The First Remembrance Day
- 11th November 2019
As we prepare to mark Remembrance Day, 100 years after the first one, we thought we’d share this clip from an interview with Winifred Barber. In it she recalls the very first Remembrance Day, when she went into Birmingham to join many others in marking the day on 11th November 1919.
The interview recently came to the archives as part of a collection deposited by Mike Dickens of many interviews he carried out over the years, and which he wanted made safe and available through the archives here.
Winifred was born in 1907, so was 12 in 1919. Earlier in the interview she talked about Curly, an American soldier she and others visited in a local hospital, and how she was sad when she went one day to be told he had died. Curly is mentioned in this clip and was one of the people she was thinking of. The interview conveys the powerful emotions that must have been present with all those people standing together to remember friends, family and colleagues had hadn’t come home.
Winifred spoke to Mike in 2000, just two years before she died. Her memories live on.
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