Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish - reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week, I reviewed the TV series, The One, that I enjoyed most for being fun to criticize. Tina read two books set in the UK, offered by NetGalley. She enjoyed The Lost English Girl by Julia Kelly more than Secrets Between Friends by Tracy Buchanan.
What we call Veterans Day in the US is called Remembrance Day in the UK.
The UK's traditions have kept their observation on November 11th more tied to the origins, the end of the First World War. Today, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, many people in the UK will observe two minutes of silence. That includes the BBC. According to this article, they even have something planned for the children's shows at that time:
To mark the two-minute silence at 11am on 11th November, CBeebies and CBBC will simulcast Poppies, an evocative, dialogue-free animation that sees war as experienced by animals in a WWI battlefield. The film is set to a score composed by Oscar-winning Steve Price (Gravity) and recorded by the BBC Philharmonic.
The larger observance happens on Remembrance Sunday, the closest Sunday to November 11. This year that will be this Sunday, on the 13th. King Charles will lay a memorial wreath at the Cenotaph, the war memorial. This will be his first time as monarch, although he occasionally replaced Queen Elizabeth when she was unable to do it.
The BBC has broadcast this event on television since 1937, missing only some of the years during World War II. According to the Wikipedia Article, that makes this "one of the longest-running annual broadcasts in the world." Sometimes, the BBC streams live events to YouTube for a worldwide audience, but I don't see evidence that they plan to do that today or on Sunday. If they do, it will be on either BBC or BBC News.
Do you observe November 11th? We have a historical cemetery near us that served the Black community. Among the people buried there are Black veterans who served in the Civil War and later wars (often in segregated units that were provided with fewer resources). One of the local youth organizations decorates it with flags for Veterans Day, so I enjoy walking through it.
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
