To love, honour and Obama

Barack Obama's decision to retake his presidential oath just to be on the safe side, after one word was fluffed during the swearing in ceremony, demonstrates the importance we still place on the spoken promise.

Oath-taking was serious stuff in medieval times and its significance was revived within Germany's Third Reich when the oath of loyalty to Hitler probably ensured that the Second World War lasted a little bit longer than it should have done.

I can only recall taking two oaths in my life time. The first was in the Boy Scouts when I promised to do my duty for God and the Queen.

The second was my marriage vows. Gill, my wife, was a bit of a thespian in her younger days, acting with Bradford University Theatre Group and with Bradford Playhouse. She thought it would be a good idea that we learned our marriage lines rather than repeat the vicar's words.

The vicar wasn't too enthusiastic, having performed hundreds of marriages and knowing how nervous people can be on these occasions. Neither was I as I can't even remember a one-line knock knock joke.

But Gill was going to get her way and we did recite our vows to each other, word perfect. I remember that beforehand there was a little bit of debate about the word "obey." It was becoming fashionable for women to leave it out, influenced by the feminist argument that promising to obey a husband (when he makes no such promise) reduced women to the status of chattels. Funnily enough they never object to the man's promise to "worship" his missus, never mind giving her all his "worldly goods" (in my case, a beat up old Saab).

The vicar was a traditionalist and made some neat point that I can't remember, so we left it in, much to the disgust of some of her friends. And I've been obeying her ever since.

Thiepval Monument and the Somme

Returning from a weekend in Normandy we called at the Thiepval monument to the 72,000 British dead who died with no known grave on the Somme in the First World War (1914-18).

Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, it towers over the battlefield and today has an interpretation centre to put the battle in context for new generations of visitors.

The list of names is staggering. Imagine your telephone directory pasted page by page on a wall. I counted three Donkins: a Thomas Donkin from Durham, a Harry Donkin from East Yorkshire, and a Stanley Donkin from Cornwall, none related to me as far as I know.

White feather

Both of my grandfathers were in the artillery. Grandad Donkin did not join the Army until he was conscripted in 1917. I'm quite proud of him for sticking it out when there was tremendous pressure to volunteer. It's probably the reason I exist. Young women would hand white feathers to young men they saw in civilian clothes. I wonder if that ever happened to my grandad? If so, I wonder how he handled it?

At Fricourt we visited one of the perfectly maintained British cemeteries. Almost all those buried there were members of the West Yorkshire Regiment and all were killed on July 1, the first day of the Somme when the British and Commonwealth losses ran to almost 20,000 with another 40,000 wounded. That's a football crowd, gone in a single day.

Mass Graves

There are more than a thousand British WWI graveyards in France but very few German graveyards. No more than a fifth of the German dead are buried there in marked graves. Some were removed after the first war and others after the Second World War when the dead were either repatriated or deposited in mass graves.

When I first went to the Somme nearly 30 years ago there were few visitors. Almost every farm you drove past had its stack of old munitions ploughed up from the fields. Yesterday at the Lochnager site where a large mine was exploded (60,000 pounds of ammonol completely destroyed a German redoubt) there was a young chap selling brass shell casings and old nose cones as mementos. Nearby there is the Old Blighty Cafe.

A good way to visit the Somme is to start from Albert, then head towards Bapaume on the D929 which intersects the battlefield. You can see the ridge line in which the Germans had dug their trenches, supported by deep underground shelters that enabled enough of their troops to survive an otherwise devastating bombardment.

Withering fire

Once the shelling had finished, whistles blew and the British troops, many from the same streets and villages, climbed their ladders and set out across no-mans land. Meanwhile the German defenders were rushing up from their bunkers to reach their firing positions from where they were able to rake the khaki lines of slowly advancing troops with withering fire.

One of them was the father of an old friend of mine, the late Godfrey Golzen. As a machine gunner, Godfrey's father must have mown down hundreds of the advancing British. Later he would lose an arm before returning to his home town of Berlin at the end of the war.

Holocaust survivor

Mr Golzen senior was a well respected Justice of the Peace who lived peacefully in Berlin with his family, including Godfrey, throughout the Second World War. What makes this remarkable is that he was a Jew, one of about 200 in Berlin who avoided transportation and survived the Holocaust.

Godfrey explained that his family were assimilated and felt as German as any other Berliner. Not that that would have made any difference to the Nazis; but his neighbours and friends stayed loyal throughout the war. Another thing worth noting is his family's attitude to Eastern European Jews. "They weren't liked by those who had assimilated as we had done," said Godfrey.

Footpath idea

The WWI sites are so important to Europe's heritage that they should be made more accessible. I would like to see a Front line footpath that follows the trench system at a certain date - say the morning of July 1 1916 - from it's beginning on the coast to the border with Switzerland.

Very little of the trench system has been preserved but a modern footpath would enable visitors to appreciate the enormity of this terrible war in a way that differs from simply turning up to a site in the car and reading a plaque. The access would need to be purchased but that should be possible. The farmers get enough as it is in EU subsidies. Why not attach a few conditions for those whose farms cross the battlefields?

Postcript: Since writing this I have been contacted by Thomas Golzen, Godfrey's son, who points out some innacuracies. I could edit them in the text but prefer to publish his note instead because it shows how stories can get mangled even given the best intentions of the author. But I also think it gives a different perspective on events where certain stereotypes have emerged. I wonder what the Nazi hierarchy would or could have said to the Jewish German highly decorated war hero?

Here is Thomas's note:

I can see from your blog that you knew my dad, Godfrey, and that you seem to have heard some family history. It's very strange for me to think that I'm only a generation or two away from all that. Actually, it was my gandmother's sister Susi who survived the war in Berlin as a Jew. My dad's family (father, mother and younger sister) managed to escape to Switzerland in 1939 and made their way to the UK from there. I also seem to remember being told that my grandfather had been mostly up against the French during the Somme. His recollection of the first day was climbing out of the dugouts after a week's bombardment with their machine guns and shooting all the attacking troops.

I never met him - he died before I was born - but I got the impression that he rather enjoyed the war. As a Jew, it gave him the chance to be treated on an equal footing with ethnic Germans, and to show them that Jews could be good soldiers too. He was highly decorated before he was invalided out.

A plea for lighter evenings

The one and only leader I ever wrote for the FT was in favour of daylight saving. I thought about that while walking the dog this evening in the park. It was only about 5 pm and kids were still coming home from school yet it could have been the middle of the night.

Some people need to get up early but what's wrong with getting up in the dark? I think that more light is wasted by more people at the start of the day during winter than is saved at the end.

I can just about recall the UK experiment with darker winter mornings between 1968 and 1971 when British clocks were harmonised with those of other Western European countries.

For those three years, the UK had British Summer Time - re-named British Standard Time - all year. The Government dropped the experiment after pressure from the construction industry, farmers and politicians in Scotland who complained about a rise in road accidents during the dark mornings.

The number of early day accidents in Scotland did indeed rise. But a study carried out some years ago by the Policy Studies Institute showed that the fall in the number of road accidents in evenings during the period of year-round BST more than compensated for the rise at the other end of the day.

The study calculated that year-round BST would result in 600 fewer deaths and serious injuries a year resulting from road accidents.

Meyer Hillman, who carried out that study in 1988, said something telling at the time: "The death of a child on a dark morning in Scotland can prove very emotive evidence for retaining Greenwich Mean Time. Unfortunately lives that are not lost as a result of a change in hours do not make headlines."

There were other economic benefits too in fuel savings and extra income for leisure industries. I think year-round BST is a good idea. But we should go further and have double summer time in the lighter months as they did during the Second World War.

If lighter evenings make more economic sense, if they make life more pleasant for most of us, then why doesn't the Government make the change and leave it like that? The answer, I'm sad to say, is that there is no political will for this anywhere. It's a move that is difficult to explain to everyone, people generally are suspicious of change, and this kind of initiative does not win votes.

If only countries ran on common sense.

Here's an interesting US-based site on daylight saving