“I’m so sorry. It’s been tearing me apart….. I feel so bad…. All that lying, all that treachery. It was worth it wasn’t it?”
These are the words of Alan Carr, the comedian who won Celebrity Traitors this week. 19 celebrities started out, with the Faithful trying to work out who were Traitors for a prize pot totalling £87,500. Time after time, Faithfuls were banished or murdered with players not having the benefit of the day’s edited highlights and the final episode featured a mission, lies, plotting and counter plots leading eventually to changes of heart and strategy. And so, a Traitor won and a Neuroblastoma Charity for which he has been a faithful ambassador for many years benefitted from the money and the publicity generated as truth eventually prevailed.
The word Traitor may have different resonances this Remembrance Sunday, with William Joyce, known as Lord Haw Haw, being famous for his broadcasts aimed at undermining British morale during World War II, for which he was executed as a traitor in 1946. Warrant Officer Raymond Davies Hughes, from Mold in Flintshire, was known as the Welsh Lord Haw Haw for broadcasting Nazi propaganda in Welsh to troops fighting in the Mediterranean and for other treacherous activities, although he also claimed to have inserted covert pro-Welsh sentiments into the Lord’s Prayer. The non-Welsh speakers working him were unable to detect this so Davies Hughes was only court martialled and sentenced to hard labour, being fortunate to avoid the death penalty. The double agent Arthur Owens from West Wales may also have treacherously liaised with the Nazis as well as enabling MI5 to supply the German Secret Service with false information during the war years. Double standards, deception, plotting and betrayal were played out for real, and often only came to light much later – at the time, it was often hard to discern skilled traitors alongside many who continued faithfully and loyally to obey orders, to do what they could and, in many cases, make the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.
The Duke of Wellington suggested that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton and in 1892, the poem Vitaï Lampada, meaning the torch of life, was written by Sir Henry Newbolt following the unsuccessful attempt at rescuing General Gordon and others besieged in Khartoum. Its second verse reflects this spirit as the defensive square formed by soldiers in the Sudan was ruptured:
The sand of the desert is sodden red –
Red with the wreck of the square that broke.
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England’s far and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks-
“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”
Play the game. As the poet Robert Brooke urged his friends, “Come and die. It will be great fun.” Sadly for Brooke, he was sent off to the Dardanelles where, instead of dying in hail of bullets which he thought would be heroic, he actually died of an infected mosquito bite on the way to Gallipoli. Fun it was not. Yet, as many declared at the time,“Play up, it’s just a game.”
But is it? During the game of Celebrity Traitors, one of the players declared herself to be flabbergasted by what was happening and a Traitor, Cat, declared herself to have been hoodwinked by a Faithful, Joe. Hoodwinked is an ancient word of Anglo Saxon origin, indicating use of a head covering such as a hood or scarf to blindfold a person accused of treachery or deceit. At the National Memorial Arboretum, there is a poignant image of a blindfolded young man, erected in memory of the many who were shot for cowardice, then regarded as a betrayal of duty and service. Nowadays, it’s recognised that many of these petrified men were young lads scared out of their wits and often having shell shock. Hoodwinked youngsters were often shot as an example to others who might themselves want to flee. But, as many thought, the war was at first expected to be over by Christmas 1914 and would be a bit of a lark and adventure. Play up, play the game.
That was perhaps so with some of the men whose names are on these memorials and with so many other ordinary people who, nevertheless, stepped up and made an extraordinary response to the reality of what was unfolding before them. Today is a time to remember those who died in both world wars and in the conflicts since, some of them still ongoing. Yet the battle against tyranny, treachery and deceit still continues as it did on a train from Doncaster a week ago when a man began stabbing passengers, some of whom were playing games on their iPhones and thought, at first, that a trick was being played on them for Hallowe’en. A game it was not.
Quick thinking by the driver, a passenger and a staff member who put himself in harm’s way, sustaining life-threatening injuries as he fought off the attacker armed with just a frying pan, meant that they undoubtedly saved lives, as did those in other situations: the two men who died protecting others in the Manchester Synagogue for instance; the bravery of Rob Burrows, the Rugby League player fundraising for a centre he would never live to see himself but which would benefit so many others with MND; Virginia Giuffre who courageously wrote of her experiences of being sex trafficked and named those she accused, including Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, yet who found doing this so painful that she took her own life. Many others also courageously endure lives of quieter heroism and defiance as they confront situations such as loneliness, illness, disability, mental health issues, or the struggle of the cost of living. In what do we put our faith and trust as we battle on in our own circumstances today?
“The devil will not win,” screamed the attacker on the Doncaster train. Whether we believe or not in an actual devil, the word evil is in the name and the power of evil and manipulation is alive and at work in our nations and communities today, as is the power of love and hope. Each of us may have to choose between them as we play our part in confronting the real issues before us and we may well encounter game playing, double standards and betrayal as we do, perhaps inflicted on us by others or sometimes inflicted on others by us. Will we “Play up, and play the game?” Have there been times when we’ve later realised that we’ve actually been flabbergasted or hoodwinked? Alan Carr wept as he won Celebrity Traitors, with real emotions breaking through into the game playing and one Faithful still calling another Judas, the Traitor who betrayed Jesus, long after filming ended. Yet, by betraying Jesus, Judas also began events that lead to the resurrection and hope prevailed eventually because of that betrayal and manipulation – that can be so in our own lives and communities too if there is the will for it to be so.
Hope also prevailed in Celebrity Traitors when the uncomfortable truth was revealed in the End Game of the series – just as each one of us is ultimately accountable for the sometimes uncomfortable truth about the reality of our life’s purpose and role playing. This echoes down the ages – “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women the players,” wrote Shakespeare in As you like it. What role is each of us playing and is our performance credible, given that we still have the gift of time and the possibility of change as we play the game of life itself? Liberty means that we have the choice not to behave as others or we may hope, that we can simply opt out of the struggle, become overwhelmed or choose appeasement rather than step up to the challenges being faced. But the prison service, the police, the NHS, the church, law and order, the climate, even freedom itself and so much more all seem to be under attack today – we’re constantly being told Britain is broken and systems aren’t working. Yet Newbolt’s Vitaï Lampada, the torch of life, has been trustingly passed down the generations into our hands and amidst the gloom, apathy and negativity that seem to be growing there are still many opportunities to celebrate the joy and hope of life itself and to do even small things to lighten the darkness and find a better way. This Remembrance Sunday, as we give thanks for the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War Two and for all those who laid down their lives at such cost for the sake of freedom, will our actions, whether varying at times as a Traitor or a Faithful to the legacy of the Fallen or our own standards, honour the sacrifice made at such cost and ensure it was and is worth it?
