A fine display of the true meaning of Remembrance The South Bank Show
From the Asian Network to Manx FM, every station did its duty. There were Remembrance-themed pop picks on 6 Music; “sonic memorials”, recorded at the locations of famous battles, on Radio 3; music composed by Great War veterans on Classic FM; a phone-in for Forces relatives on 5 Live. On Radio 4, even Tweet of the Day had a military angle (apparently grey partridges flourished in No Man’s Land).
I’m not complaining. The 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War needed special recognition – not just because of the centenary, but because it feels so valedictory. The last veteran of the war, Florence Green, died six years ago at the age of 110. There are no eye witnesses left.
What we do have, however, is their voices. Dan Snow’s Radio 4 series, Voices of the First World War, used archive recordings from the BBC and the Imperial War Museum to give a vivid, trench-eye view of the conflict. The last episode, on Friday, reconstructed the final hours. One veteran recalled a belligerent German machine gun unit that kept firing right up to the last minute. “At 11 o’clock, the officer stepped out of their position, stood up, lifted his helmet and bowed to the British troops, fell all his men in and marched them off,” he chuckled. “I always think it was a wonderful display of confidence in British chivalry.”
While the Armistice was greeted with wild celebrations in England (“They nearly had my trousers off!” remembered one sailor, who had been set upon by rejoicing women), the mood on the front was subdued. Many soldiers had never worked outside the military. “We’d been kicked out of a job,” explained one. “Where do we go from here? A terrible empty feeling.”
It wasn’t just men who had found purpose in war. Wednesday’s episode of the World Service history programme, featured the splendidly no-nonsense recollections of Mairi Chisholm – one of only two women allowed on the whole of the Allied front. Together with her friend Elsie Knocker, Mairi set up a nursing station just behind the trenches in Belgium.
At night, Mairi drove a truck around the battlefields to collect the wounded, scanning the darkness for snipers as she skidded about in the mud. She wore the same underclothes for so long that, when they were eventually peeled off, the skin came away from her back. She and Elsie survived two gas attacks, were awarded medals and became national heroines. But what she remembered most fondly was a poem from a grateful patient. “Good heavens! How a man with a boil like that between his buttocks, and me poking around at it, could write me a poem so utterly beautiful! I said, I shall keep it forever.”
In The Unknown Soldier (World Service, Sunday), Moira Stuart described the creation of our most powerful symbol of national grief. Two years after the war, at the suggestion of army chaplain Rev David Railton, the body of an anonymous British soldier was exhumed from a French battlefield and brought back to Britain for a state funeral. It was a brilliant idea: one that has since been adopted all over the world. The fact that he could have been anyone, of any rank or class, from Britain or the colonies, meant that the Unknown Soldier belonged to every grieving family.
On 11 November, 1920, tens of thousands of mourners gathered around Westminster Abbey for his funeral. During the two-minute silence, not a single telephone call was made anywhere in the country. All traffic stopped; every railway light turned red; the pilot of an aeroplane flying from Manchester to London even switched off his engines to glide silently through the skies, while his four passengers stood up and removed their hats. Thus, from a distance of almost a century, this enthralling programme showed us the true meaning of Remembrance.
“Oh my goodness! Hold on to your hats!” exclaimed Bruno Tonioli, introducing his second series of Bruno Tonioli at the Opera (Radio 2, Tuesdays). I love opera, but it’s a lonely passion. Most people of my generation find it baffling or absurd. Many are intimidated, mistaking opera for a highbrow art instead of a sensuous pleasure.
Not Tonioni. The Strictly judge introduces every aria with near-carnal excitement. Even Rigoletto’s villainous Duke of Mantua is dished up as a wicked treat: “He’s rrrich, crrruel, powerrrful, immorrral. Need I say any more?” Each episode is arranged thematically (Love last week, Villains this week), which means that the music skips around willy-nilly between composers. Purists will hate it. I adorrrred it, as Tonioli would say.