Return of remembrance service to Haymarket warmly welcomed

By Alan Pattullo
Published on Monday 14 November 2011 12:26

THE lights at the end of Grosvenor Street stood at poppy red. Everything stopped. Everything was still. From the lady looking down from a flat window in her nightie to the rigidly straight Heart of Midlothian manager Paulo Sergio, they paid tribute in a mantle of silence, respecting those who, because of their valour, will never grow old.

Football was forgotten. Or was it?

The Heart of Midlothian remembrance service yesterday returned to Haymarket for the first time since 2008.

The event marks the heroics of the footballers and supporters from not only Hearts, but also other clubs, including Falkirk, Hibernian and Raith Rovers.

There was no first-team game for Hearts at the weekend. This, however, means just as much as any big match. Players from both the top squad and the under-19s were on duty, though they were able to leave their boots at home.

“I view this service and today as the most important off-field day in the club’s annual calendar,” said David Southern, the Hearts chief executive. “It is hugely important, not just to the history of the club and the tradition but also to the future of the club, and the generations coming through.

“It is important that they understand the sacrifice that was made by our players, and also the supporters and players of other clubs like Hibernian, Falkirk and Raith Rovers, who are also in attendance today. We know that we are among friends.”

Courage was the theme of the day. Courage is the ability to confront fear, noted Sergeant Major Peter Stuart of the Salvation Army.

In his own small way, John Sutton did that, stepping into the breach at the last moment to read In Flanders Fields.

That poem was written 96 years ago by John McCrae, a Canadian whose surname is a significant one when it comes to Hearts.

McCrae’s Own, the name by which the 16th Royal Scots Battalion is more commonly known, were flung into the worst of it at the Battle of the Somme.

Several Hearts players, who had been among the very first footballers to volunteer in 1914, were included in the devastatingly high number of fatalities.

Sutton may be used to performing in front of ten times the number present yesterday but he still had to show his mettle. Told only yesterday morning that scheduled reader Ryan Stevenson, who had only returned from Scotland international duties in Cyprus on Saturday, was unable to make it to Haymarket because of concern for his pregnant wife, Sutton quickly volunteered his services. The striker is out of favour in terms of first-team opportunities. Here, however, he truly did lead the line.

Others stepped up, too. Craig Herbertson, a singer-songwriter based in Germany, travelled from Dortmund to render an a-cappella version of his Hearts of Glory anthem.

His voice not only filled the street, it echoed long after he had finished.

As well as Stevenson, something else was missed. The memorial clock. This still stands in storage somewhere, waiting for the time when it is re-erected on its plinth. The trenches which have been dug throughout the capital are not tributes to the fallen. They are the less consequence of long-running tramworks. The Haymarket area has been as heavily disrupted as anywhere, hence the removal of the clock for safe-keeping.

There is no greater argument for returning the memorial as quickly possible than the one stitched into one flag yesterday. “The stones and the base of the old church tower are stained with the tears of the generations of men and women who came to that place to remember,” it said. “It is holy ground.”

Southern was just pleased that the service had managed to return to within a couple of hundred feet of its true home.

“We are very pleased to have returned to Haymarket,” he said. “This is certainly the rightful home for the service. We were comfortable holding the service for a couple of years at Tynecastle. We attracted over 2000-plus on each occasion, but we do feel that it is only right to return now in advance of the memorial returning.

“We would like to see it back as soon as possible,” he added. “We are realists, though. We know the trouble the city has had with the tram network and the preparation for that. I think that at the very latest we would want it back and in place by 2014. But we are hopeful that, with a fair wind, it can be done by 2013. That decision is out of our hands.”

Jack Alexander, whose book McCrae’s Battalion is a superbly-researched chronicle of the footballers who helped encourage others to enlist by joining up en masse in 1914, is another Hearts fan who, for once, did not wish to be at Tynecastle yesterday.

“I think everybody now recognises that the Haymarket memorial is a landmark,” he said. “It’s an Edinburgh landmark for sure. But it is also, in terms of significance, a First World War memorial, and one of the most important First World War memorials in the world.

“There is nothing quite like the story of what happened in 1914 in Gorgie, and in Edinburgh. I think that in 2016, when it comes to the 100th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the world’s eyes will be on Edinburgh. And we want the memorial back by then, definitely.”

Alexander’s life has become defined by his work to recognise the war dead from McCrae’s battalion and Hearts FC, both here in Haymarket and at Contalmaison in France, where a memorial cairn stands.

“It’s an honour,” he said yesterday, as we looked on at the 45 wreaths laid by representatives from various groups, including Hearts supporter clubs and those from other Scottish sides. “Without sounding daft, it’s been a privilege. I was standing there at the ceremony thinking about Duncan [Currie], Ernie [Ellis], and about Jimmy Boyd. I was thinking about all those who were killed, and I was thinking about the families of the fallen who I met when I was researching the battalion.

“I have their faces in front of my eyes.”

Taken from the Scotsman