Remembrance Day Memories

A member of the John Dickinson Band plays the Last Post at the inaugural Armistice Day parade in 1920 to commemorate the fallen from the Apsley Paper Mill.

FRED, THE LAST POST AND ME
Memories by Annie Dehaney-Steven (Flugelhorn)

I have not lost anyone to war. My mum, who was from a small community in the Scottish Highlands, lost seven uncles during the Great War but that was long before she was born and her family unit didn't survive beyond her fourth year, so there were few family stories passed down. My dad is Jamaican and no-one in his family, or even his immediate community, was involved, (although many West Indians were), so there are no stories there. However, for many years I, a pacifist humanist, have been involved with the local Last Post scene due to the actions of an old brass bass player.

About sixteen years ago I was approached by Fred Stevens, who played for the same brass band as me, and asked to play the Last Post at All Saints church in Theydon Garnon, not so far from here, at which his family had worshiped for generations. Fred Stevens had been born in 1914, the year his brother had been killed, at, I think I remember rightly, the Battle of Ypres. Fred was an uncompromising, irascible old man who had out-lived his entire birth family and alienated his children, found my vegetarianism absolutely incomprehensible, ("...if you'd ever been hungry, young lady..."), and couldn't really understand why my husband, from "good English stock", had married me when he could just have kept me as a bit of exotic crumpet! He attended band practice on the day his wife, Doris, died and told me once that when they were courting he had cycled seventeen miles each way every Friday to see her and wished he hadn't because she never let him do more than hold her hand! I liked him. Yes, he was rude, intolerant and entirely un-PC, but he admired me as a musician and as a person and he made me laugh.

The first time I played Last Post for Fred was at that Remembrance Day service when he stood with me and timed the two minute silence before I could play Reveille while we both thought about the brother neither of us had known and about whom he had told me everything he had been told. Like many others, he had joined up because everyone had. There was no conscription, but not to join up would have separated him from his friends and left him open to accusations of a lack of patriotism and deliveries of white feathers, the symbol of cowardice. I don't mind saying that I was scared. Everyone knows what the Last Post sounds like, but it really is the most unmemorable collection of notes. It is made up of, I think, fourteen bugle calls and none seems to follow naturally from the preceding one, so I was terrified that I would get it wrong. I didn't. Fred was happy and I felt as if I had achieved something great!

Over the years I have played the Last Post many times; Remembrance days, Armistice Day, Battle of Britain day and countless funerals, but the eleven o'clock one on Remembrance Day at Theydon Garnon church affects me the most. In thinking about Fred's brother, (I only know him as J. Stevens because Fred only ever called him "my brother" and, after a while it was too late to ask his name). I didn't play Last Post at Fred's funeral; his children didn't ask for it and I hadn't seen him for about three months before he died. I think of him often because he introduced me to the Last Post and made me think about its significance. Now, when I remember him it isn't with sadness but with great fondness and thankfulness. Fred survived the Second World War, had a long, largely happy, argumentative life and played for years with a band he loved.

I find myself thinking of all the young men who went to war in 1914-18 because they felt compelled to and in 1939-45 because they were compelled. I also think about the men and women who have lost their lives, health, minds in service of their countries in the years since, and now, of course about those involved in the current conflicts.