It is left to us to remember them

I’ve heard family stories - my paternal great grandparents played music in pubs and danced in clogs, and my mum’s “nanah” was a mother-of-eight who discovered her hard-drinking husband had another family. But what did my forebears do in the First World War? “There was an uncle who was gassed on the Somme, he was about 21,” one of my aunts told me recently. That’s pretty much all I know.

Other than pinning a poppy to my school jumper every year and going to Remembrance Sunday services at church with the Girl Guides, the ‘Great War’ meant little to me as a youngster. I didn’t even learn about it at school. War wasn’t on the curriculum; my history lessons began and ended with the Industrial Revolution, so I knew more about the Spinning Jenny than I did about either world war.

Now I wish I’d talked to my grandparents about the world they grew up in. I was quite close to my grandmothers, I even lived with one for a while, but I didn’t know much about their younger selves. One of them was a little girl during the 1914-18 war, the other was born two years after it ended. They must have remembered photographs of young men in uniform on mantlepieces, and quiet voices whenever a much missed name was mentioned.

I guess we’re so wrapped up in our own lives we don’t think about the generations who came before, until we too become older. I recently came across some T&A photographs of Bradford Pals at the city’s Cenotaph in the 1970s; old chaps, united by memories of horrors in the mud. One caption quotes Cpl George Morgan: “I’ve lived 60 years afterwards and never, never got over it”.

As a child I didn’t take much notice of old men, like Cpl Morgan, who turned out at church on foggy November Sundays in dark suits. Only now do I think: ‘Those were men who survived the trenches’. We had a kindly old neighbour, Mr Atkinson, who gave us sweets. My mum helped him with shopping and told me he’d been ‘in the War’. I sometimes think of him and wonder what he went through. Like most of that generation, I doubt he talked of it - and if he did, did anyone listen?

Those who survived that war are all gone, and soon those from the Second World War will be too. It is left to us, who remember them as flesh and blood, to ensure they are thought of by future generations.

Approaching the centenary of the Armistice, Bradford World War 1 Group is inviting people to share family stories of men, and women, in the 1914-18 war. The group’s excellent Shared Remembrance exhibition, at Bradford Mechanics Institute until Saturday, highlights the war’s global context. A particularly haunting strand lists men from Bradford and around the world who died the same day; two lists each begin with men from Arncliffe Terrace, Lidget Green - a street that lost 10 men to the war - followed by names and regiments of pre-Partition Indian soldiers who perished the same day, from places such as Jhelum and Gujar Khan, where the current Lord Mayor of Bradford, Zafar Ali, lived as a child. Councillor Ali has relatives serving in both world wars. Today he joins the Lidget Green Community Partnership at a Remembrance event.

“This was a global war,” says WW1 Group president Tricia Restorick. “Almost everyone living in Bradford today will have some connection with it.”

What did our great grandfathers and uncles do in the Great War? It’s what people around the world should be wondering this weekend.

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