Round-up of Remembrance ceremonies in Redbridge

More than 180 pupils will attend the sixth Remembrance Day ceremony at Fairlop Waters Country Park.

Pupils from John Bramston, Mossford Green, Fullwood and Manford Way primary schools will be joined by Redbridge mayor Cllr Barbara White on Wednesday for two minutes of silence in memory of the pilots who died fighting in the First and Second World Wars.

David Martin, chairman of the Fairlop Heritage group, said: “This is a first – we have 186 children attending and it is brilliant.

“It would be lovely if children in Fairlop that day can talk about it when they are my age. It is a very important place with more than 4,000 years of history.”

Mr Martin, 72, has been organising the Remembrance commemoration at the airfields since 2009 and hopes to honour every one of the 18 countries which were represented there during the wars.

This year, Ireland and Russia will be honoured, with their national anthems played while representatives of both countries look on.

This will be the first Fairlop ceremony without Harold Bennett – the first pilot to fly a war mission from Fairlop aerodrome during the Second World War – who died in January, aged 93.

In December 1941, Mr Bennett, then aged 20, was shot down in the English Channel and spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war in Germany.

He was operated on following his fall and the words, “Just back, wobbly knees” – which he wrote on a photograph of him at the time – are now inscribed on the Fairlop Waters memorial to the pilots, which was built in 2013.

The commemoration is organised by the Fairlop Heritage Group and will start from 10.30am, with the silence observed at 11am.