Remembering fallen heroes in Liverpool, Knowsley, Wirral and Sefton

Nov 9 2009 Liverpool Daily Post

MERSEYSIDE united to pay respects to our fallen war dead yesterday.

Services were held across the region to mark Remembrance Sunday 70 years on from the start of World War II.

Thousands lined streets under canvasses of umbrellas as present day wars prompted large crowds to turn out.

In Liverpool, the Lord Mayor Mike Storey led a huge service by the war memorial on St George’s plateau.

The city also saw the end of a 40-year era as Merseyside’s leading member of the Royal British Legion, Colonel J Graeme Bryson, performed the Act of Remembrance for the last time. He helped organise Liverpool’s first Remembrance Service after the end of the Second World War.

There were also services in Hamilton Square, Birkenhead, and outside the public library in Upton, Wirral, at Prescot Parish Church, Huyton war memorial and Kirkby Municipal Buildings in Knowsley and at the war memorial, at the Five Lamps in Waterloo, and the war memorial, King's Gardens, in Bootle, Sefton.

The Birkenhead service was touched by particular sadness, coming just days after Corporal Steven Boote was killed, one of the five soldiers gunned down by a rogue Afghan policeman.

Col Bryson, 96, of Formby, served as deputy president of the Merseyside branch of the British Legion under Lord Sefton and took over as president in 1969.

The former High Court judge, who served with the 89th Field Brigade based on Aigburth Road, said: “I would have liked to have gone on doing the services but I have to sit for most of the proceedings. My mobility was poor today.”

But he added: “I thought it was one of the very best services I’ve been to.

“I think that the national situation, with Afghanistan – I don’t think people are in favour of it but they support those who take part in it because they are representing the country.”

Hundreds of service personnel filled the parade ground at St George’s Hall as ex-soldiers swelled the crowds.

But families, young couples and children also turned out to remember.

After the battalions had marched off the plateau, there was an impromptu gathering of servicemen and women in St John’s Gardens at the back of the hall where the Lord Mayor planted the first memorial cross on Friday.

Yesterday, Lance sergeant Kyle Naylor, an Irish Guard from Netherley, was also there.