Notes from the 2025 Remembrance Sunday service in Greenhead Park.

It rained from a quarter to ten until the second silence had ended. Not a downpour. A West Yorkshire rain — patient, fine, the sort that arrives sideways. The forecast had been kinder, and the bandstand had been borrowed by the brass section who could not play wet instruments in any weather. Around fourteen hundred people came anyway. The numbers were lower than 2024, but not by much, and the rain did not seem to have made the difference. A wet morning at the Memorial is not a deterrent to anyone who has decided to be there.

The service ran to its usual order, the order this trust has helped shape on every Sunday nearest the eleventh of November since 1924. The civic procession from the Town Hall arrived a few minutes early. The Royal British Legion standard-bearers took their positions on the south side of the Memorial. The Lord-Lieutenant’s deputy laid the first wreath, followed by the Mayor of Kirklees, the leader of the council, six regimental representatives, eleven local authorities and civic bodies, and twenty-three further community organisations. The full list will appear on this page as our annual wreath record in December.

The Last Post was sounded at eleven o’clock by Mr Robert Sutcliffe of Honley, who has bugled at the Memorial since 1997. He has told me, more than once, that he can hear in his playing each year exactly how the wind is sitting. Yesterday it was sitting from the west, and the lower notes carried clearly across the park. We held the silence for the two full minutes. The rain held with us.

A wet morning at the Memorial is not a deterrent to anyone who has decided to be there.Rev Dr Paul T Wilcock BEM · Trustee

After the silence

The wreath-laying procession took a little longer than usual because we paused at each panel of names where the chalking had washed out in the morning’s rain. The chalking is one of the small, ordinary pieces of work this trust funds each year. Before the parade, a stonemason or trained volunteer goes over the inscribed names with a soft chalk, working the surface so the letters stand out white against the grey of the stone. It is a temporary intervention. Rain undoes it, which is fine. The point is to make the names visible to the wreath-bearers in the act of passing. When you stop at a panel, you should be able to read every name there. Yesterday morning, at the south-east panels in particular, several had become hard to read in the wet, and the procession slowed.

Tea in the bandstand

After the dispersal of the procession, the Friends of Greenhead Park had set up a small refreshment table inside the bandstand. We do this every year. The tea is real tea, brewed in a green metal urn that has lived in the Town Hall basement since the 1970s. There is no charge for it. There is no register at the door. The people who come into the bandstand are mostly older — veterans, widows, those whose names are on the Memorial through family — and they come for the warmth and for the conversation, not for the tea itself.

I sat for a little over an hour with three men. The youngest was sixty-eight, the eldest eighty-three. One had served in Northern Ireland, one in the Gulf, one had not served at all but had lost his father in Korea and had been coming to the Memorial every year since 1956. Sixty-nine years of Sundays. He did not say much. He laughed once, when the youngest of the three told a story about a corporal who had once tried to inspect a kitbag full of fishing tackle. After he laughed, he was quiet for a long time. I have learned over the years not to try to fill that quietness. It has its own shape.

What it cost us

For the record, the trust’s 2025 spend on Remembrance Sunday came to £1,940. The detailed breakdown will appear in our 2025 annual report next year, but the headline figures are: portable PA system £640, stewarding tabards and accessibility provision £420, printed order of service £280, chalking-in of the names £200, miscellaneous costs including the bandstand tea £400. The chalking was carried out at first light on Sunday morning by two volunteers from the Friends of Greenhead Park; we owe them, as ever, more than money.

The 2026 Remembrance Sunday service will fall on Sunday 8 November 2026 and will follow the usual order. Details will appear on our Events page in early October. We are always grateful for offers of stewarding help, and our Cenotaph Steward role is open to anyone who wants a quiet, useful morning a year. We will also have a small accessibility provision team for the first time in 2026, and we would welcome a volunteer with British Sign Language to join us.

For now, the wreaths will stand at the foot of the Memorial until the end of the month, and the chalk will need re-doing before next year. The names are still there. The town turned out. The rain held with us. That is what we have to report.