'East Devon gearing up to commemorate Remembrance Day'

This year, the 11th falls on a Saturday with ceremonies usually held on the nearest Sunday, November 12.

Last week I had to do a 24-hour there and back trip to London for work and decided that rather than the exhaustion of seven hours driving I’d let the train take the strain. I was never one of those children from my generation who went train-spotting or felt the romantic pull of the iron horse. To me it was a suburban means of getting to school and back between 8-18 with very little glamour and much being crammed in like sardines.

However, decades later I do now see why many people feel such an affinity with train travel. The journey from East Devon - both west and east - is beautiful, reminding passengers of ancient settlements along the way and the sheer scale and strategic importance of our farming land.

It’s quite easy at this time of year to think of Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 novel, War Horse, the story of a horse taken to the First World War from Devon, and the efforts of a fifteen-year-old lad called Albert to bring him back. More than twenty years after publication, this was adapted to one of the greatest productions ever at the National Theatre with some groundbreaking work in puppetry when the metal horses whinnied and neighed during the horror. It felt utterly real.

So, with two- and three-quarter hours each way on the train I realised that if I tried to read a book I’d be asleep pretty quickly, and instead I boarded with my laptop loaded with programmes from the BBC iPlayer. The first was about Sri Lanka as it continues to emerge from war, a tsunami and an economic catastrophe.

The second was called “I Was There! The Great War Interviews”. This memorable documentary was the BBC at its best. It drew on interview footage first recorded in the early 1960s for their 26-part series “The Great War”. Fifty years on, someone at the BBC realised that they still had the rushes of these interviews and it might be worth having a look at unused footage.

As anyone who has ever been interviewed for anything knows, broadcasters often use just a minute or two from an interview which has taken half an hour to record. In this case, the thousands of yards of film left on the cutting room floor remained a gold mine of personal accounts. I cannot recommend this programme highly enough if you can find your way around the iPlayer.

All ranks and classes of mainly men told their stories, in their sixties and seventies at the time of recording. Some of the most compelling accounts came from those who’d been lucky enough to come home on leave, and to then survive the war. They had seen such horror, many stating simply that the battlefields seemed like the day of Armageddon, that when they met people back on the Homefront, they had no words.

Simply, during and after the war they felt they had to bottle it all up, realising that if you weren’t there you simply could never understand. Yet by the miracle of television, they were able to give testimony nearly fifty years later, and sixty years on from that we can now listen and hopefully heed what they had to say.

Tragically, today as so often, mankind seems yet to learn. But at least in the next couple of weeks we may remember them – and what they were trying to impart.