Britons at home and abroad paused in silence yesterday to remember the nation’s war dead and reflect on the sacrifices made by servicemen and women.
Some of the most poignant Armistice Day services included the Duke of Edinburgh leading tributes to fallen troops in Ypres in Belgium and a wreath-laying ceremony at the National Armed Forces Memorial attended by the last surviving widow of World War I.
However, it was 99-year-old veteran Harold Jellicoe Pervical who became the sombre day’s human face after his funeral started, fittingly, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
The touching service, attended by many who did not even know Mr Percival, came about after he died without close friends or relatives at hand at a nursing home, where staff worried no one would be at his funeral made a public appeal for people to attend. Members of the public, old soldiers and serving servicemen and women, stood in silence for the arrival of Mr Percival’s funeral cortege at the crematorium in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire. “It’s just staggering,” his nephew, Andre Collyer-Worsell, said after attending the service.
“It just shows how great the British public are. He was not a hero, he was just someone who did his duty in World War II, just as his brother and sister did and his father before him in World War I.”
It was a sentiment shared by 93-year-old Dorothy Ellis, whose husband Wilfred Ellis survived World War I despite being shot, gassed and left for dead.
Mrs Ellis, who has since become the last surviving widow of the Great War, was a guest of honour at a service held at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.
“I noticed, he was always usually a very jolly person but on Armistice Day he would just go very quiet and at first I couldn’t understand it but then I got to realise why he was being so quiet and silent,” she said.
“He said to me ‘you’ve got to remember this is the day that thousands of poor chaps died for us to keep us alive’.”
The Duke of Edinburgh also chose a fitting site to honour those killed during war, leading tributes at Ypres in Belgium, where some of World War I’s most deadly battles took place.
A minute’s silence was held before the 92-year-old Duke – a World War II veteran – and Prince Laurent of Belgium each laid a poppy wreath.
Meanwhile veterans’ charity Erskine held a service at its Edinburgh home. A piper played as wreaths were laid at the home’s memorial stone following two minutes of silence.
In Glasgow, a new memorial stone was unveiled at Central Station, dedicated to railway staff who died in World War II and subsequent conflicts.
The polished, black granite memorial sits beneath the bronze memorial to World War I.