The Epitaph on the Kohima War Memorial were composed at the end of the First World War by a Cambridge graduate John Maxwell Edmonds, it reads ‘When you go home, tell them of us and say: for your tomorrow, we gave our today”. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, we have 2 minutes silence to mark the end of the First World War and to remember all those who have fought, served, and made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.
I am privileged to be Chairman of the Memorial Gates Council; the Memorial Gates were inaugurated by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2002 and every year on Commonwealth Day in March we hold a ceremony to commemorate the service and sacrifice of the 5 million volunteers who served in the First and Second World Wars from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Inscribed inside the roof of the pavilion of the Gates are the names of the Victoria and George Cross winners, 3 of whom were from my father, Lt General F.N. Bilimoria’s battalion, the 2/5th Rifles (Frontier Force).
This year on the 11th of November I spoke in a webinar organised by the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe (ZTFE), of which I am proud to be Patron, in which I spoke alongside Air Chief Marshal Fali Major PVSM, AVSM, SC, VM ADC the former Chief of the Indian Air Force and Sir Laurie Bristow KCMG, the former British Ambassador to Moscow and Afghanistan and currently President of Hughes Hall Cambridge. We discussed the uncertain world in which we live in and how important our Armed Forces are for the safety of our countries.
When her Majesty the Queen sadly passed away on the 8th of September, the whole world looked up in admiration to someone who gave 7 decades of dedicated service; she was the ultimate service leader. The motto of Sandhurst, the UK Military academy is ‘Serve to lead’. My grandfather, Brigadier N.D Bilimoria, was one of the few Indians to have been commissioned from Sandhurst in between the Frist and Second World War, he was known as a King’s Commissioned Officer. My father was commissioned from the Indian Military Academy whose motto is ‘The safety, honour and welfare of your country come first, always and every time. The honour, welfare, and comfort of the men you command come next. Your own ease, comfort and safety come last, always and every time.’ The most important responsibility of a government is the safety of its citizens and when I spoke in the debate of the 70th Anniversary of NATO in The House of Lords in 2019, I recommended to the government that we needed to increase our defence spending to 3% of GDP, given the uncertain environment globally, and sadly 3 years later Russia invaded Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022.
We must never take our Armed Forces for granted and always be grateful to them. On one of the columns of the Memorial Gates are inscribed the words of the Booker prize-winning author and poet, Ben Okri ‘Our future is greater than our past’.