The Great Silence

Today, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the twenty-first century, people across the globe fell silent, in commemoration of the dead of two world wars. It’s a custom that, in the decades since it was instigated, has become almost a commonplace of public mourning. Silence is observed for the victims of terrorism, and for those who have died in train crashes, and other large-scale disasters. It has become a way of showing respect for the suffering and loss of others, and of demonstrating social cohesion in adverse circumstances.

It’s strange, then, to think that this particular kind of silence hasn’t always been around. The practice was first introduced in South Africa, during the First World War, as a way of commemorating the sacrifice of its soldiers. As the then British High Commissioner to South Africa, Sir Percy Fitzpatrick wrote:

In the hearts of our people there is a real desire to find some lasting expression of their feeling for those who gave their lives in the war. They want something done now, while the memories of sacrifice are in the minds of all; for there is the dread – too well grounded in experience – that those who have gone will not always be first in the thoughts of all, and that when the fruits of their sacrifice become our daily bread, there will be few occasions to remind us of what we realise so clearly today…

In Britain, the first two-minute silence, then called the Great Silence, was observed on Armistice Day, 11th November, 1919, a year after the guns of the Western Front fell silent. The idea of making some kind of public recognition of the war’s end had been put forward by Lloyd George, with the agreement of King George V, and an announcement was placed in national newspapers the week before. This simply stated that, at the designated time, and at a given signal, ‘there may be for the brief space of two minutes a complete suspension of all our normal activities’.

In her book about the aftermath of the First World War, The Great Silence, Juliet Nicholson movingly describes what took place:

just before 11.00 a.m. motorcycles and cars waited obediently at junctions. Engines stilled as War Office lorries, taxis and motorbuses came to a halt. Horse exhaled deeply as they were pulled up by the side of the road… Bicycles braked, road menders laid down their spades, telephone exchange operators unplugged their connection boards, factory workers switched off the machinery, dock workers stopped their unloading, schoolchildren stopped their lessons, miners downed their tools, shoppers stopped their purchasing, lovers stopped murmuring… Only the act of breathing, the final affirmation of life, remained as the sign of human activity…

For those who took part on that day – which included survivors of the conflict as well as those bereaved by it – the ‘silence’ brought them face to face with everything they had lost. For the returned soldiers, with their memories of trench warfare all too vivid, there would have been an echo of the eerie silence that followed the ceasefire. ‘How still it is with the guns silent,’ wrote one; and, referring to his lost comrades – ‘They can sleep now…’ For the families of those who had died, the silence must have brought only a numb recognition that sons, husbands, and lovers were never going to return, and that life must now continue without them.

It must have been an extraordinary moment – hard to imagine now, in an age of mass communication, when the horrors of war are conveyed to us through our TV screens, and the ‘sharing’ of private emotion has become the norm. Photographs taken of the immense crowds that filled Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, show all the women wearing hats, and all the men bare-headed, as if in church, or at the passing of a funeral cortege. Looking at these pictures, I can’t help wondering if my grandfather, Charles Thompson, might have been part of one of those vast, silent crowds.

Having served as a gunner in the Royal Field Artillery during the First Battle of Ypres in 1914, and afterwards at Loos and Passchendaele, Charles lost his sight to a burst of shrapnel, and was invalided home in late 1917. In November 1919, he was reaching the end of his two-year recuperation at St Dunstan’s Institute for the Blind – then located in Regent’s Park – and was training as a telephonist (a job he held for the next forty years). He was engaged to be married to the attractive VAD he had met while recovering from his wounds. He had also had time to turn himself into a champion rower, winning several silver cups and medals, in the summer of 1918. Yes, I think Charles would have been somewhere, in that London crowd, paying his respects to the friends who hadn’t made it home.

Of course, not everyone saw the point of the silence. ‘A disgusting idea of artificial nonsense and sentimentality’ wrote the young Evelyn Waugh in his diary. ‘If people have lost sons and fathers, they should think of them whenever the grass is green or Shaftesbury Avenue brightly lighted, not for two minutes on the anniversary of a disgraceful day of national hysteria…’ It’s the attitude that some people expressed after the death of Princess Diana, finding something distasteful or even ‘un-British’ in the display of emotion that followed that event. But whether one regards it as an empty gesture or not, silence as an act of remembrance is now part of our lives – a brief moment when, in a world grown too full of noise, we can take time to reflect. And while I agree with the famously splenetic author of Decline and Fall that such public displays of feeling can all too easily degenerate into triteness, I can’t help feeling that, almost a hundred years on, the Great Silence has survived the test of time rather well.