Official Report 383KB pdf
Good afternoon, colleagues. The first item of business is time for reflection, which will be led by the Rev Neil Gardner of Canongate kirk.
It is good to be with you in person this afternoon, instead of seeing you, as I often do, scurrying down the road to get to work. I wonder if you have ever stopped en route to look at the parish war memorial fixed to the wall of the Tolbooth next to Canongate kirk. It is where poppy wreaths will be laid after our service this coming remembrance Sunday and it bears the names of hundreds of men who once lived in this immediate area but who did not return from the first or second world wars. The sheer number reflects a time when this was a densely populated industrial part of the city and, in turn, it prompts us to reflect on the impact of such losses on this neighbourhood where you and I find ourselves working today.
As the minister of what is widely known as Edinburgh’s military church, and a former Army chaplain, I have stood at many a war memorial across the country and around the world. One of the most memorable remains the national war memorial in Sydney, Australia. It is situated in the centre of an impressive rotunda, and when you first go in you climb steps to look down on the body of a young soldier cast in bronze and held aloft on a shield by four statues beneath it. It is only when you go down to ground level that you discover that those four statues are all of women, representing the soldier’s mother, wife, sister and daughter. It is a powerful and vivid illustration of the wider impact of one man’s death, and of all those whose lives would never be the same again.
The verse that most immediately follows the very familiar lines by Laurence Binyon in his poem “For the Fallen” addresses that very subject:
“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 morningWe will remember them.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;They sit no more at familiar tables of home”.
To this day, the names etched on war memorials in every community, across every constituency in Scotland and far beyond, reflect not just the sacrificial cost of conflict but the wider impact on the places where we still live and work. It is why we should, it is why we must, and it is why we will remember them.