2014 Remembrance Day Parade

Well, the blog has been dormant for many weeks now.  All sorts of reasons for that.  Most of them excuses.  At any rate, in an attempt to get myself back into a writing routine, here's a short post about the recent Remembrance Day festival in Melbourne.

Remembrance Day commemorates the end of hostilities in World War I.  Technically it's on November 11, since hostilities ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.  The US designates November 11 as Veterans Day to acknowledge a broader scope than WWI, but the associated festivities are typically done on Memorial Day in May.

Remembrance Day had special significance this year because it marks 100 years since the beginning of WWI.  I got involved with the festival in Melbourne through Melbourne Town Band, for which I play trombone.  The band has strong ties with the local chapter of the Royal British Legion.  They lead the parade, several of the members have other roles (parade master, standard bearer), and they play a concert at the local British Legion Club afterwards.

Melbourne is not a large community.  Although it's technically a town because it has a charter, folks who live here refer to it as a village.  The parade had 500 participants and observers along the street.  Here's a photo of the band leading the parade down the main street in the village.

We marched through the town to the Parish Church (I took this photo of the war memorial and all the wreaths that were laid about a week later when Kristine and I were out for a walk).  Along the way we encountered a bus approaching the parade on the same street from the opposite direction.  The quick-thinking police officer who was walking up front with the band motioned it to the bus-stop on the street.  Fortunately there was time for the bus to pull in before the parade needed to pass.

The actual ceremony for laying wreaths was relatively short.  We started with the traditional cornet solo piece, The Last Post.  The band played a handful of songs while wreaths were laid by different organizations from in and around Melbourne.  We finished with My Country 'Tis of Thee God Save Our Gracious Queen.  This photo below gives an idea of what the area around the memorial looked like.  It was packed.

Once the ceremony was done, the parade re-assembled in front of the monument and marched back to its starting point at the Royal British Legion.

We took a different route on the way back.  It included playing while marching up hill, which I found to be more than a little bit tiring.  Fortunately we didn't have to do it much.  In the photo below, the band director is raising his baton to signal the drummer to give the band the short rolls that cue'd us to start playing again.

Here's the whole route for the parade, along with the locations I had to plug in to force Google to create it.  I haven't participated in equivalent memorial activities like this one before, although I know they exist.  It was a privilege to see how the small community of Melbourne came together for it.