Spectator letters: India’s forgotten soldiers, James Delingpole’s happy father, and a defence of public relations

Worth the candle

Sir: I was saddened by Charles Moore’s account of the Westminster Abbey candlelit vigil marking the centenary of the start of the first world war (The Spectator’s Notes’, 9 August). At each of the four quarters of the Abbey (representing the four corners of the British Empire), he notes, there was one big candle and one dignitary assigned to snuff it out. He was ‘niggled’ to be in the South Transept, where ‘our big-candle snuffer was Lady Warsi’.

Baroness Warsi had been chosen to represent the upwards of one million men from the Indian subcontinent who took part in the Great War. The Indian army was possibly the largest volunteer army in the world at the start of the war. Only six weeks after the war’s outbreak, Kitchener (then war secretary) brought in the first of seven ‘Indian Expeditionary Forces’ — some 130,000 men — who were rushed to the Western Front. Around 9,000 died in Flanders and France, six of whom received the Victoria Cross. Many more would later lose their lives fighting for the Empire in the Middle East and Africa.

I was born in south India and I am proud to be British — and would die for my country if called upon. I am also conscious that none of those fallen from the land of my birth are honoured, by name, on war memorials. They are remembered only on paper in archives and in the memory of their surviving loved ones. Baroness Warsi snuffed out that candle in Westminster Abbey in their honour.
Tazi Husain
Chairman, Tempsford Memorial Trust,
Bedfordshire