Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph on Whitehall is when Britain’s elite pay their respects to their nation’s war dead. The king and other senior royals, the prime minister, leaders of the opposition; this is their time to lay wreaths. As a consequence, Whitehall is locked down from early morning.
For ordinary Londoners and curious tourists, Armistice Day (November 11th) is usually a much more accessible opportunity for those who want to pay homage at the Cenotaph, the hallowed monument that for many Britons symbolises the human cost of their nation’s military efforts, past and present.
Provided it doesn’t fall on a Sunday – this year Armistice Day was on Monday – the Western Front Association, a military history group, marks the moment that the guns fell silent in the first World War with its own wreath-laying service at the Cenotaph at 11am. Fewer dignitaries, but no less dignity.
Crowds of ordinary people watched as the Pipes & Drums of the London Scottish Regiment led the WFA’s Cenotaph procession party from the side of the Foreign Office on to Whitehall at 10.45am on Monday. Wreath-layers from civil, military and religious groups, including Sikhs and Muslims, stood at the monument. A lone bugler sounded the Last Post and two minutes of silence began.
The two minutes of silence ended but the quiet continued as the wreath-layers did their duty. Everybody seemed suitably sombre where I was standing outside 54 Parliament Street, the old Grindlay’s Bank a few doors up from the Red Lion pub. The crowd was thick at this point, the route ahead blocked. Yet I felt movement and pressing behind me as someone tried in vain to get through.
I turned around to find a short man scowling, clearly irritated at being hemmed in. He muttered darkly in a language I recognised as Portuguese, although I had no idea what he was actually saying. Yet somehow I knew he wasn’t reciting Rudyard Kipling. Then I realised the man’s quandary.
He was dressed in the bright orange uniform of a Just Eat delivery driver and he carried a large food bag. Someone in one of the government offices just ahead had clearly ordered a meal for delivery. For 11am. On Armistice Day. Near the Cenotaph. Our intrepid Just Eat guy – by now I assumed he was Brazilian – was on the clock and no war memorial service was going to stop him.
Growing desperate, he hoisted the food bag above his head like a barbell and began to force his way through. Amusement rippled through the crowd at the chutzpah of this little man, who in that moment seemed to me to represent the changed face of Britain. “Over ‘ere, mate,” joked a few poppy-wearing likely lads outside Number 54. But our Just Eat hero wasn’t swayed from his task.
The wider hush was soon broken by the sound of drivers leaning on their horns down at Parliament Square. A dozen anti-war protesters from one of the pop-up left-wing groups had blocked the road to decry the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. London cabbies might be prepared to kill their engines for a few minutes at 11am on November 11th for their war dead. But not for Youth Demand, or whoever it was this time. Later the group would unfurl a banner at the Cenotaph warning of genocide.
Even later on Monday, while rambling through the Facebook pages of the Western Front Association, I noticed a post that said all military records on Ancestry.com were free to view until midnight on Wednesday, November 13th. “You never know what you might find,” it said. I found my grand uncle.
Patrick Swaine, born into a working class family in Ballinakill in Laois just before the turn of the 20th century, was my grandfather’s older brother. Laois wasn’t exactly overflowing with opportunities just over a century ago so he joined the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and later transferred to the Munster Fusiliers. He was killed in action in France in March 1918, aged 21. On Ancestry.com I found the records for his Victory Medal, whatever it was this dead young man had won.
Back at the Cenotaph, earlier, before I had stumbled upon the records of my own family’s war dead, I was still fixated on the Just Eat driver. I was rooting for him. Would he get to fulfil his mission?
His food bag disappeared from view somewhere close to Richmond House – hoisted down. Surely this must be it, I thought. A few minutes later the bag, unzipped and presumably emptied of its cargo, reappeared above his head. Unseen beneath the taller people around him, the man moved back through the crowd and on to his next job as the ceremony continued nearby with recited poetry.
They chanted: “And death shall have no dominion.” But Brazilian delivery drivers rule.