On Remembrance Sunday we commemorate the service and sacrifice of British and Commonwealth military and civilian men and women who served in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Merchant Navy and Emergency Services during World War I, World War II and later conflicts who defended our freedoms and protected our way of life.
Originally called Armistice Day in commemoration of the 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.
“When You Go Home,
Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Your Tomorrow,
We Gave Our Today.“
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 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.”
BajanThings is on a mission to record some of the stories from WWI and WWII of those valiant young men and women who volunteered and did not return and those that did return who did NOT speak about their often horrific experiences of war, and who, post war just got on with life as best that they could – often suppressing those war-time memories, living with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). If you or a relative have a story please contact BajanThings.
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 …
