This year’s poignant ceremony – which celebrated soldiers and paid tribute to the late Queen – highlights the virtues of service and loyalty
At a time when the shallowness, vanity and sheer indignity of public life is enough to make one fear for the nation’s future, we need a collective ceremony to remind us that this country is more than its politicians and its hucksters, and that out there beyond the media glare the quiet but essential virtues of service and loyalty are still alive and well.
Every year the Royal British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance does exactly that. The tradition of honouring the fallen of the First World War in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall combining splendid military ceremonial, music played by military bands and choirs and an Anglican service of Remembrance began in 1923. It’s taken place every year since, though of course the scope of the remembrance has expanded to include British losses in the Second World War, and all the more recent wars in which British forces have been involved, up to and including the fighting in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2021. The poignant symbol that was visible everywhere and which united all these individual acts of remembrance was the red poppy of the Flanders battlefield.
This year’s Festival was bound to be especially poignant, as, in the presence of our new King, it paid homage to someone for whom service was second nature: the late Queen Elizabeth II attended every Festival of Remembrance during her reign bar three. It was moving to hear recordings of her voice during the ceremony, speaking about her duties as Commander-in-Chief.
As always, the festival began with a procession into the huge circular space of the hundreds of standards of the Royal British Legion, the organisation that supports ex-servicemen and women. Accompanying them musically from the raked platform beneath the organ were the combined musical forces of the Household Division Orchestra, the Countess of Wessex’s String Orchestra, the String Ensemble of Royal Marines Band Service and the Royal Air Force Salon Orchestra.