Address given at a Service of Commemoration and Thanksgiving on Remembrance Sunday 2025

A photograph—I want to tell you about a black and white photograph. It was taken in September 1945. A woman, standing, in silhouette, in the bombed-out and shattered ruins of the Vienna State Opera. She is singing an aria from Madame Butterfly. The picture was printed in a magazine with a description of a city that had been conquered and where people were starving. In the midst of devastation and hunger, an aria from Madame Butterfly. The text commented

They are drunk on music, light frothy music for empty stomachs.

The photograph was taken by Lee Miller, an American war correspondent. Some of you will have seen the exhibition of her work at the Tate Gallery. If you haven’t, I commend it, but it is not for the faint-hearted.

Two more photographs. One from the Children’s hospital in Vienna and some harrowing commentary beneath. And, just beside that little girl in her hospital bed, a picture taken in Heidelberg, also in 1945. A very different, lovely, laughter filled photograph of two little girls on an Easter egg hunt. They are looking out of the family bomb shelter. There will now be no more bombs. A picture of peace. These are the children of a German industrialist. He is married to an American woman and Lee Miller had spent ‘a polite two hours’ talking to her. Peace-time courtesies. The photographer also noted that the family factories that paid for all this happiness were operated by slave labour. Peace. Slave labour, the legacy of war.

We are here to remember. We gather at the grave of the Unknown Warrior and remember the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month. We try to hold in our heads the chaos and carnage of the First World War. The war in which both my grandfathers fought and of which they would not speak. So hard to recall. We will also remember other conflicts, and other casualties. Some of us will remember friends and family members whose lives were ended, or utterly changed. Some of us will remember particular stories of war and peace, books we have read pictures we have seen. We will remember some events, the Somme, D Day, Goose Green, Kandahar Province. We might recall acts of heroism, acts of cruelty, a regiment, a concentration camp. We will remember them.

The remembering is important. We look clear-eyed through all the years and see the past, see what war was and what war did, see the cost, and the challenge, remember who we were. But remembering will always summon up some stories and some faces. Remembering we will revisit the things we think we know and then remembering becomes a routine.

Let me take you back to Lee Miller and those photographs. Her career in the 1920s, the other side of the camera, a model, on the front page of Vogue magazine. It was fashion and fancy, but an extraordinary life and an exceptional talent took her elsewhere, charted in photographs in a sequence of rooms at the Tate. She was in Britain in the early years of the Second World War, taking photographs of both fashion and the Blitz. Then, in 1944, she became a war correspondent. She was in Normandy after the landings, in Alsace in ’45. She was the first journalist to reach Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden.

The pictures are challenging. A French woman accused of collaborating with Germans, shaven headed and shamed. German officers who have committed suicide lying dead in their vandalised homes—dehumanised. Look through the window and there is a statue of the figure of justice, it has its back to us. These ambivalent pictures, they ask questions, who is guilty and of what?

Then on to the concentration camps, Buchenwald and Dachau. Traumatic pictures taken without a zoom lens, up close with a Rolleiflex. Pictures that left Lee Miller mentally scarred for the rest of her life. Pictures published, like so much of her work in Vogue, of all places, challenging editors more familiar with fashion shoots, to tell the truth. ‘Believe it’, she urged.

You walk out of that room, the bodies and brutality of the camps, and encounter the pictures of the complex victory that I have already described, starving children and refugees, the dancing and singing in the ruins. Rightly we celebrated VE and VJ this year, but let’s not forget that peace was complex and not everyone was waving a flag or going to a party. Lee Miller saw that; she recorded the broken lives and shattered hope. She made herself ill. She was traumatised, she was herself going hungry. Friends and magazine editors begged her to go home. She refused. She was looking for hope in the ruins of war. She said,

I’d rather chew my fingernails right down to the elbow rather than retreat from here until I have something positive and convincing to say.

My point is this. We have gathered to remember. We want to do that. We came here already committed to the task. Remembrance, though, is too often a kind of historical duty. Remembrance is bits of a story we learned long ago, a family history possibly, a regimental memory, some facts from a book. Those photographs I have seen recently remind me it must more than that. Remembrance is a moral duty. We are not shuffling a few memories; we are looking for truth and telling hope. We are not just remembering the past. We are trying to remind ourselves that there must also be a future in which our better instincts prevail. We must not come here and make it tidy, make it safe.

Five years ago, we stood on doorsteps and applauded the NHS, called the courage and commitment. This week the papers reported that racist abuse of NHS staff is at a record high. Our memories are short, our remembrance is so fickle. We have to do better. We have to learn that remembrance is a moral duty, not a casual birthday card to the past, sent and forgotten. The remembrance of what we were must shape what are and will be.

That slightly strange first reading written three thousand years ago was trying to tell us just that:

They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit… They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain. (Isaiah 65: 21, 25)

That was written in the ruins of a war and it looked to the future. It was resolute. It saw the damage and the pain and dared to believe in different. That is a moral remembrance, one that honours the past and still hopes. That is what we so desperately need in a society in which we rage against what we hate and then turn away. We are so angry about what hurts, but we look inwards to a few friends, turn the music up and dance. We will not build a future if we try to forget. We will certainly not build a future out of pain and vengeance. Ours must be a moral remembrance, one that stays the course.

I’d rather chew my fingernails right down to the elbow rather than retreat from here until I have something positive and convincing to say.