Remembrance Day 2021

Lynne Isaacs

Trinity College Cambridge Remembrance 14 November 2021 Professor John Lonsdale (1964)

Good morning: As an historian, I believe our pasts and futures test each other here and now, in our present day. As to our past, we are here chiefly, as we must always be, to recall the debt we owe to our Trinity dead. For our future, I believe we should ask how we might add a wider sense of indebtedness to our Remembrance. I came up in one of our pasts, in 1958, as a freshman: we were all men, white, from public and grammar schools, most of us having done our national service. Trinity has changed much and for the better since then – but only after we have questioned ourselves. Our membership keeps changing: Should we not now consider the rituals that help to make us one community?

I am prompted to ask that question by a text that must have searched out past Trinity generations as it has searched out me: words reported of Christ in Luke 12:48. “Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”

As has been twice required of Trinity men. Robert Tombs, at St John’s next door, tells us Old Etonians were five times more likely than others to die in the First World War. Trinity men who went off to France must have dreaded a similar arithmetic. We name 615 of them in our sanctuary, two of them with Victoria Crosses, John Dunville and Arthur Tisdall; and, from the Second World War, 381 more in our ante-Chapel: nearly a thousand in all, five successive years of freshmen. This chapel is their memorial. They gave us their today; so it matters what we make of our tomorrows.

Nigel McCrery, most loyal of alumni, will next year offer a volume of biographies of our fallen. A former Dean of Chapel, F. A. Simpson, Snipper Simpson, knew them well. Famous for his eccentricities with secateurs in hand, he was also loved for two successive post-war sermons. In both he mourned the “born leaders” of generations not so much decimated as “decapitated”. “Death”, he said, “chose the very best. Almost one found oneself predicting …, after the final handshake, ‘Well, whoever comes back, he will not.’ And too often we were right.”

Remembrance Day, Armistice Day, was first conceived in order to offer what consolation there might be in shrouding such private grief in public rituals of sorrow and pride. People of my generation still stop at village war memorials, to

ponder the names of people we never knew: they bring back memories of our own. And dreadful losses still occur, in more controversial conflict: in Northern Ireland, in the Falklands where Mark, one of the veterans among our porters, witnessed the fiery end of the good ship Sir Galahad. Then too there are the Balkans, Iraq, and, most sadly, Afghanistan. Despite repeated prayer, Remembrance of past wars has ended neither war nor the tyranny against which war is fully justified.

Luke 12:48 nonetheless urges us on to fresh purpose. On my doubtless debatable reading, Christ specified, with greater social sensibility than Simpson, those from whom much would be required: namely, those to whom much had been given. Simpson mourned those he called born leaders, without reflecting on the accident of birth that had demanded that leadership from them, born as future Trinity men, at the top of a class-ridden society, even if they had, with self-discipline, added gifts of their own.

But – and to begin to raise the issue of our future purpose – many more men under their command, men to whom much less had been given, met the same death, in common duty to King and country. It was to honour this equality of sacrifice by the unequal many that in 1915 those who could afford it were forbidden to bring their sons home for burial, why standard headstones were prescribed for all the dead, irrespective of rank, in communal cemeteries. The Unknown Soldier has neither rank nor status. This insistence on equality was the fruit of a long learning process in how to treat service personnel who were becoming citizens of increasingly democratic states. In the 1860s, after its civil war, republican America was the first to spare its common soldiery the callous indignity of mass burial. Forty years later imperial Britain also began to bury its military dead in individual graves, after the second South African, or Boer, war.

So it was that the Great War’s mass sacrifice by a citizen army demanded as its most fitting Remembrance more equal lives for citizens in the future. Women at last got the vote; council houses replaced some slums; in the Second World War the British people both earned a welfare state and, to deliver it, elected Major Clement Attlee, veteran of the First World War. A later prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was another such veteran. Born to privilege – to Eton, Balliol, and the Guards – the wounds he suffered in France troubled his footsteps ever thereafter. He had given what was required of him. So had his men. In 1984, aged 90, he rose to speak in the House of Lords, in agony of spirit over the strike by the coalminers who, or whose fathers, had learned with him the comradeship of the small platoon:

David Johnson

“… We need”, he said, “a kind of moral and spiritual revolution… It breaks my heart to see what is happening in our country today. A terrible strike is being carried on by the best men in the world. They beat the Kaiser’s army and they beat Hitler’s army. They never gave in.”

Macmillan grieved for an unequal nation to which he owed a duty. But – and here I come to our future here – we also live in an unequal world, for which our country bears some past imperial responsibility. At the high noon of that empire Cecil Rhodes, another Oxford man, exulted that “to be English is to have won first prize in the lottery of life.” But it was no happy accident: that would be the Simpson error. No: it was thanks to the much we had been given by the labours of others: not only Britain’s coal miners, but also the African slaves bought to be trafficked across the Atlantic, the Indians coerced by poverty into indentured labour around the world; the Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English poor who sought new lives in new worlds overseas. So, what is required of us in return?

Well: just as Britain learned to give equal respect to our own war dead, The Imperial, now Commonwealth, War Graves Commission has had to educate itself in the equal dignity owed to the one and three quarter million imperial servicemen and women, of all colours, who also died for us in two world wars. African and Indian soldiers too often lie in unmarked graves. As do most of the Great War’s 95,000 known dead among East Africa’s military porters, among a still greater, unknown, number among their families, killed by famine and disease. I know two Second War cemeteries, in Italy and Kenya, where white and black troops lie forever apart in segregated lines. But their headstones are all the same –the then empire was clearly beginning to learn, as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission now recognises, that the comradeship of death in a common cause shames racial discrimination as much as class distinction.

What does this mean for us? Britain’s imperial history may be hotly disputed but for us at Trinity the lesson is surely very simple: do we not need to publicly recall this wider, imperial, debt? Around thirty per cent of our home undergraduates are from so-called ethnic minorities, grandchildren of empire, as are we all. We might start by remembering that we have long been, if barely: a multicultural college. Naming only some of those now gone before, we are the college of the poet Mohammed Iqbal and prime minister Jarwarhalal Nehru from the subcontinent, of our former master Michael Atiyah from the Middle East, of my Ugandan friend the lawyer Nkambo Mugerwa who stood up to the tyrant Idi

Amin; and of David Clemetson a Jamaican, comrade to all the imperial subjects who, with Macmillan’s coal miners, gave for us their lives.

Clemetson came up in 1912, read law and rowed for the College. Of mixed Indian and African descent, in 1914 he enlisted as a volunteer. The British army did not then commission men of colour – until the toll of death changed that rule. Clemetson was commissioned as a junior officer: of whom, notoriously, the most was required. He died two months before the war’s end.

Clemetson, I believe, had no children. Other imperial subjects who fought for us have bequeathed to us their grandchildren and great grandchildren, the Trinity women and men of today. Our new research fellow in the history of racism, Dr Adjoa Osei, has a photo of her grandfather in India, posted there with the Royal West Africa Frontier Force, precursor of today’s Ghanaian army. Those who keep your Annual Records: please look up Joya Chatterji’s article, in 2012, on teaching British history, not as “our island story” but more truthfully: as a global web of unequal histories stitched together by empire. The caption to her illustration, a photo of cheerful imperial troops, reads: “Indian and African soldiers making British history in the Second World War.” In that war the Indian army of 2.5 million was the largest volunteer army in world history. And I myself remember Sergeant Major Maingi of the King’s African Rifles, who taught me, his supposedly superior officer, the soldierly conduct he had learned not many years before when helping, with 90,000 other Africans, to drive the Japanese from Burma.

So: with what purpose shall we continue to remember well? Might we not try to inspire all future Trinity men and women, of all cultures, colours, or creeds, to share in remembering not only Trinity’s dead but also, and with the same sense of indebted duty toward tomorrow, all the fallen among our forefathers and mothers, including those to whom, as imperial subjects, much less was once given? Australia, Canada, and New Zealand remember with national pride. Other Commonwealth countries can be reluctant to honour sacrifice to an alien empire that was in some colonies less than grateful, sacrifice often made in segregated, menial, roles such as the South African Native Labour Corps – who lost 600 drowned when in 1917 their ship the Mendi sank off the Isle of Wight.

But that’s no reason why we should not be grateful to those who gave us much, who gave their all.