Remembrance Days and Cathode Followers - Tony Cunnane's Afterthoughts

Written on 11 November 2008

For the past few days I imagine most of us have been reminiscing about Remembrance Days gone by. I can’t remember my first Remembrance Sunday although it was probably at this time in 1948 – my first term at Grammar School. Younger readers may not realise that it is only in the last few years that, in addition to Remembrance Sunday celebrated on the Sunday nearest to 11 November, there has also been a National ceremony at the 11th hour of the 11th month when that does not fall on a Sunday. Thus, these days we have two Remembrance Days.

The 1914-18 war had been heralded as the ‘war to end all wars’ but after the outbreak of war in 1939 that earlier war was usually referred to as ‘the last war’ – using ‘last’ in the sense of most recent rather than in the sense of the last ever. Once WW2 was over and when the 1940s gave way to the 1950s I seem to recall that far more attention was paid to VE and VJ Days rather than to Remembrance Day. That was, I suppose, understandable, since the end of WW2 was then in the forefront of our memories.

When I enlisted in the RAF in 1953 and for many years after there was always, without fail, a mandatory church parade on every Battle of Britain Sunday – the nearest Sunday to 15 September, the date on which, in 1940, the Battle of Britain was deemed to have ended. There was also a ceremonial parade for all RAF personnel on the main parade ground on the previous Saturday morning. Those who were in the RAF in those years will recall that before prayers were said by the C of E Padre the order "Roman Catholics and Jews, fall out" was given. Those belonging to those denominations then marched to the rear of the parade and stood with their backs to the proceedings. Once the prayers were over they were ordered back into the ranks and the parade continued with the advance in review order and a final march past. You couldn’t get  yourself excused Church Parade just because you were not of the Church of England faith.

A slight digression. When I was at RAF Locking, the RAF's No 1 Radio School, in 1953-54 a new religion, ‘Christian Scientist’ was in vogue about which little was known (although there was one dedicated adherent on my Wireless Fitters' course). A joker on my course decided that he would go one better and announced that he was a Cathode Follower. Within days, the small cards on our personal lockers on which was inscribed our name, rank, service number and religion, had the religion changed to Cathode Follower. Our Drill Instructors and some of our very young officers were mystified by this rapidly spreading new religion and wondered whether Cathode Followers should be ordered to fall out on church parades along with the RCs and Jews. Eventually the truth came out: cathode follower was a type of radio valve circuitry that we had been learning about. Those who had been taken in were not amused but they did nothing about it because they had no wish to admit that they had never heard of cathode followers.