Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our leader today is the Rev Alastair H Symington, member of the kirk session and minister emeritus of Troon old parish church and a chaplain to the Queen in Scotland.
I served as a Royal Air Force padre when I was a young adult. I was 25 when I entered the service and the four years that I spent there grew me up in a major way.
Back then we confronted two foes: the Soviet threat and the Irish Republican Army. Each was ever present, but in different ways, and each was certainly very different from the head-on confrontational conflicts that we have faced in more recent times, so there were few headlines and few support groups for servicemen. Ours was a quiet job and we got on with it.
This period, when we come towards our national remembrance acts and services, is always a time for me to look back to those days and remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in order to be prepared to meet the foe. I remember a young pilot officer who served with me at Lyneham. We were the same age and both preparing for our respective weddings. He was from up here in Scotland and we had a lot in common. He attended the station church and decided to be confirmed in the Christian faith. So he was, and his family came to Wiltshire from up here and we had the service and a celebration lunch in the mess afterwards.
Four days later he was killed on a training run. He was not a war hero—he was not mentioned in our newspapers or on television—but was killed on exercise to be prepared to do his job for real if required. His parents and fiancée were back in the mess with me, now arranging his funeral, which was held with due military honours. This month I remember him vividly still, even though that happened 40 years ago.
Our servicemen in every generation, whether in times of real conflict or in what euphemistically was called peacetime, have done this nation well in the past and do so now. It is a century since the most terrible of all wars stripped Great Britain of a generation of young adults, and in between then and now the spirit of service has never wavered.
For me, the memory is of the unsung and the unknown—and especially of a young Scotsman who looked forward to life as I did but was cut short in service. He has not grown old as I have. Age has not wearied him, nor have the years condemned, but at the going down of the sun and in the morning, I will remember him.
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