At 8pm on Monday 4th August a service to commemorate the start of the First World War will be held at St John’s Itchen Abbas, led by the Rev Jan Brookshaw. Please come and join in, you are all welcome, whatever your faith or none.

Sir Edward Grey, who fished in the Itchen Valley and wrote about his enjoyment of the area, is credited with the saying “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time” and a national commemoration is taking place all over the UK.
Grey’s own memoirs, published in 1925, mention the remark as having been said on 3rd  August 1914:  A friend came to see me on one of the evenings of the last week — he thinks it was on Monday, August 3rd. We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office. It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking. My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”
More information about LIGHTS OUT can be found at http://www.1418now.org.uk/lights-out/