The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Calls for centenary of war’s end to be ‘properly marked’
Historian warns against muting First World War anniversary
The centenary of the end of the Great War risks being toned down over a “fear of offending” Remainers or Brexiteers, a Downing Street historian has warned.
Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, called for the “major” commemoration in 2018, which will mark the end of the four-year war, to be “properly marked”.
The academic added the importance of the war should be “etched on to the young” and all generations, most of whom do not have the “haziest idea about its significance”.
“Major anniversaries on this scale are very rare and need to be properly marked. The bloodiest war in the history of the world till then needs to leave behind a very significant legacy,” he said. “There is a danger that the fear of offending one side or the other on Brexit will lead to the centenary being muted.”
The university chief urged the Government to keep alive the memory of troops who were killed in the First World War by fulfilling the wishes of a young officer who wanted a pathway of remembrance to be built along the Western Front.
Second Lieutenant Alexander Douglas Gillespie wrote from the frontline shortly before he was killed in 1915, asking for a 500-mile pathway to be erected with collaboration between British and French governments.
Sir Anthony, who is a “historical adviser” to Downing Street, said the monument would remind “all nationalities” of the “perils of conflict”.
But the academic warned that failing to create the pathway connecting “cemeteries and sites of battles” would “consign these memorials to a long, painful retreat into irrelevance” and said an announcement for the project needed to be made “before the 100th anniversary of the Armistice”.