In November 2008, he turned out again with two other veterans, Harry Patch and Bill Stone, at the cenotaph; Stone died in January.
By the start of the 21st century it became evident that the soft stone of the Cenotaph was deteriorating badly as a result of water damage and frost.
After the First World War, a quarry was opened by The Crown Estate to provide stone for the Cenotaph in Whitehall and half a million gravestones for war cemeteries, and after the Second World War hundreds of thousands of gravestones were hewn for soldiers who had fallen on the Western Front.
The Southampton Cenotaph is a stone memorial at Watts Park in Southampton, England, originally dedicated to the casualties of the First World War.
The focus of grief at the 1919 anniversary of the armistice had been Sir Edwin Lutyens's temporary plaster Cenotaph in Whitehall, the permanent stone version of which was unveiled by the king, en route to the Abbey.
After World War I Lutyens became architect to the Imperial War Graves Commission, for which he designed the Cenotaph, London (1919 20); the Great War Stone (1919); and military cemeteries in France.
It was eventually replaced in 1901 by the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, a more permanent stone building by the architect Frank Petre, though the cenotaph by Mountfort was preserved.
Facing the Cenotaph, Whitfield designed a recessed entrance in stone and yellow brick with a composition of bay windows and turrets that evokes, but at no point directly copies, Tudor precedent.
The monument, a plain stone structure whose form was in part derived from Edwin Lutyens's Cenotaph, stood on the riverside walkway at some distance from the gallery and lacked any commemoration or dedication whatsoever.
Last month, the People's History Museum in Manchester, home to an archive of Labour-party history, made tentative inquiries into acquiring the stone for its collection – which includes the coat Michael Foot wore at the cenotaph in 1981 – but everybody they spoke to denied any knowledge of the Ed Stone's fate.
