The Spectator's Notes | 8 November 2018

The sixth of November 1918 was remembrance day for my great-grandfather, Norman Moore. It was the fourth anniversary of the death of his younger son, Gillachrist (known as Gilla), a second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment, who had been killed at the first battle of Ypres. Sitting quietly in his London house in Gloucester Place, Moore heard shouting in the street: rumours of peace were spreading. ‘If it be so,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘how appropriate on Gillachrist’s day for he gave his life to resist German power.’ It became so five days later.

On 9 November, NM (as he was always called) attended the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in Guildhall: ‘A fanfare of trumpets announced Mr Lloyd George. Soon after, we went into the great hall, where Mr Pitt, and Beckford & Wellington were ready to add their marble grandeur to the feast.’ The prime minister, whom NM, in those pre-broadcasting days, had never before heard, began, ‘ “The German messengers have not been able to reach Marshal Foch so I have nothing to tell you. I had better stop & go no further.” Cheers sent him on. He told that Kaiser Wilhelm & the Crown Prince had abdicated and then made clear that the acts of war were those not only of the rulers but of the German people themselves & they too must answer… They must agree by 11 on Monday at the latest… He had been a week at Versailles. He had walked in its beautiful woods — the leaves were falling &… the crowns of kings kept falling with each day. He spoke of the young men who had fallen (and my dear Gilla I remembered you).’ NM thought it ‘a noble speech — not equal to Burke — but very great indeed — some of the force of Bunyan in it… The speech itself in that old hall… hung with banners with the chief man of England speaking seemed not a mere relation but an actual scene in the fifth act of a long drawn terrible drama.’