Remembrance Sunday
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In the United Kingdom Remembrance Sunday is the Sunday nearest to 11 November - Remembrance Day, which is the anniversary of when hostilities in the First World War ended at 11 a.m in 1918.
Remembrance Sunday is marked by ceremonies at local war memorials in most towns and villages, attended by civic dignitaries, ex-servicemen and women (principally the Royal British Legion), youth organisations (e.g. Scouts and Guides), and military cadet forces. Wreaths of poppies are laid on the memorials and two-minutes' silence is held at 11am.
The national ceremony is held at the Cenotaph on Whitehall, London and since 2005 the women's memorial is also included. Wreaths are laid by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, Duke of York, the Princess Royal and the Duke of Kent; the Prime Minister, leaders of major political parties, the Foreign Secretary, the Commonwealth High Commissioners and representatives from the Army, Navy and the Royal Air Force, the Merchant Navy and Fishing Fleets and the Civilian Services. A two minutes' silence is held at 11am. This silence is marked by the firing of a field gun on Horse Guards Parade to begin and end the silence, followed by Royal Marines buglers, playing the Last Post.
The Ceremony is televised each year by the BBC, and has been annually since 1946. It is the joint-longest running live televised annual event in the world, the record being shared with the Chelsea Flower Show, and when first shown in 1937 it was the second ever live outside event to be broadcast, the first being the Coronation procession of George VI earlier that year.
The 1947 telerecording of the ceremony is the oldest surviving record of a broadcast of a live outside event.
The event consists mainly of live music, including Sir Edward Elgar's Nimrod & James Thomson's Rule Britannia.
Other members of the British Royal Family watch from the balcony of the Foreign Office.
After the Ceremony, a parade of veterans, organised by the Royal British Legion, marches past the Cenotaph, each section of which lays a wreath as it passes.
From 1919 until 1945, Remembrance ceremonies were held on Armistice Day; observance was then moved to Remembrance Sunday but since the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1995 it has become usual to hold ceremonies on both Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday.
On Remembrance Sunday in 1987, a bomb exploded by the Provisional IRA killed 11 people and injured 63 in Enniskillen (see Remembrance Day Bombing).
In 2006, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown proposed that in addition to Remembrance Sunday, a new national day to celebrate the achievements of veterans should be instituted. The "Veterans Day", to be held in the summer, would be similar to Veterans Day celebrations in the United States.
