Armistice Day 1918 - On a train in Yorkshire.

90 years go this month on 11th November 1918 at 11 O’clock the Armistice came into action and hostilities on the Western Front finally ceased.

There was a wide ranging mixture of emotions and experiences on the fateful day. From wild euphoria to solemn relief and even grief.

Over the next month I will be posting a mixture of these accounts and feelings some will be famous and well known, others more obscure. But I hope they will capture a small glimpse of what it may have been like 90 years ago.

To start with a great story of an encounter on a train to Yorkshire between a lady from the Women’s Land Army and an Australian soldier, from the excellent book “A Stillness Heard round the world by Stanley Weintraub.”


"Elinor Pike had changed trains at Sheffield, travelling from one farm to another as part of the Women’s Land Army. In her compartment was an Australian soldier, as she assumed from his bush hat. As the train sat in its siding, the soldier asked her about her uniform and confided that his sweetheart in Mildura was going to marry him as soon as the war was over.

Then it was over.

The railway carriage throbbed with the sounds of hooters and bells. “We both jumped up,” she recalled, “and shook hands very solemnly, vowing that we would remember that day, even though it was a very chance encounter.”

The train went on through Yorkshire and eventually they alighted in gentle rain. As they began to move shyly apart, the soldier turned to ask if she would mind giving him her name and address. “When I am married, if my wife has a daughter, I hope she will allow her to have your name.” Although embarrassed by the suggestion, Elinor agreed “and watched him a s he laboriously wrote with a pencil stump on a small piece of paper as we stood on the cold damp platform.”

A few years later she was astonished to receive a letter from Australia announcing the birth of her namesake, christened in advance on Armistice Day 1918."