Remembrance Sunday 2025

Every year, the Village pays tribute to those who gave their lives in the Great War.

The War Memorial Service

Alastair Stewart read the names of the servicemen listed on the War Memorial:

• Frederick Whitney, H.M.S. Hampshire
• Ivan Essex, Royal Engineers
• George Harrison, Northumberland Fusiliers
• Joseph Wray, Northumberland Fusiliers
• Harry Whitney, West Yorkshire Regiment
• William Smailes, Yorkshire Regiment
• Thomas Campbell, Yorkshire Regiment
• Harry Brindley, Yorkshire Regiment
• Maurice Smailes, Yorks and Lancs
• Richard Hildreth, Middlesex Regiment
• John Essex, North Riding Volunteer Regiment

In addition, Alastair also readthe names of servicemen from Stonegrave and those who gave their lives in later conflicts.

The Church Service

The Remembrance Service in the Church was taken by the Very Rev Peter Atkinson (Retired Dean of Worcester Cathedral), who gave a moving sermon reminding us that we did not have to be heroes and give our lives for others. We just needed to be kind, compassionate, helpful and be of service.

Alastair Stewart read an excerpt from an article published in the Racing Post in July 2006 written by the famous racing commentator Alastair Down:

I will just say one thing at this stage about the World Cup. If any sports pundit employs the word “heroic” just once more to describe ten Englishmen playing football for an hour, then I promise to break the 41-year rule mentioned above [not to lose my temper].

Let me try to tell you why. Over a typically enjoyable Irish Derby weekend, by far the most significant and moving event occurred in Dublin on Sunday when a long-standing wrong was put right in scenes of great solemnity in the suburb of Islandbridge.

As you will know, Saturday marked the 90th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916. At the Lochnagar crater and at other points such as Beaumont Hamel, where 630 out of 800 Newfoundlanders died or were wounded in the first 40 minutes of the battle, men and women gathered at the witching hour of 7:28 am to pay tribute and remember both the slaughter and the courage.

In the flat landscape of massive cemeteries that is the Somme, there is a tiny graveyard at Mansell Copse where just over 120 members of the Devon regiment are buried. In late June 1916, a lieutenant of the Devons had some rare leave. A draughtsman by trade, he wiled away some of his fractured home time making a model illustrating exactly how, when he charged with his men in the big push, they would be mown done by a machine gun built into the base of a memorial in the remains of the civilian cemetery 300 yards away.

He was a fine draughtsman and was, as we would say, no bad judge either. He lies in that immaculate tiny grouping of tombstones, a few yards from the poet William Hodgkin, buried by the regimental Padre at the very place from which they charged. An inscription at this benighted but oh-so-special place reads: “The Devons held this trench, the Devons hold it still”.

At such immortal locations on Saturday morning, people stood to take part in that simplest, but most honest and heartfelt, of human rituals – remembrance.

The English, Scots, Welsh and Ulster dead have always been remembered with that strange mixture of bitter tears, admiration, remorse, pride, and pity. But for nearly 100 years until last Saturday, the 35,000 Irishmen who died in the Great War have had not the slightest recognition in the land of their birth. However, two days ago this long wrong was at last put right. At the National Wall Memorial Park at Islandbridge, Bertie Ahern finally and to his undying credit, laid a wreath at the Cenotaph on behalf of his people. (…)

The ceremony has made a great impact in Ireland, and I would expect no less from this nation. It takes a grown-up society, forward-looking and confident, to come to terms with past omissions and put things right.

While we worry about football games and allegedly errant horse races, let me pass on the only really sound tip that I have. Before you die, find a time to go and see where they died. Do a little homework, hop across the channel and drive the short hour and a half south to the Somme.

Go in the early autumn when the bare fields show up the trenchlines and the roadsides have piles of shells brought up by the plough as they have been for the last 90 years. Go to weep, go to wonder, go to rage, go to respect. Even if I have to take you myself, for God’s sake.go.

We sung three famous Remembrance hymns, finishing with “I vow to the my country“.

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