Long-time no speak, and I can only apologise for that! Training to be a teacher is much more of a commitment than I had ever prepared for, and unfortunately my blog has had to take a back seat. I'm absolutely loving my PGCE so far though and can't wait to get back into the school after half-term, so I don't begrudge my teacher training or this new fast pace of life one bit! While I am on half-term, I decided it was a good time to update my blog, and just lately I have a brilliant topic to write about!
Remembrance Day this year is a very special one because it will be 100 years since the end of the First World War. Remembrance Day, as the name suggests, is a Memorial Day wherein which Britain and the Commonwealth remember and pay tribute to those who fought and died during the First World War and beyond. It was first established in 1919 by King George V and has become an annual event that my family observe each year as we wear our poppies and follow the procession down from the church to our local cenotaph.
This year though, we took it one step further, and began our tributes a little early. This is all because of the Rawcliffe & Rawcliffe Bridge Pumpkin & Scarecrow Festival!
Pumpkin & Scarecrow Display October 2017
Proudly posing alongside our display
The scarecrow festival is a newly introduced annual event held within our Parish. Households are encouraged to participate in the festival by creating pumpkin and/or scarecrow displays and showcasing them outside their houses over the weekend closest to Halloween. Last year our display was strictly Halloween themed, I'm sure you can see that we very much put a lot of effort into it and were very proud of the end result! Both of my parents have lived in Rawcliffe all their lives, with my mum literally being born here, so they're very keen to participate in community driven events. This year the vision for our display took a different direction, and very much led to our fifteen minutes of Facebook fame! Here's how the display came about...
Known nowadays at our 'local historian', my dad is passionate about preserving the memory of our fallen soldiers from both the First & Second World Wars. For most of his adult life he's been very interested in genealogy. He has done a lot of research into our roots and from creating his family tree realised that so many of our ancestors came from Rawcliffe, the village that we still live in now! From this research came a broader interest in the history of the village we live in. It's safe to say that he's obsessed with all things Rawcliffe and when you combine that with a specialised interest in historical warfare (and, I would argue, too much spare time) you manage to get yourself labelled as Local Historian of the Parish! You also manage to recruit fellow history enthusiasts and successfully form a War Group, putting on exhibitions in the local area to showcase artefacts, documents and photographs of the war and our Parish all those many years ago. Along with friends David and Roy, my dad presents the experience of warfare from the perspective of those who lived within our village. Rawcliffe's War Group have big plans for Remembrance Day this year which I'll get onto in due course, but it's from these plans that the idea for our scarecrow display was born, and the many weeks of preparation began.
Roy Dresser, Robert Barker and David McKenna hosting an exhibition at the Yorkshire Waterways Museum, Goole.
Following on from previous exhibitions and with this year's fast approaching, it's safe to say that it has been the focus of our household all year. So much so that it made perfect sense to dedicate our scarecrow display this year to such a tribute. My dad definitely had the vision and put lots of time into getting it right, meanwhile me, my mum and my brother all stood by and offered a helping hand when and where we could. It involved lots of late-night Amazon orders, many an afternoon spent filling sandbags and smearing shades of Urban Decay's Smoky palette onto pieces of "barbed wire" (string - and yes you read that right, this is how truly dedicated we were!) But finally, weeks later, we displayed our finished product on the front lawn just as the street light was turning on, and then retired inside for a glass of wine ahead of the festival the following morning.
Households around the village presented wonderful and creative displays, a few of which were shared on the Facebook page that I will also share here!
Brilliant Harry Potter display!
Mr Sweep, the chimney sweep, enjoying a spot of lunch!
One of our scouts!
Scarecrow & PumpGIN Festival!
As you can see, lots of households participated in the event and showcased their brilliantly creative ideas! Over the weekend the village played host to lots of visitors who came to admire the many wonderful displays, and all day and night we had people wandering down our street to take a lot at our handiwork. The response from visitors and residents alike was fantastic, but when one of our friends took to Facebook to give us a shout-out, the recognition became slightly more widespread!
I've included both of the different versions of the post that I have seen that have really taken off on social media, and some of our own photographs of the display! When we created this, it was with the hope that people from our community would appreciate it, but to have the appreciation of thousands of people from across the world is absolutely amazing and so touching. It humbles me and restores some of my faith in humanity to know that so many people are supportive of the effort we put into this to try and represent our remembrance of the First World War, I think people are really recognising the importance of the centenary of the armistice and taking some time to think about the men from across the Commonwealth who fought for us.
Our garage door was hand painted by my dad, the poppies knitted by my mum and assembled onto stems by yours truly, the sandbags each individually filled and the scarecrows constructed from all sorts of bits and pieces we could find! We collected the pebbles to put by the graves, which were painted and nailed together into the cross shape, the gun is made out of a few pieces of painted wood and the soldiers uniforms ordered from Amazon!
As I've previously mentioned, this is just a snippet of the colossal effort my dad has gone to and will be going to for Remembrance Day 2018. On Friday 9th and Saturday 10th he and the Rawcliffe War Group are hosting one of their fantastic exhibitions in St James Church, Rawcliffe, from 10am until 5pm. On display there will be an array of historic artefacts and documents to take a look at, tea and coffee will be on offer along with traditional trench cake and other sweet treats, and the infamous trench display (seen above) will be resurrected for everybody to take a closer look at. Also, and most importantly for me, my dad's debut book 'THOUGH LOST TO SIGHT TO MEMORY DEAR: Rawcliffe, One Parish and Its people in the time of War', will be available to buy. The book tells the stories of many men and women from Rawcliffe and the nearby areas and their personal experiences of warfare, preserved in historic newspaper articles, diary entries and letters sent home. The book includes the photographs and names of all who died from the Parish, and much more. It has been a self-funded project and one that my dad has been so passionate about. He wants to tell the story of those who didn't get the chance to tell it for themselves and has invested a lot of time, money and effort into writing and publishing the book. If you are from the village or have ancestors from here then it really would be wonderful to have on your bookshelf.
THOUGH LOST TO SIGHT TO MEMORY DEAR: Rawcliffe, One Parish and Its people in the time of war will be available to buy for £18.00 at the exhibition on Friday and Saturday.
It will be Robert Barker's debut book.
I cannot thank everybody enough for the praise we as a family have received for our little tribute, and though we have all offered him a helping hand, it really is my dad that deserves the recognition. As I say, he has dedicated so much time, effort and money to this worthy cause, and I couldn't be prouder of him. With that in mind, and with it being clear how grateful he is and how proud we are of him, it is by far and large those who fought and died one hundred years ago that truly deserve your recognition right now. Please remember that. Robert Binyon put it every so poignantly and poetically when he reminded everybody that: They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old; age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn, and so at the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them. Please carry those words with you throughout this month and beyond, think about what they gave and what we can do to thank them now. It's one thing to share an image of a tribute on social media, but it's another to be a part of that tribute and to be a part of that effort in preserving the memory of those who left their professions, their loved ones and their lives behind, and went away in the hope of securing us some sort of future.
Please do come along to the exhibition, especially if you're from the village, it's a wonderful way to observe Remembrance Day and to pay respects to those who fought and died for us. This year we have seen so many tributes throughout the villages and towns in our area already, in Rawcliffe alone we have the beautiful knitted poppy's, our very own Tommy and the crosses on the village green, not to mention of course the exhibition and the Remembrance Service on Sunday. Take part in what you can and honour those who came before us. If you are interested, then please do get in touch with me via the About Me page and I can arrange for you to purchase a copy of the book.
Thank you very much for reading!