William Wallace, Lord Wallace of Saltaire,
I’ve been a member of the House since 1996 and I am especially strong on international
relations and 20th century history, thus my interest, and I’m also a member of the government’s
advisory board of the commemoration of World War One.
Looking back at our history of 100 years ago reminds us of a whole host of things, how
much this country has changed, how diverse our population is in terms of its origins
and it encourages us all to go back into our family histories and that helps us all, I
think, to understand what sort of country Britain is today.
Partly my own interest, I’m researching my father’s involvement in the First World
War, he was 42 years older than me, 18 therefore in 1917, and fought through the last year,
but I began to discover that members of the current House of Lords who had all sort of
different family links with both sides in the First World War or with conscientious
objectors or whatever, so I thought rather than rely on anecdotes, I would ask for a
good sample of members of the House of Lords so that we could begin to raise interest,
not only in what the members of the House of Lords in World War One did but what the
families of the members who are here now had as memories of the First World War.
Well, we have several members whose families fought on the other side in the course of
the First World War, particularly people who come from continental Jewish families, whose
families came over as refugees in the 1930s, many who come from ethnic minorities, whose
grandparents or others were in the colonial forces who were in World War One. Some who
have aunts or grandmothers who were in the voluntary nursing service, and some, at least
two, who were imprisoned during the war, who had family members who were imprisoned, for
objecting to the way in which the government was conscripting labour.
I think what we’re all going to go through in Britain in remembering World War One is
discovering just what an enormous impact the war had on family life, social life, the mobilisation
of industry and the immense tragedies of families who lost their fathers, their brothers, whatever,
and this is a snapshot if you like, here’s the current House of Lords, drawn from a whole
range of different backgrounds, and discovering how this cross-section of Britain remembers
the First World War itself. The most striking element that I have come across is the number
of people who have said, ‘well he never spoke about it after the war’, or ‘I know
that we lost a great uncle, but no-one in the family mentioned him’, the sense that
it was all too painful to be able to speak about it is very strong.
My father was called up in 1917, being from a Scottish family volunteered for a Scottish
Highland Regiment, went out as a Lance Corporal, because he survived rose to be a Staff Sergeant
within a year, and at one point in the last German push was the second in command of his
battalion, because there were only 70 of them left, one of whom was an officer, it was a
dreadful experience, he never spoke about it until he was 80 and he had a very serious
operation and in the course of recovering from the operation, saw, he said, a lot of
his friends who had been killed in 1918 and then began to talk about his amazing and horrifying
experiences in the trenches.