Silence

On May 8, 1919, Australian journalist Edward George Honey (1885–1922) suggested, in a letter to a London newspaper, the idea of setting aside five minutes of silence to commemorate the fallen in the Great War. Using the pen name Warren Foster, Honey hoped to influence the ceremonies then in the planning for the first anniversary of the Armistice that signaled the end of the war on November 11, 1918: the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”