Edward George Honey Proposes a Silence for the Fallen (1919)

May 8, 1919

On May 8, 1919, an Australian journalist named Edward George Honey wrote a letter to a London newspaper proposing that the British Empire mark the anniversary of the Armistice with a period of silence in honor of the war dead. His suggestion, made six months after the guns fell silent on the Western Front, planted the seed for what would become the Two-Minute Silence, one of the most enduring rituals of remembrance in the English-speaking world.

A Soldier Turned Journalist

Edward George Honey was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1885 and later moved to Britain, where he built a career in journalism. During the First World War he served in the ranks of the British Army, an experience that placed him directly among the men whose sacrifice he would later seek to commemorate. Like millions of others, Honey lived through the final, grinding months of the conflict and witnessed the sudden, almost disorienting arrival of peace when the Armistice took effect at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918. In the months that followed, Britain and its Empire grappled with how to properly honor the more than one million Commonwealth dead, and public discussion turned toward creating lasting rituals of memory. Honey, working as a journalist in London, was among those who believed that words and monuments alone were insufficient. He wanted a shared, disciplined act of quiet reflection that ordinary people across the Empire could perform together each year, a moment when daily life would visibly pause in deference to those who had not returned. It was against this backdrop of raw, recent grief and civic uncertainty about commemoration that Honey put pen to paper in the spring of 1919, setting out an idea that was strikingly simple yet emotionally powerful.

The Letter of May 8, 1919

On May 8, 1919, Honey's letter appeared in a London newspaper, proposing that the anniversary of the Armistice be marked by five minutes of complete silence throughout the British Empire. He argued that such a pause, however brief, would allow the living to reflect fully on the scale of the sacrifice made by soldiers, sailors, and airmen during the war, and would offer a more meaningful tribute than parades or speeches alone. Honey envisioned the silence as a unifying act, one that factories, offices, streets, and homes could all observe simultaneously, halting the ordinary rhythms of commerce and conversation for a shared act of remembrance. At the time, his proposal did not immediately spark official action, and it drew relatively modest public attention compared to the scale of its eventual influence. Yet the idea resonated with a public still searching for ways to process enormous collective loss, and it circulated among those thinking about how the first anniversary of the Armistice, coming that November, should be observed. Historians now regard Honey's letter as the earliest known public proposal for what would become a formal silence, predating by several months the more famous initiative of South African statesman Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, whose separate suggestion reached King George V's advisers directly in the autumn of 1919.

From Proposal to Royal Proclamation

In late October and early November 1919, Sir Percy Fitzpatrick's proposal for a silence reached the Palace through official channels, and King George V issued a proclamation calling on the people of the Empire to observe a suspension of all activities for two minutes at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1919, the first anniversary of the Armistice. That silence was observed with remarkable solemnity across Britain and the Commonwealth, with traffic halting, factories stopping, and crowds standing motionless in city streets. Because Fitzpatrick's proposal moved through official government correspondence, he received most of the immediate credit, while Honey's earlier letter faded from public memory for decades. Honey himself did not live to see his idea firmly credited to him; he died in London in 1922 at the age of 37. Later historical research, however, established that Honey's May 1919 letter predated Fitzpatrick's proposal, and he has since been recognized as a co-originator, if not the first originator, of the Two-Minute Silence tradition. Commemorations of Honey's contribution have grown in Australia, including a laneway named in his honor in Melbourne. Today, the Two-Minute Silence remains a fixture of Remembrance Day and Armistice Day observances each November 11, a quiet ritual tracing its roots to a grieving journalist's letter written in the spring of 1919.