The Princess of Wales marked Anzac Day in London on Saturday morning by placing a wreath at a memorial in Whitehall before attending a Westminster Abbey service to commemorate the war dead of Australia and New Zealand.
The wreath carried a ring of poppies and white flowers shaped like the feathers of the Prince of Wales’ crest. The note, signed by Catherine and Prince William, paid tribute to “soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.”
At Whitehall, Reverend Dr Lyndon Drake recited from The Fallen, a Royal Marines Portsmouth Road Band trumpeter sounded the last post and attendees observed a one-minute silence. Catherine then joined others in singing O God Our Help in Ages Past, while men and women in military uniforms marched off Whitehall to the commemoration and thanksgiving service at nearby Westminster Abbey.
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The day carried special weight because Anzac Day marks the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who served and died in all wars, conflicts and peacekeeping operations. The Gallipoli campaign, fought in 1915 as part of a British-led effort to defeat the Ottoman Empire and secure a naval route through the Dardanelles, ran into 1916 and ended after more than 100,000 troops had died. That battle has become central to Anzac remembrance.
Princess Anne also joined the commemorations with a dawn service at Wellington Arch in London, organised by the New Zealand and Australian high commissions. She laid a wreath as the service concluded with the national anthems of the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. Hamish Cooper and Jay Weatherill, the high commissioners for New Zealand and Australia, walked in tandem to lay their own wreaths.
Elsewhere, commemoration services were held across New Zealand, Australia and on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey, while the day was also marked in Villers-Bretonneux in the Somme region of France, where Australian units helped defend the town during World War One. The Royal Family posted on X about Anzac Day, underscoring how the tribute stretched from London to the battlefields and memorials that shaped the day’s meaning. Catherine later spoke with some of the military families after the Westminster Abbey service, bringing the formal remembrance back to the people who carry it most directly.
In London, the message was plain: the service was not only about history, but about the dead being named and the living being asked to remember them. That is why the wreath, the silence and the hymn mattered — and why the Princess of Wales’ appearance, framed by the symbolism of her commemorative outfit, fitted so closely with the day’s purpose.
