A lot of people went to a lot of effort to make Remembrance Sunday 2025 a relative success. The service was well conducted and more dignified than in former years. Nevertheless, I am re-blogging my comments of Remembrance Sunday 2024 because, within 4 8 hours the gates of the city's Gardens were again been locked against the citizens. This annual disrespect to the veterans of many wars is a scandal and I am not the only veteran in Exeter who thinks so. This is the time of year when citizens throughout the nation remember. The wreaths so sincerely inscribed and so solemnly laid will not properly be seen again until Christmas by which time, if they survive, they will hardly be in any condition to remind the nation of it's debt to dead servicemen.
The irony is that the motive behind this civic disrespect is shortage of funds. Ironic because if the Exeter City Council only gave sensitive thought how to make these unique, historic Gardens more attractive to visitors, i.e. to promote them as 'gardens' rather than as a field wherein to mount 'events', they would do far more for the reputation and the prosperity of the city than they now do with vulgar abuse.
From the archive:
On Remembrance Sunday, 2024, in Exeter there was no ceremony to remember the dead of Devon at the County war-memorial in the Cathedral Yard. This was just as well for the Sons (and Daughters) of Mammon had built their houses (The Christmas Market!) so close to the Devon war-memorial that they had not left room for the Lord-lieutenant to lay his wreath.
Respect for those Devonians who gave their lives for the causes of this nation was therefore registered, subsumed, in the moving ceremony that took place in the Northernhay Gardens, Exeter's sacred corner, its Valhalla and the jewel in the city's crown, where stands the very fine Exeter war-memorial executed by the Devon sculptor, John Angel, and where also is a rather sad war-memorial raised to those who have lost their lives in more recent conflicts. A larger crowd than usual, therefore, turned up to see the Mayor of Exeter and other dignitaries, civil and military, lay wreaths to the memory of the fallen.
The following day, yesterday as I write, was Armisitice Day and the gates of Northernhay Gardens are once again locked against city folk and county folk and all. None will have access to the Gardens until 22nd November. The wreaths lie at the war-memorials in what has officially become a 'construction site' with only the 'constructors' to see them. They will inspire no remembrance. Exeter's will be the war-memorial least visited in the kingdom. The Lord Mayor, who so sincerely bade us remember the sacrifice of so many, and his Council, have rented out the Gardens to be once again a 'Winter Wonderland' which is to say a rather tatty and harmful, to the Gardens, funfair.
The Gardens, for Health and Safety reasons, are now denied to the public. When they are opened again the city's war-memorial wil be surrounded by all the fun of the fair and by plastic 'rudolfs', 'santas' and such. Not much thought will be given to the glorious dead.
There will be a further week of Health and Safety closure while the 'Wonderland' is packed away. Shortly before Christmas the people of Devon and Exeter will have their war-memorial back, the wreathes, so 'respectfully' laid will have wasted, degraded by the rains and winds of winter and much of Northernhay Gardens, no doubt, will exhibit swathes of the mud that one associates with Flanders Field.
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