Land Army, Charity Pull & Rosary Crusade – 2005

Land Army, Charity Pull & Rosary Crusade: Saturday 8th October 2005 was a day of considerable variety as well as some tricky travelling around London for me, beginning in Whitehall with the women of the Land Army, rushing to Lewisham for a charity event organised by the Mayor and then back to Westminster Cathedral for a religions procession.


Commemoration of the Women’s Land Army – Cenotaph, Whitehall

Land Army, Charity Pull & Rosary Crusade

During the Second World War many women joined the Women’s Land Army. First set up in 1917 during World War One, it was reformed in June 1939 when World War Two seemed inevitable, before the war actually began at the start of September.

Land Army, Charity Pull & Rosary Crusade

During WW2, over 200,000 Land Girls worked in the Women’s Land Army, playing a crucial role in feeding the nation at war – and it continued for some years after the war ended in 1945, finally ending in November 1950.

Land Army, Charity Pull & Rosary Crusade

For many joining up was a healthy alternative to working in munitions or joining the other services, less regimented and offering a wide range of activities. Few had any previous experience in agriculture, but “they ploughed, grew produce, milked cows, caught rats, drove tractors – and much more.”

Land Army, Charity Pull & Rosary Crusade

But the war had ended 50 years earlier and they were now in their 70s and 80s when I met them opposite the memorial to the Women Of The Second World War which had recently been unveiled near the Cenotaph.

Some I talked to had been at the unveiling of that memorial and were extremely scathing about it and had been and were disappointed that the Queen had not spoken at all at the event.

They were a sprightly and feisty group despite their age. A few had come in 1940s dress but most wore some of their uniform often with a number of medals. They marched to the Cenotaph where wreaths were laid and a bugler sounded ‘The Last Post’. After which I rushed away to Charing Cross to catch a train as the event had run late.

More pictures


Lewisham: Mayor’s Charity Vehicle Pull

Every year like most Mayors the Mayor of Lewisham has a charity appeal and for some years a Charity Vehicle Pull from Downham to Lewisham was organised as a way of raising money for this.

I’d got a later train than I’d hoped, so sat on the train trying to work out where the vehicle pull would be by the time the train arrived in the area. I left the train at Ladywell and rushed from the station to Lewisham High Street and fortunately found my guess had been correct.

I took a few pictures – there isn’t a huge lot you can do with an event like this – and then got on the top floor of a bus which was travelling along the open lane inside the event, hoping to overtake them. It would have worked, but for an illegally parked vehicle that was blocking the lane.”


Rosary Crusade of Reparation – Westminster Cathedral

At Lewisham Station I’d missed the Victoria train, and had to run under the subway to jump on a Charing Cross service just as the doors were closing, changing at Waterloo East to Southwark Station on the Jubilee line, then at Green Park to the Victoria line to Victoria.

I hurried the short distance from Victoria Station to Westminster Cathedral arriving just at the right time for the start of the Rosary Crusade of Reparation.

The Rosary Cruade had started in Vienna in 1947, with a series of processions with the statue of ‘Our Lady of Fatima’.

The Virgin Mary appeared to Portuguese children at Fatima in 1917 and had asked for prayers and penance to avoid further wars and achieve world peace. This call was renewed in the Rosary Crusade by Father Petrus Pavlicek following a vision during his visit to a Marian shrine in 1946.

The processions became an annual event, held on or around 12th Sept, the Feast of The Name of Mary (which celebrated the defeat of Turkish armies surrounding Vienna in 1683), and soon spread to other countries.

When Russian troops left Austria in 1955, many Austrian catholics ascribed this to their prayers in the rosary crusade.

More pictures on My London Diary.


FlickrFacebookMy London DiaryHull PhotosLea ValleyParis
London’s Industrial HeritageLondon Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.


11 October 2008

It was the start of the final 100 days of the Bush adminstration and the ‘Hands off Iraqi Oil’ coalition whose members included Corporate Watch, Iraq Occupation Focus, Jubilee Iraq, PLATFORM, Voices UK, and War on Want and was supported by the Stop the War Coalition and others had come to Shell’s UK headquarters at Waterloo to protest against plans by Britain and the USA for Iraq to hand over most of the country’s oil reserves to foreign companies, particularly Shell and BP.

Iraq had nationalised its oil by 1972, and it provided 95% of its government income. Many had seen the invasion of Iraq by the US and UK (along with Australia and Poland) as largely driven by the desire to gain control of Iraq’s huge oil reserves and the US had engaged consultants to help it write a new oil law which it got the Iraqi cabinet to approive in 2007 which would give foreign oil companies – including Shell and BP, long-term contracts within a safe legal framework. But large-scale popular opposition meant the Iraqi parliament failed to approve the new law. But in June 2008, the Iraqi Oil Ministry went ahead with short-term no-bid contracts to the major foreign oil companies – including Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, Total and Chevron and later these and other contracts were made more favourable to the oil companies.

After the protest at Shell’s offices the protesters marched to protest outside the BP HQ in St James’s Square and then to the US Embassy, and I left to cover the London Freedom not fear 2008 event outside New Scotland Yard. Similar protests were taking place in over 20 countries to demonstrate against excessive surveillance by governments and businesses, organised by a broad movement of campaigners and organizations.

The London event highlighted the restrictions of the right to demonstrate under the Labour government’s The Serious Organized Crime and Police Act 2005, (SOCPA),, the intimidatory use of photography by police Forward Intelligence squads (FIT), the proposed introduction of ID cards, the increasing centralisation of personal data held by government, including the DNA database held by police, the incredible growth in surveillance cameras, ‘terrorist’ legislation and other measures which have affected our individual freedom and human rights.

For something completely different I walked a quarter of a mile down Victoria Street to Westminster Cathedral where people were assembling for the Rosary Crusade of Reparation, one of the larger walks of public witness by Catholics in London.

This tradition began in Austria in 1947 with the roasary campaign begun by a priest praying for his country to be freed from the communist occupiers. The first annual parade with the statue of Our Lady of Fatima took place in 1948 in Vienna on the feast of the Name of Mary, Sept 12, which had been established by Pope Innocent XI in 1683 when Turkish invaders surrounding Vienna were defeated by Christian armies who had prayed to the Blessed Virgin.

As the procession to a service at Brompton Oratory began I walked back up Victoria St to Parliament Square, where a number of other small protests were in evidence. All over the centre of London there were people giving out leaflets about the growing problems faced by Tamils in Sri Lanka, where they allege a program of ethnic cleansing is being carried out by the government. International media are banned from the Tamil areas of the country and NGOs have been ordered out of some areas, so there are few reports of the war. Worse was to come and in 2009 in the final stages of the war conservative estimates are that 70,000 civilians were killed in the the Mullivaikkal massacre.

Others in the square were protesting against the UK’s scandalous treatment of asylum seekers and calling for the asylum detention centres to be closed down.

Brian Haw was still there, and I wrote:

Facing Parliament, Brian Haw‘s peace protest continues – he has been there for almost 2700 days – over 7 years – and it will soon be his 60th birthday. Brian says that now the police seem to have largely abandoned attempts to get rid of him legally there have been a number of odd attacks against him and others in the square – which the police have ignored. I took some time talking to a man who smelt of alcohol, was talking nonsense and acting unpredictably – and who then went and started to insult Brian. One of the other demonstrators stood between him and Brian who was filming him. I put down my bag as I took photographs in case I needed to step in and help, but fortunately he eventually moved away.

There were others protesting in Parliament Square, including one man who asked me to take his picture. He told me his name was Danny and that he had been there on hunger strike for two weeks, protesting over his failure to get his case investigated. He claimed to have been abused by police and social services following an incident in which as a seven year old child in Llanelli he was implicated in the death of a baby brother. I was unable to find any more information about his case.

Finally I saw a group of people walking past holding leafelts with the the word CHANGE on them and rushed after them to find they were Obama supporters hoping to persuade Americans they met to register and vote in the election. It was time for me to go home.

Parliament Square
Rosary Crusade of Reparation
Freedom not Fear 2008
Bush & Cheney’s Iraq Oil Grab