Armistice Day 1918 - in Aberdeen & Belfast.

There was of course all over Great Britain great rejoicing and celebrating as these two accounts from the book “A Stillness Heard round the world by Stanley Weintraub.” Give witness.

The first describes the celebrations in Aberdeen and the second Belfast.

"Winifred Deans, a student at the University of Aberdeen, remembered the Scot restraint giving way to jubilation, which first arose from church bells and ships in the harbour. Then came the students, who tied up Union Street with an impromptu, piper-led procession. “Ignoring tramcars and other vehicles. There was tremendous excitement; newsboys were shouting, apprentices from the shipyards were dashing about, all sorts of people had abandoned their work and were out on the pavements shouting and hurrahing. I never expected to see such a stir in Aberdeen, where people are on the whole staid and undemonstrative…In the days that followed I have often thought of Wordsworth’s lines, written in the early days of the French Revolution: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive…..”

"In Newtonards, near Belfast in Northern Ireland, a lieutenant who had served in the Salonika campaign was training a unit of Royal Dublin Fusiliers when the colonel paraded the troops at midday to announce the Armistice. The men were given a few pounds in advance pay and told to report to the camp next morning. Five hundred empited their barracks and “most of the lads were by sundown well and truly sizzled. I myself with two other subalterns and a Scots captain of the Cameron Highlanders complete with kilt safety reached the local railway station where we took the train to Belfast, all of us in fine fettle. We were met by hoards of Mill girls, who lay in wait for the train. They laid hands on us and produced a motor car of sorts, crammed three of us inside, placing the Scotsman astride the bonnet with is kilt pinned under his chin. The car was then pushed by theses harridans to the local Unionist Club where we were decanted, being welcomed by such members as could still stand up.” The next morning he found himself awakened “by a very majestic and disapproving butler who revived me sufficiently to go downstairs to breakfast with my host, who I didn’t know from Adam. He and his good lady treated me as one of their family.”"