How Remembrance Sunday has changed

Wreaths at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, 13 November 2016. Photo: Sgt Ross Tilly RAF/MOD. Crown copyright 2016. Reused under the Open Government Licence. Display may be cropped to fit. Image source · Reuse licence

Even the Sunday in Remembrance Sunday was once a break with tradition. The national service moved from Armistice Day to a Sunday during the Second World War to avoid disrupting industry. Sunday observance was formally adopted in 1946, as the ceremony came to commemorate the dead of both world wars. Later conflicts became part of it too. What now feels like an obvious feature of the national calendar began as a practical decision about when people could stop work.

The silence, the wreaths and the march past the Cenotaph give Remembrance Sunday a sense of continuity. Yet the people taking part, the conflicts being remembered and the expectations placed on the ceremony have all changed. In a chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Dark Events, Samantha Chaperon and I examined UK national newspaper coverage from 1985 to 2025 to see how those changes were debated. Some of the most revealing disputes concerned seemingly straightforward decisions about who could march, who could lay a wreath and what those gestures were understood to mean.

In 1995, plans by LGBT groups to lay a pink wreath drew opposition. In 2021, the charity Fighting With Pride took part officially at the Cenotaph, where LGBT+ veterans marched and laid a wreath for fallen comrades. The same ceremonial act carried a different public meaning when people who had previously struggled for recognition could perform it in an official capacity. For veterans whose military careers had ended because of their sexuality, participation offered a public acknowledgement of their service.

Other disputes raised questions about what a national commemoration should do. In 1998, newspapers reported objections from some veterans to a suggestion that German and Japanese veterans might join the parade. The proposal brought two expectations of remembrance into contact. A parade could honour the people who had served and died for their country, and it could offer a public gesture of reconciliation between former enemies. In 2006, criticism of Gordon Brown’s suggestion that Remembrance Sunday could become a “British Day” brought a different tension into view. The occasion already expressed something about British national identity, but explicitly making that its purpose changed what some veterans understood the day to be for.

The relationship between remembrance and present conflicts came into sharp focus in 2023. A pro-Palestinian march took place in London on Armistice Day, the day before the Remembrance Sunday service. In the coverage we examined, the timing of the march became part of the argument. Some commentators treated the remembrance weekend as a time that should be set aside from political protest. Others saw a connection between remembering the consequences of past wars and protesting against a war taking place in the present. An event held on a different day from the national service could still become part of the public debate about what remembrance meant.

That same Armistice Day, far-right counter-protesters gathered separately, and some clashed with police near the Cenotaph. Our chapter traces earlier controversies too, including reports of neo-Nazis attempting to take part in Remembrance Sunday in 2000. The two episodes show different ways far-right groups have sought a public role in remembrance, from joining the ceremony to claiming to defend the memorial. Those claims raise a question about who gets to speak for a commemoration that honours, among others, those who died fighting Nazi Germany.

Newspaper coverage tends to give disagreement more space than quiet acts of commemoration. It gives us a record of what became controversial in public and how those disputes were framed. Looking across four decades, we found that arguments about respect, participation and politics kept returning in different forms. A dispute about a wreath might be about whose service was recognised. A dispute about the parade might turn on whether the event could make room for reconciliation. Each concerned a practical decision about an event, with consequences for what that event represented.

That is what interests me about Remembrance Sunday as an events researcher. A ceremony can retain the gestures that make it recognisable while changing who gets to perform them and what they signify. The move to Sunday, the expansion of the conflicts commemorated and the formal participation of LGBT+ veterans are all part of that history. They help explain how the ceremony people recognise today came to be.

This article draws on research by James Kennell and Samantha Chaperon, published in the Routledge Handbook of Dark Events (2026). Read the chapter details and abstract.