Assembly Insights: Two Minute Silence

Assembly Extract from Mr Phil Harrison – Head of Sixth Form
Presented on Monday 14 October 2024

Remembrance Day: the enduring nature of the first two-minute silence

Remembrance Sunday, yesterday, is held in the United Kingdom as a day to commemorate the contribution of British and Commonwealth military and civilian servicemen and women in the two World Wars and later conflicts It is held on the second Sunday in November – the Sunday nearest to 11 November, Armistice Day, significant because it marked the end of the first world war – and brings together monarchs, politicians, and many other notable people from across the world.

A National Service of Remembrance is held at The Cenotaph in Whitehall on Remembrance Sunday, and similar services of quiet remembrance are held in villages, towns, cities, schools and other organisations across the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth – our own community gathered here yesterday to remember of all those, including the many Old Bancroftian’s who have lost their lives in conflict.

The first Armistice Day, November 11 1918, was very different to now. As news of the end of hostilities emerged, crowds cheered on the streets of Allied countries such as Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, France and Belgium. People rejoiced at the ending of a period of total mobilisation that had affected every aspect of their lives, inflicting unprecedented hardship on soldiers and civilians alike. Among the celebrations, however, 2, 738 men lost their lives that day, as the news slowly filtered across the trenches, including Private George Edwin Ellison, the last British soldier to be killed in action during the First World War. He died at 09:30 am, 90 minutes before the armistice came into effect, shot by a sniper while on a patrol in woodland on the outskirts of Mons, Belgium.

For those who had lost the war, the news of the armistice came as a shock. While some were relieved the conflict had ended, the sudden collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires provided a breeding ground for revolutionary movements and further internal conflicts. For them, Armistice Day was not a time for celebration but a moment of anguish and bitterness.

In the furthest reaches of the conflict it would be weeks before news of the armistice would come though, with commanders having to agree their own protocols for an armistice ceremony. In East Africa, German Gen von Lettow-Vorbeck was undefeated, and when it came to the negotiating the armistice he was keen to be recognised as such. In that context, the British agreed that, after he and his officers had ceremonially handed over their weapons, they would immediately be given back.

After its first iteration, Armistice Day became a more formal and sombre commemoration. People were encouraged to remember the dead with respect and solemnity. At 11am on November 11 1919 a great silence fell over the British Empire. Everywhere people stood silently: in their workplaces, on the street, assembled in public squares, before war memorials and in churches from Sydney to Ontario and New Delhi to Edinburgh. At the Cenotaph in London, a visiting Australian Methodist minister recalled that the crowd was overwhelmed by an “awful silence”, which “was so intense that the flutter of the pigeons’ wings away above us in the calm sky seemed to deepen it”. For two minutes people were united by the silence.

Symbolically marking the first anniversary of the signing of the armistice which concluded the first World War, the first two minutes silence was intended to bring together a grieving empire. More than a million servicemen and women had been lost, many more had been injured, and families and communities were grappling with the upheaval to their lives.

The social dislocation caused by this mass sorrow was made worse for those who had lost loved ones abroad and were denied the ordinary practices of mourning, such as funerals with all their traditions and comforting rituals. A situation that perhaps seemed unthinkable in modern times, until covid came and reminded us again of the fragility of calm and order. Although the Imperial War Graves Commission was established in 1917, many would never be able to see the final resting places of their loved ones.

How did a collective silence come to be the way in which we remember those who gave their lives?

As the first anniversary of the end of the war approached, the British government was faced with how to mark it – at home and across the empire. The proposal for holding an empire-wide silence was brought to the attention of the cabinet by the colonial secretary, Lord Milner. Milner had been lobbied by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick – a South African politician himself inspired by the two-minute silence daily observed in Cape Town after the noonday gun. The story of the Cape Town silence began in 1915, when at an army recruitment meeting a member of the audience is said to have shouted “You will forget us as soon as we are gone.” As a commitment to the men sent off to fight that they wouldn’t indeed be forgotten, a monthly meeting of local dignitaries had, by 1918, become a city wide two-minute silence. The pause was originally three minutes but was reduced to two “in order to better retain its hold on the people”. It was repeated daily for the duration of the war and only ended in December 1918, after the conclusion of the conflict.

The stated aim of the pause was silent remembrance, fulfilling a debt of honour to the fallen and demonstrating to those who survived that the sacrifice of the dead did not go unnoticed or unappreciated.

In Cape Town there is a plaque entitled “commemoration of an honourable tradition”. It reads: “When the Noonday gun was fired from the Lion Battery, Signal Hill, on 14 May 1918, it brought Cape Town to a dead stop for a Two-Minute Silence. “One minute in ‘Remembrance for those who died for their cause’, one minute in ‘gratitude’ for survivors.

Inspired by the people of Cape Town, Fitzpatrick emphasised the symbolic power of two minutes, where there would be “from the heart of the empire to its uttermost limits, just silence and remembrance”.

There was reason to believe the silence would be successful. Similar local silences had been held throughout the war, in England, and Australia, as well as South Africa. In 1916, an Anglican clergyman in Australia, Canon David Garland organised two-minute silences as part of an ANZAC Day commemoration. Observed on 25 April each year, Anzac Day was originally devised to honour the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who served in the Gallipoli campaign. Cannon Garland’s innovation had been to treat it as an ecumenical moment – a bringing together of people from different religious traditions. Silence bridged sectarian differences: Protestants disavowed prayers for the dead, and Catholics could not be led in prayer by non-Catholic clergy.

For the same reason, the silence was also inclusive of the many Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others in India, Asia and the rest of the colonial empire – most notably vast swathes of the African continent and those from the Caribbean – that had contributed to the war effort and suffered great losses. Almost forgotten perhaps are the Chinese on the Western Front, with the number of Chinese and later Vietnamese workers to have participated in the war estimated at more than 100,000. Over 4 million non-white non-European men were deployed into European and American armies between 1914 and 1918, providing frontline and auxiliary aid on and beyond the Western Front.

Silence meant time for contemplation, reflection, introspection and, above all, respect. In multifaith empires, where atheism was also progressing, the gesture could conveniently replace a prayer.

On the day – Nov 11 1919, things proceeded smoothly, with bells and factory whistles and other arrangements working to synchronise the silence. The effect, one newspaper noted, was a remarkable sight as: “Commerce was suspended, traffic came to a standstill, trains and trams ceased running, and the community observed a solemn prayerful silence, calling to mind the mercy of God and the heroism of her sailors and soldiers.”

A Times correspondent riding a London bus that had stopped, spoke of how the sheer force of the collective emotion of the moment confounded cynics. Others reflected that it offered “a glimpse into the Nation’s soul” and that as life slowly resumed, things had been permanently changed by the silence as private grief became public, shared now by everybody.

That was during the day. The evening of 11 November was different. Thousands of people – most of them young – wanted to have fun.

“Victory balls” – charity fundraising events involving fancy dress, dancing, singing and copious drinking – were held to cater for this need. The largest of the balls took place at the Royal Albert Hall, but they could be found across the country too.

In 1925, the Times newspaper published a letter from Richard Sheppard, vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, central London. He called for the annual Albert Hall ball to be cancelled.

“Dancing is frequently the obvious and fitting form of gratefully commemorating a glad event,” he wrote, “but a fancy dress ball on a vast scale as a tribute to the Great Deliverance which followed on the unspeakable agony of 1914-1918 seems to me not so much irreligious as indecent.”

Sheppard, who had been chaplain to a military hospital in France during the war, argued that balls and similar “thoughtless and ill-conceived” celebrations in hotels and restaurants “should not be encouraged, at least while this generation retains the heartache of a tender and thankful remembrance”.

Not everyone agreed: One contributor, described as “Company Commander”, argued that, as the sole survivor of four brothers, “the last thing that they would wish is that they should stand in the way of our enjoying ourselves”.

The number of balls dwindled during the late 1920s, when Armistice Day began to take on the more or less entirely sober character it has today. In spite of all the divisions and pain caused by the war and regardless of political or religious differences, the simple act of pausing for quiet remembrance became the most successful monument to the dead.

The two-minute silence continues to be profound because it is a simple, collective act. For the first silence all it took was a command from the king for everything to cease, so that: “In perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the Glorious Dead.” It was short enough to focus the mind, but long enough to mean something.

A century on, people still gather and observe silence; sometimes one minute, sometime more. The dead of subsequent conflicts join the legions of the lost remembered in that hallowed quiet. Its universality has led it to become a powerful response to many human tragedies, like after the July 7 2005 London bombings, or on the anniversary of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster.

We mark our remembrance of the dead in other ways – In memorials, in song and poetry, and probably most notably the wearing of a (red) poppy. But for all its powerful symbolism, pundits and the public are debating – as they do every year – the fine details of poppy etiquette: who should wear it, who can’t wear it, and for how long prior to Remembrance Sunday should it be worn.

The enduring nature of collective silence – including the one our community will observe later this morning – is, then, perhaps, for two simple reasons. A silence, unlike, say, the wearing of a poppy, is an apolitical and secular act. And, as for the millions across the British Empire who fell silent in 1919, there are some moments when there are no suitable words to collectively express the emotions we might feel. There is a poetic solidarity in collective silence.