Remembrance Sunday this year is on 10th November 2024, when we shall 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 life 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”