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Oct 04, 2023

Paisley Abbey monument to reach centenary milestone this week

The Cross of Sacrifice has towered over the cloister gardens for 100 years now.

The Cross of Sacrifice has towered over the cloister gardens for 100 years now.

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The breeze will blow through the cloisters at Paisley Abbey and all will appear as it always has.

There will be no event to commemorate it but this Saturday will mark 100 years since the unveiling of a monument to the church's war-dead.

Situated within the garden of the historic site is the Cross of Sacrifice, where on Sunday, June 10, 1923, a solemn gathering took place to remember those lost to the horrors of the battlefield.

It was built to commemorate the 51 men from the Paisley Abbey congregation who were killed during the First World War.

The monument consists of an octagonal stepped base supporting a tall stone cross on which is fixed a bronze sword.

Round the first step of the base is carved Laurence Binyon's well-known stanza from "For the Fallen: "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

"Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

"At the going down of the sun and in the morning

"We will remember them."

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Paisley Abbey manager Linda Barrett told the Paisley Daily Express: "It's 100 years since the cross was erected to mark the fact that specifically from the Abbey, 51 people had died.

"But today, sadly, war, and the horrible loss of life associated with it is still ongoing and so as well as those 51 members of our congregation who were lost, the monument also stands as a reminder of that too."

The memorial was unveiled by Field Marshall Earl Haig.

On that day in 1923, Rev Dr A. Wallace Williamson, preached a sermon.

Rev Dr J. M. Simms, principal chaplain to the British Army in France during the war, offered the dedicatory prayer, and Paisley Abbey's minister, Rev Dr A. M. Maclean read the names of the 51 dead.

The names, appearing in the order in which they fell, are on the two panels to the north side of the memorial.

These panels were originally placed north and south but were repositioned after the Second World War when two new panels were added on the south giving the names of the 32 men and two women who were killed in that war.

A statement from the Abbey to mark the historic milestone reads: "In the long history of Paisley Abbey there have been many events whose anniversaries are cause for celebration.

"The centenary of the unveiling of our War Memorial is not one of these.

"It is nevertheless important that we acknowledge the date, conscious of the power that such monuments have to engender our remembrance, not of those long dead, but of the consequences of human conflict.

"When in 1922 King George V visited the sites of the battlefields of the western front, he was taken aback by the sheer number of memorials to the fallen and contemplated in a speech afterwards ‘whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war’."

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