Armistice Day

I spent yesterday evening at the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall, giving a talk on the Last Post as part of the Richmond Literary Festival. And very enjoyable it was too.

For those who missed my Radio 4 programme on the same subject, it is now available on iPlayer. And there's also an article I wrote for the BBC website to accompany the show.

And finally, on the occasion of Armistice Day, a further plug for my piece about the National Union of Ex-Servicemen, the most radical of the campaigning groups in the aftermath of the First World War. This was the organisation that effectively made Douglas Haig found the British Legion, so worried was he by their revolutionary potential.

National Union of Ex-Servicemen

One of the things that intrigued me when writing The Last Post was the role of the National Union of Ex-Servicemen. The NUX, as it was known, was by far the most radical, even revolutionary, of the veterans' groups that sprang up in the years immediately following the First World War. 'Instead of being the means to save capitalism,' declared the Union's general secretary, 'the organised ex-servicemen will now be the means of destroying it.'

Unfortunately, I had limited space to explore this in the book itself. So I've filled in some more details in an article about the NUX on the Lion & Unicorn website.