Armistice Day: Remembering the Guyanese who went to war

Gershom Onesimus Browne was 17 when he gave his age as 18 to enlist in the British West Indies Regiment. The teenager from Bagotville, West Bank Demerara, served in North Africa and Palestine during the First World War and rose to the rank of sergeant. When he died in 2000 at age 102, he was Guyana’s last known surviving veteran of that war.

 

Armistice Day, observed on November 11, marks 108 years since the ceasefire between the Allies and Germany took effect at 11 a.m. in 1918, bringing fighting on the Western Front to a halt. Among those who fought on that front was Lionel Fitzherbert Turpin, a merchant seaman from British Guiana who enlisted in the British Army at 19. He survived the Battle of the Somme, but a gas attack damaged his lungs. He died in 1929.

 

A generation later, Cyril “Cy” Grant of Beterverwagting joined the Royal Air Force as part of its first wave of Caribbean aircrew recruits. A navigator on a Lancaster bomber, Grant was shot down on his third mission in 1943 and spent two years as a prisoner of war. He went on to become a singer, actor and broadcaster.

 

Guyana held its national Remembrance Sunday ceremony on November 8 at the War Memorial Cenotaph in Georgetown. President Irfaan Ali laid the first wreath, and the ceremony included a military parade, the sounding of the Last Post and two minutes of silence. At a separate ceremony, pledges and a private donation totalling G$8.5 million were announced for the Guyana Veterans Legion’s welfare programmes.

 

Queen’s College, one of Guyana's oldest schools has its own remembrance tradition. At its annual service, the school reads aloud the names of former students and teachers who died in the two world wars. The youngest students have traditionally laid poppy wreaths at the memorial plaques bearing those names.