poppy field

Bedford

This year's Remembrancetide events took place on Sunday 9th November and Tuesday 11th November 2025.

Remembrance Sunday next year will be on 8th November 2026, when we shall once again honour and remember the fallen, whether they lie in a ‘foreign field’ or in ‘home soil’.

Specifically, we shall remember the fallen of Bedford, men and women who were prepared to lay down their lives for their country, their county, their town, their family, and their friends.

The memorial on The Embankment is simply not big enough to record all the names of those Bedfordians. We don’t have the numbers, but we know that over 400 lost their lives in the First World War alone.

The first to die in that awful conflict was William Fisher, 30 years of age of Allhallows Lane, a private in the Bedfordshire Regiment who perished in the first battle of Ypres in 1914, and the last was Charles Howe, also of the Bedfordshire Regiment, who died of bronchial pneumonia and malaria in Egypt on 4 November 1918 after the long campaign against Turkey in Gallipoli, Egypt and Palestine. Charles was just 20 years of age.

 

“They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them”