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Poppies at the Cenotaph 1998
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The
silence has continued to be a central part of every Armistice or
Remembrance Day in ceremonies throughout the United Kingdom. For the
last three or four years there has been a move to restore the silence on November
11 rather than restricting it to the
Sunday following Armistice Day (now known as Remembrance Day). In fact
1999 (perhaps because of the nearness of the new century) saw even more
shops, schools, businesses of many kinds observing the two minute silence
at eleven o’clock.
With
such an continuing interest perhaps the scene
witnessed by a young London schoolgirl in a doctor’s waiting room in the early 1920s will still be mirrored
a hundred years from now:
As the
hands of the clock moved towards eleven ... There was a gathering tension
in the air of the waiting-room; everyone around me was sitting very
straight, hands folded in laps or clenched between knees. Then the maroons
went off, and the noise of the traffic outside stopped abruptly, leaving
an almost unearthly hush. We all got to our feet in a single movement like
a wave of the sea, and the silence which followed was so absolute that you
could almost put out your hand and touch it.
Eileen Elias,
Straw Hats and Serge Bloomers (1979)
 Much of the
information for this article came from Adrian Gregory’s The Silence of
Memory and Geoff Dyer’s Missing of the Somme as well as contemporary
newspapers.
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