The Noon Gun and the Two-Minute Silence

Read the episode (Narration script)

Today is the eleventh of November. At eleven o'clock this morning, in Britain, Canada, Australia and a good many other countries, people stop where they are and stand without speaking for two minutes. The custom is older than the armistice it marks, and it began a long way from Europe. Welcome to Hidden History. Take a break from the modern world and journey into Cape Town, South Africa, in May of 1918, a city where a cannon went off at noon.

The cannon came first. On Signal Hill, above the harbor, sat a pair of old muzzle-loading naval guns, cast in England in 1794. A midday shot had been fired in Cape Town since 1806, by tradition so that ships' officers in the bay could check their clocks. By 1918 it was simply the sound of noon, loud enough to reach every street in town.

That May, which is autumn at the Cape, the news was bad. The German army had opened its great spring offensive in France, and the casualty lists in the papers ran long.

The mayor was Harry Hands, a fifty-seven-year-old accountant, English-born, who had spent the war chairing recruiting committees. On the twentieth of April he and his wife, Aletta, received a telegram. Their eldest son, Reginald, had died of wounds in France. He was twenty-nine, a lawyer who had played rugby for England and cricket for South Africa.

Not long afterward, as the story is told in Cape Town, Hands was sitting in his office under the City Hall clock tower with a friend, a councillor named Robert Brydone. Brydone was an Edinburgh-born insurance man. Early in the war, at a recruiting meeting, a man in the crowd had called out, "You will forget us as soon as we are gone," and Brydone had promised that the city would not. Now the two men heard the gun go off on Signal Hill, and Brydone suggested they use it.

On Monday the thirteenth of May, a notice from the mayor ran in the Cape Times under the heading "Pause for three minutes." Hands did not claim to have invented anything. Some towns in the country, he wrote, had lately taken to halting at midday for a minute or two of silent prayer for the men at the front, an excellent example to copy. Starting the next day, at the sound of the midday gun, every tram would stop. Pedestrians were asked to "remain standing wherever they may be," and everyone, "however engaged," to leave off work and keep silent.

The next day at noon the gun fired, and Adderley Street, the main street of the city, stopped. Trams, taxis and private cars halted where they were. People on the pavements stood still, and most of the men took off their hats. In shops and offices, work stopped. On a balcony at the corner of Adderley and Darling Streets, a bugler named Biccard played the Last Post, with the mayor standing bareheaded nearby. Then came three minutes of nothing at all. Then the bugle again, sounding Reveille, and the trams moved off.

A reporter noticed a young woman dressed in black who had stopped on the pavement and was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. "One could not but wonder," he wrote, "what personal interest she had in the act of remembrance."

Hands was moved by what he saw. He was also a practical man, and he decided that three minutes was too long. A notice in the Cape Argus explained that the pause would keep its hold on people better at two. So the following noon it was two minutes, and two minutes it stayed, day after day through the rest of the war. In time the two were given separate jobs: one minute of thanks for those who had come through alive, and one for those who had not.

It might have remained the wartime habit of one port city, except for a man who had stood in it.

Sir Percy FitzPatrick was among the best-known South Africans of his day, a former ox-wagon driver and mining man who had written a much-loved book about his dog, Jock of the Bushveld. His eldest son, Nugent, an artillery major, had been killed by a shell in France in December 1917.

In 1919, with the war over, FitzPatrick wrote a memorandum and sent it to a friend in the British cabinet, Lord Milner. He described what happened in Cape Town when the gun fired. "Silence, complete and arresting, closed upon the city," he wrote, "the moving and awe-inspiring silence of a great Cathedral, where the smallest sound must seem a sacrilege." He proposed that the whole British Empire do the same once a year, on the anniversary of the armistice. And he was particular about the tone. "It is not in mourning, but in greeting, that we should salute them on that day."

Milner passed it to the palace. King George the Fifth liked it, and the cabinet approved it on the fifth of November. On the seventh, four days before the anniversary, the newspapers carried a message from the King. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, he asked, "all work, all sound, and all locomotion should cease" for "the brief space of two minutes." He added, hopefully, "No elaborate organisation appears to be necessary."

None was. On four days' notice, on the eleventh of November, 1919, it worked. In the big towns the signal was a maroon, a kind of loud signal rocket. In villages it was the church bell. The Spectator reported that every movement came to a sudden stop, that men removed their hats, soldiers stood at attention, and women bowed their heads. Trains halted on the lines. Ships at sea kept it.

FitzPatrick was traveling when he read about it. "I was so stunned by the news," he said later, "that I could not leave the hotel." A few months on, a letter came from the palace. The King, it said, "ever gratefully remembers" that the idea was his.

He was not the only one who had it. An Australian journalist in London, Edward Honey, had written to a newspaper in May of 1919 asking for five silent minutes, and Australia remembers him for it. Churches had kept silences for years. What Cape Town added was a whole city doing it at once, on a signal everybody could hear, and a mayor's good sense about how long people can stand still.

The gun on Signal Hill still fires at noon. Most days, it just means lunchtime.

Thanks for listening to Hidden History.