NEVER FO RGET
PAYING HOMAGE TO THE FALLEN:
CHURCH bells rang out across the Potteries to mark the exact moment when the guns fell silent 100 years ago.
Large crowds were evident across North Staffordshire as thousands of people turned out to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War on Remembrance Sunday.
At Stoke Cenotaph, the bells of Stoke Minster brought a poignant two minutes of silence to an end, replicating the moment when in 1918 those same bells rang out as the Great War ended.
It was followed by prayers and then the National Anthem, which was joined in by all in the crowd. Just as 100 years ago the celebrating masses had broken into a rousing chorus of God Save The Queen during what was, ironically, Gun Week in the Potteries – a fund-raising event designed to raise cash to pay for ammunition and shells which were no longer needed.
During a moving service at Stoke Minster, the Right Reverend David Mcgough, Auxillery Bishop of the Archdiocese of Birmingham, spoke about the Great War and the impact it had on the Potteries – particularly when telegrams would arrive from the War Office with news of a fatality.
Rt Rev Mcgough, who was born and raised in Tunstall, said: “I can remember my mother telling me about the way in which she and her family dreaded the day when the telegram boy turned up, because in a working class area you didn’t get a telegram unless there was very bad news.
“When the telegram boy did come, he stopped at not one house, not two, but seven. I can’t imagine the pain and suffering that just applied in that one street, and yet they never spoke of it.”
Normandy veteran Roy Vickerman, aged 92, of Hartshill, was one of the few people attending a Remembrance Service who could remember the joy of seeing a World War come to an end. He attended VE Day celebrations in 1945 with his fiancee Nora.
Roy, who served with Black Watch during the Second World War, said: “I thought about my father during the silence, he was in the First World War, in the Royal Flying Corps.
“When I went to war, he and my mother and Nora came with me to Stoke Station, to send me off. I was back at home in Britain when the war ended, because I had been wounded. That day Nora and I went to a pub in Bucknall. Everyone was overjoyed, they were all singing and having a good time.”