On Monday 4th June James Duddridge, Member of Parliament for Rochford and Southend East, attended the Southend School’s Festival of Remembrance event at St Andrew’s Church.
The event, which was also attended by the Worshipful Mayor Cllr Derek Jarvis, follows on from the successful event in November 2017 which included the creation of individual poppies by 5000 pupils across 25 schools to form a lake of poppies in aid of Remembrance. It was then decided by the Southend School’s Festival of Remembrance to then use the poppies that survived the weather to be used to honour the brave residents of Southend who died for our freedom during the First World War by placing the poppies on the Commonwealth ward graves that are scattered across Southend.
This event also saw the launch of Southend School’s Festival of Remembrance’s new Great War Legacy Trail which aims of put all of the research and stories in one place online to be shared with the whole community. For more information and read some of the inspirational stories please visit: www.ssfr.org.uk.
James said,
“I praise the work that the Southend School’s Festival of Remembrance has done. It has brought the youngest and the oldest generations to teach the stories of the brave men and women who gave their lives to protect our freedoms. It is projects like this that are vital to ensure that our war heroes are never forgotten.”
The Southend School’s Festival of Remembrance is an inclusive National Lottery funded project working with children and volunteers from all parts of the community to organises exhibitions, learning materials, online resources, and classroom sessions and aims to re-establish the importance of Remembrance with a younger generation by making their local history understandable and memorable.
The project works with older members of the community in order to education students about the role which Southend played during the First World War. It hopes that through this channel of communication the students will understand that history is not just Monarchs and Politicians but also brothers, sisters, mother and fathers.