Remembering Private Henry Thrale

by Nick Debney

My Great Grandfather, Henry Thrale, has no marked grave. He was killed in action 17th August 1917 at Vimy, France while serving in the 75th Battalion of the Canadian Infantry. His name is inscribed on the Canadian Forces memorial at Vimy Ridge in northern France. 

Henry was born in Nottingham and worked as a stone cutter. He emigrated to Canada before war broke out and travelled back to Europe to fight in 1916. 

I have vivid memories of Remembrance Day services in church as a child; of seeing old women in tears, and men sombre faced, heads bowed in deep prayer and thought during the two minute silence. During these moments, there was a palpable feeling of connecting to a deeply moving human event, a tragedy, a sense of participating in something that touched all of humanity, but could not quite be grasped through a child’s eyes.  

My mother always sat with us children to watch the annual remembrance event at the Royal Albert Hall on television, which finishes with the seemingly endless cascade of poppies falling onto the heads and shoulders of servicemen and women stood to attention below. I can hear her voice now reminding us that each poppy represents a life lost, and a family changed.

After the end of WW1, newsreel shows traffic stopping in the streets at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month as the chimes of Big Ben rang out across London; bus drivers getting out of their cabs and removing their hats. The whole country stopped, to remember. 

With each passing generation, as the tangible memory of the horror of World War 1 fades from immediate human experience, the marking of this most tragic event – the war to end all wars – sadly becomes watered down.
The poetry of Wilfred Owen puts us back with a jolt into an uncomfortable place of war, describing what he saw and experienced with unnerving clarity, yet tinged with human feeling for those whose lives end in a foreign field far from home.  It is, of course, another tragedy that Owen himself was killed in action just a week before WW1 ended. 

Music has a magical power to heal and inspire through its unique ability to touch the human spirit. It is my hope that listening to the singing of arrangements of Owen poems by the Reading A440 choir will energise you in some small way to want to make this world a better place.