Remembering the contribution of British and Commonwealth military and civilian service men and women in World War I and World War II and later conflicts.
Originally called Armistice Day in commemoration of the one-year anniversary of the peace agreement that ended World War I (11th November 1918), after World War II it became Remembrance Sunday (the second Sunday in November).
The most recognizable symbol of Remembrance Sunday is the red poppy. In 1921 the newly formed British Legion (now the Royal British Legion), a charitable organisation for veterans, began selling red paper poppies for Armistice Day, and its annual Poppy Appeal has been enormously successful since.
This epitaph on the Kohima War Cemetery in India honours the soldiers who lost their lives in the Battle of Kohima during World War II and is attributed to John Maxwell Edmonds (1875-1958); an English classicist, poet and author. It is thought to have been inspired by the epitaph written by Simonides of Ceos to honour the Greeks who fell at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC. The exact wording of Simonides’ epitaph is not known, but it is said to have read something along the lines of “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”
Walter Daniel John Tull was born in Folkestone, Kent, on 28 April 1888 to Barbadian carpenter Daniel Tull and Kent-born Alice Elizabeth Palmer. In 1895, when Walter was seven, his mother died of cancer. A year later his father married Alice’s cousin, Clara Palmer. She gave birth to a daughter Miriam, on 11 September 1897. …
2nd Lt Walter Tull – first black infantry officer in British Army (1888 – 1918) Read More »
Sid Graham was born in Tidal Basin, Custom House in the London’s East End in 1920, the son of Sidney “Siddy” Graham a seaman from Barbados and his English wife Emma an East Ender. Sid made it to his 97th birthday on 28th January 2017 and sadly passed away on 30th April 2017. Until then …
Sid Graham. A forgotten Bajan WWII hero (1920 – 2017) Read More »
The torpedoing of the Cornwallis in Carlisle Bay, Barbados on the afternoon of Friday 11th September 1942 by German U-Boat 514 is remembered by older Bajans as the dark day in 1942 when World War II reached Barbados’ shores. The 75th anniversary of the torpedoing of the CNS Cornwallis in Carlisle Bay was Monday 11th …
Torpedoing of the Cornwallis in Carlisle Bay, Barbados, 11th September 1942 Read More »
Henry Cecil Bovell was born in Barbados on the 4th of January 1893 the only son of the Sir Henry Alleyne Bovell KC, Attorney General of Barbados, and Lady Annie Cecil (nee Briggs) Bovell. He died aged 70 on 31st March 1963. He left Hazelwood School (in Collymore Rock) in the summer of 1905 for the …
