80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Friday 9th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the founding chairman of the British Normandy Memorial. I congratulate the Minister on his powerful opening and the right reverend Prelate on her excellent maiden speech.

A lot of this week has been about celebrating VE Day but, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Hunter and Lady Meyer, have powerfully said, we should not forget those who fought and served in the Far East, including my father, who was in the Fourteenth Army in Burma. They called themselves the Forgotten Army but it is right that they are not forgotten today. We should also remember that for millions of people in eastern Europe, 8 or 9 May was a day when they swapped one totalitarian occupation for another, and it was another 45 years before they had their liberation day.

As we have heard in today’s debate, celebration has to go hand in hand with the commemoration of those whose sacrifices made victory possible. I want to reflect briefly on the trends in commemoration, on the strength of the experience of designing, building and running the British Normandy Memorial. This was the first major UK national memorial overseas for several decades. The tradition in this country is that we commemorate here at a national commemoration monument, at the Cenotaph or the Unknown Warrior, while overseas the focus for commemoration is in the intensely moving Commonwealth war graves cemeteries. But the initiative for a national memorial in Normandy came from a group of veterans. They wanted all the comrades who fell in the 1944 battle to be remembered in one place, as is the case with the American and Canadian memorials.

With generous help from the Government and many donations from the public, we built what I think I can say is a fine memorial overlooking Gold Beach, which opened to the public in 2021. We benefited a lot from the contribution of other noble Lords: the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, who has now taken over from me as chairman, and the noble Lords, Lord Janvrin, Lord Soames and Lord Kakkar, who are also trustees of the Spirit of Normandy Trust. We were enormously honoured when the King and Queen, with President and Madame Macron, presided at the official opening on 6 June last year, and it was moving to hear His Majesty refer to his visit to Normandy in the speech he gave at the VE Day concert last night.

One advantage of a national memorial is that it can be inclusive, telling the story of not just a single engagement but an entire military campaign, in our case from 6 June to 31 August 1944. Our memorial commemorates all those who fell under British command, of many nationalities, and includes those in the merchant marine—22,440 men and two women from the Queen Alexandra’s nursing service. One name, indeed, who figures among them, having been killed on 6 June, is Sergeant Vernon Coaker.

The memorial is inclusive in another sense as well. We built a separate memorial on the site to the many thousands of French civilians who were killed in that summer of 1944. Over the last 80 years, the citizens of Normandy have welcomed back the veterans, calling them “our liberators”, and it is only right that the suffering of their forebears should also be remembered.

My second trend is that commemoration needs to be more digital if it is to transmit successfully to the next generation the memory of what happened and why. We invested in a state-of-the-art app so that our roll of honour can be searched. Many families have generously donated photographs, letters home and journals, all of which are now available online. I, like other noble Lords, am convinced that telling the human stories behind the names graven in stone on memorials is the best way to keep interest alive in those momentous events. Our trust has recently completed the Winston Churchill education centre and is focusing on programmes for schoolchildren.

My last trend is the constant need to be creative. These VE Day celebrations have shown the power of creativity. For the second summer, we are delighted to welcome at the British memorial the haunting life-size silhouettes of service men and women created by the charity Standing with Giants. It has installed 1,475 figures at our memorial—that is the number of those killed under British command on D-Day alone—and it is an extraordinarily moving installation. It has proved immensely popular, with 250,000 visitors to the memorial last year, and I pay tribute to Dan and Janette Barton, who founded the charity and whose inspirational work has been very powerful in many other places as well.

If we can be inclusive, digital and creative, we can ensure that the courage and sacrifice of those who fought for our freedom, including the many referred to in this debate, will never be forgotten.