Peace campaigners remember war victims

Peace Group members at Hollingworth Lake on Thursday 6 August.

Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group marked the 64th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima with a ceremony at Hollingworth Lake on Thursday evening (6 August).

At their annual event commemorating all those who have died and suffered in wars, they shared readings and silence and floated flowers and lanterns on the lake.

The readings included Carol Ann Duffy’s tribute to Harry Patch, the last British survivor of the trenches who had been buried earlier in the day and Michael Rosen’s poem for the children of Gaza which the children’s laureate first read during the rally that marked the start of the Stop the Massacre: Israel out of Gaza demonstration in January this year.

Philip Gilligan, on behalf of the Peace Group, said: “Today we have tried to remember all who have suffered in wars. These include the contemporaries of Harry Patch, slaughtered in their thousands at Paschendale in 1917, the 220,000 killed by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the thousands killed in Israeli aggression against the people of Gaza earlier this year and the ever increasing numbers of troops and civilians killed in Afghanistan.

"In our remembrance of their deaths and suffering, we also remembered Harry Patch’s view that war is the ‘calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings’ and ‘not worth one life'."