ARMISTICE DAY

Evening Star, Issue 20053, 19 December 1928, Page 11

ARMISTICE DAY

AUTHBR CF SILF.HCE BOM 1H AUSTRALIA GRAVE UNKNOWN; WIDOW WORKING 10 HOURS DAILY. Tiio man who conceived tho Great Silence was Edward George Honey, an Australian journalist, who died in poverty in England in August, 1922. Only a bare mound marks his grave in a tiny cemetery at Northwood, in Middlesex. His widow, a few months ago, was tramping tho mountains of South Wales sis days a week trying to earn a living at the insurance business. Writing recently to a friend in Melbourne, she said: “ My one great wish in life now is to St. Hilda, which was my husband’s birthplace. . . . .1 feel I cannot carry on this workout in hail, rain, and snow.’’ Only his widow and a few friends will remember Honey, who, in a flash of. genius, gave us this supreme moment. He suggested the Silence in an article in the ‘ Evening News ’ on May 8, 1919, writing under the nom de plume of “ Warren Foster.” At that time he was earning his living in Fleet street. He referred to the bonfires that stretched across England in a sort of “ Elizabethan joy rag ” on Peace Day, and added;

ONE VERY SIMPLE RITE. “ But, if wo will only think of it in time, 1 fancy wo will each of us insist on the observance of _ one very simple, but very beautiful rite on that day of days. _ . . The Crusade is over—the falsity is swept away—but in Franco and Flanders, and in the deserts of the East, stand crosses unnumbered to mark the splendour of their sacrifice. "Can we not spare some fragment of those hours of peace rejoicing for a silent tribute to these mighty dead? Individually, yes! Too many of us know we will for our own kith and kin, for the friend who will never come back. But nationally? I would ask for five minutes—five little minutes only. Five silent minutes of national remembrance. A very sacred intercession.” DIDN’T SEEK RECOGNITION. Five minutes had been tested at an official rehearsal—at which Honey was present—and was deemed too long for great crowds to retain an immovable and silent attitude. Two tninufes was then fixed. A couple oi years after Ins masterpiece came into being, Honey fell ill of consumption, and was unable to bear the strain of journalism. His end was hastened hy the effects'oi war service in the Middlesex Regiment. One of his closest friends wrote of him just before his death; “Consumption nad reduced him to the mere husk of a man. He was coughing dreadfully. . This is my last memory of him—sitting before a fire bent and frail (ho was only thirty-six), with an overcoat buttoned up to his chin. I asked him to let me see his home, for his appearance depressed mo intolerably, but ho would neither allow me to accompany, him, nor would he give me his address. . . . Perhaps he wished to hide his poverty.” The same friend wrote of him_ on another occasion after he had visited Northwood Cemetery; “He never, while ho lived, showed any desire to be connected officially with the Great Silence. The fact that he lived to see it adopted gave him infinite satisfaction. “ The world has forgotten him, and the world, indeed, cannot be blamed, for it did not know him while he lived. . . . ~• Referring, then, to the sight of his unknown grave, this, friend added: “Gilded sarcophagi hold much _ vileness'. But it seemed to mo pitiably, wrongly strange that the cr.eator of the Great Silence should so utterly pass out of recognition.”