Britain town relinquishes special role in honoring fallen troops

The impromptu tributes began on a spring day in 2007 when church bell ringers stopped their weekly practice and tolled instead for two passing coffins carrying soldiers slain overseas. The rituals ended Wednesday with a sunset ceremony, as the town of Wootton Bassett said a solemn goodbye to its unique role in honoring Britain’s war dead.

The bodies of slain military personnel, which had been passing through the south England market town from nearby Lyneham air base, will now return to Brize Norton military airport close to the mortuary outside Oxford and Lyneham air base is to close this year.

During the last 41/2 years, Wootton Bassett paid tribute to 354 personnel, most killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, as 168 military corteges passed through the town.

The gatherings seemed to grow with each passing coffin, eventually involving people from surrounding towns and villages. They stood in silence to salute each cortege, which slowed to a walking pace to allow time for flowers and messages to be put on the hearse.

“People came from all over the country,” said Ann Bevis, treasurer of the veterans association the Royal British Legion, who became a de facto repatriation coordinator. “What we did here was never organized, it all just happened naturally. But by the end I was emailing over 200 people each time I heard of a new repatriation.”

The custom caught on, she said in a telephone interview, and villages and roadsides filled with people honoring the fallen all the way to the mortuary, about 30 miles northeast of Wootton Bassett.

The town said its last goodbye to a funeral cortege Aug. 18, honoring army Lt. Daniel Clack, 24, who was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.

Wootton Bassett marked the end of its self-appointed duty Wednesday with a brief but moving outdoor service conducted by Mayor Paul Heaphy and the vicar, the Rev. Canon Thomas Woodhouse, who prayed for victims of war and “the souls of all who have been repatriated through this town.”

The Union Jack was lowered, blessed and taken to the town’s St. Bartholomew and All Saints Church to be kept overnight, “as if to mark the passage of another brave soul through our town,” said Heaphy. It will be sent Thursday to a Royal Air Force memorial garden near Oxford.

The village of Carterton near Brize Norton will take over the duty of honoring fallen troops.

Percy Miles, a former mayor of Wootton Bassett and a World War II veteran, told the BBC that he hoped Carterton would do its duty.

“God help them if they don’t,” he said.

In appreciation, his town will now become known as Royal Wootton Bassett, an honor bestowed by the royal family.

Stobart is a news assistant in The Times’ London bureau.