HUNDREDS AT REMEMBRANCE DAY SERVICE ON TRIANGLE
MORE THAN 250 people attended yesterday’s Remembrance Day service at Upper Norwood’s War memorial on Westow Street yesterday (Sunday).
Upper Norwood Cllr Pat Ryan, a former mayor of the borough of Croydon, laid the wreath on behalf of the Mayor and people of Croydon.
A 96-year-old veteran, Dougie Roderick, helped from his wheelchair, wearing six medals including four stars, saluted after laying a wreath on behalf of the London branch of the Commando Veterans Association.
Dougie Roderick is a founder member of the Commando Veterans Association which kindly supplied the following information:
“Dougie, who is now 96 years young and soon to celebrate his 97th birthday in January, volunteered for the Army Commandos when they were first formed in 1940.
“This was when all Commandos were volunteers from their Army Regiments, and two years before the first of the Royal Marine Commandos were raised.
“Dougie was attached to No 3 Commando, and remained with them throughout the war during raids and operations across Europe including Vaagso, Dieppe, Sicily, and of course NW Europe in 1944.”
The 1st Crystal Palace Scouts wreath said: For our fallen scouts. ‘As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust’ from the poem For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), published in The Times newspaper on 21st September 1914.
Other lines from Binyon’s poem were read out by ‘an older person and a younger person’:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Wreaths were also laid by representatives of Crystal Palace Chamber of Commerce, Crystal Palace Community Association, Crystal Palace Foundation, the Metropolitan Police Service local policing team, Norwood Society, the Phoenix Centre, Rotary of Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood;
The Salvation Army, Upper Norwood Library Trust, Upper Norwood ward councillors, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Churches Together in Upper Norwood and Upper Norwood Methodist Church.
There were several individual crosses including one for a Dunkirk veteran John Baxter of the Royal Horse Artillery and another which just said: “RIP from the Cook family.”
The Christian service, including hymns and prayers, was led by Captains Michael and Lorraine Kinnear from the Salvation Army centre on Westow Street with music from the Upper Norwood Salvation Army band.
Leaflets handed out included the Kohima Epitaph:
“When you go home tell them of us and say:
For your tomorrow we gave our today.”
The Burma Star Association website says: The Kohima 2nd Division Memorial is maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission on behalf of the 2nd Infantry Division.
The memorial … remembers the Allied dead who repulsed the Japanese 15th Army, a force of 100,000 men, who had invaded India in March 1944 in Operation U-Go. Kohima, the capital of Nagaland was a vital to control of the area and in fierce fighting the Japanese finally withdrew from the area in June of that year.
The Memorial bears the inscription:
‘When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today’
The words are attributed to John Maxwell Edmonds (1875 -1958), an English classicist, who had put them together among a collection of 12 epitaphs for World War One, in 1916.” (Nagaland is a state in the far north-eastern part of India.)
