1 July 2016

Hal & Ida on their wedding day My grandfather Harold Edgar Shaw died when I was a child so I don’t know as much about him as I’d like. During the First World War he  was a medical orderly. He had trained as a pharmacist with Boots after an embezzler in his family, whose theft had to be repaid, made it financially impossible for him to train as a children's doctor, his cherished ambition.  Mum told me once that, when he set up on his own, and during the straitened times following the economic crash in 1929 and Great Depression, he often gave medicines to the needy without payment, though he could ill afford it.  She also told me recently, in one of her lucid moments, that he was a Labour man, through and through, all his life. He must have served in Egypt as well as on the Western Front, as my sister recalled he had some treasured 78s of Egyptian music which he had brought home from the war. In later life he loved to read the works of celebrated travel writer HV Morton, and I have inherited one of his books, A Traveller in Italy.

When I recall Grandpa I feel heart-warmed, and have an emotional memory of a kind, quiet, humble man. He ended his days in a mental hospital, where he used to wake in the night, weeping in great distress, believing he was back amongst the terrible scenes of the battlefields.

I have been to battlefield cemeteries of both world wars on a number of occasions, and stood at the graves of men from many nations - Chinese, Indian, American, Canadian, Australian, Russian, French, North African, German, Irish, Scottish, English and Welsh, all in their time deeply mourned and missed by their loved ones.   As most do, who visit these places, I am  always profoundly moved.
Oscar Maier One young man commemorated on my local War Memorial was Oscar Maier, a Private in the West Kent Yeomanry (Queen’s Own), who died on 31 August 1916 in the Battle of Delville Wood, and was buried in Mametz, in the Somme. Ironically, Oscar’s parents were economic migrants from Germany, arriving in Southborough in 1895. They had heard from the War Office that Oscar had been wounded several weeks before his death was finally confirmed to them on November 29th. Until then they hoped he might still be alive. His younger brother, was 16 at the time. His son Clive told me “The only thing my father ever told me was that the telegram came on the morning of his sister’s wedding.  His father read the telegram, put it in his pocket, told no one and went through with the wedding. Only when the last guest had gone did he tell the family.”

On 1 July 2016, in one of many ceremonies, the democratically-elected leaders of the nations who took part in the First World War will gather for a ceremony at the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing near Albert, in France, to commemorate the appalling carnage of the First Day of the Battle of the Somme 100 years ago.
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How desperately sad that what should have been a coming together of our leaders in a spirit of community and cooperation should be marred by the shocking division and hatred stirred up by the British referendum on 23 June.