In November 1917 the War Cabinet decided that, as from that moment, the families of those executed were to be informed that their loved ones had died on active service, which had, in any case, been the informal procedure on the part of some commanding officers, despite considerable opposition from the higher echelons of the army. As an example, the service record of Private Highgate, the first man to be executed in 1914, states that he had ‘died of wounds’, although his medal card states that his medals were ‘forfeited for desertion’.
Up until 1917 the Army Record Office, which was dependent on information from the front, had simply and bluntly informed families that their loved one ‘was sentenced after trial by court martial to be shot for desertion … and the sentence was duly carried out on …’
The families of the men executed were left devastated, in many cases ashamed, and sometimes ostracised within their communities. The effect on the family of Lance-Corporal Peter Goggins was clearly devastating, as his mother had a breakdown and his wife of six months simply disappeared. The wife of another executed man went to her local post office in 1916 and was met with, ‘We don’t give pensions to the widows of cowards.’ As a result she was left destitute, with a 3-year-old and a 4-month-old child to feed.
The family of Private Bertie McCubbin, of the 17th Sherwood Foresters, was understandably upset to be informed that he had been killed by a ‘gunshot’. Unbeknown to the family, he had in fact been executed on 30 July 1916, having been sentenced for cowardice, a fact his mother only discovered after one of his friends returned from the front line and told her the truth. As his niece, Mrs Doris Sloan, recalled, ‘she went insane with grief. She never received his medals and never received a pension because he was shot as a coward.’
On occasions, those who returned from the war were prepared to talk about their experiences, and in one village they spoke of the execution of a man with whom they had grown up, gone to school and gone to war. The family itself did not tell people what had happened, but all the other men who returned told their families. The son of the man who had been executed then had to endure the awful experience of going to school with the other boys, many of whom brought in the medals their fathers had won, and then proceeded to give him a hard time. The family was never able to shed the stigma and his mother had great difficulty facing the local community, but because they had no means to move away they had to live with it – for the rest of their lives.
The army raised many objections to the government’s proposal, ranging from the issue of the families of those executed receiving benefits and their loved ones’ campaign medals, to concerns that such a change would undermine military discipline. An unintended consequence of families being misinformed that a loved one had been killed in action occasionally led to other members of the man’s family joining up to seek revenge on the Germans, as recalled by Corporal Alan Bray, whose recollections were discussed earlier. He recalled that the misery of the comrades of the man executed was later made worse when they discovered that the man’s father had joined up to fight the Germans to avenge his son, when perhaps those to blame were in fact nearer to home.
It has taken many years for the names of those executed to be added to rolls of honour and memorials up and down the country because feelings still run high in communities on both sides of the debate. A case in point is Fulstow in Lincolnshire, which had never had a memorial to those killed in the First World War because in 1918 the community could not agree on the inclusion of the name of Private Charles Kirman, of the 7th Lincolnshire Regiment, who had been executed on 23 September 1917 for desertion. The issue was so contentious that Fulstow did not have an Armistice Day service until 2005, when finally agreement was reached to place a plaque in the village hall commemorating all those killed in the two world wars, including Private Kirman.
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It is hard to argue that those on the Western Front did not know of the likely consequences of committing certain offences, but there is some evidence that for many it was viewed as something that was more theoretical than a reality, as without proper communication the deterrent nature of the act was simply not getting through. Was this caused by incompetence, negligence, or a deliberate wish to cover it up?
George Coppard of the 6th Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment (Moore, 1999), according to the diaries that he had written while serving on the Western Front, felt erroneously that in 1917 the army had changed its policy and instead of executing men had instead sent the condemned on ‘dangerous patrols or raids’, although there is no evidence that this was the practice. This belief was perhaps reinforced by such men appearing in the casualty lists as killed in action. If those serving believed that the death penalty was an empty threat, then its deterrence aspect was severely undermined, meaning that some men were being executed simply for the sake of being executed.
Captain J.C. Dunn, DSO, MC and Bar, DCM (1989) was the medical officer with the 2nd Battalion of His Majesty’s 23rd Foot, The Royal Welch Fusiliers, and his diaries covering 1914–18 on the Western Front do not contain any references to executions that he either attended or might have known of. There is, though, an interesting entry for 15 October 1917 where he writes:
Plainly no action whatever is to be taken against our habitual deserter, clear as is the evidence of wilfulness if it were offered. And yet what use? To gratify a mawkish humanitarianism two or three score mean fellows are encouraged to slip away every time there is risk to their skins, so more and more average men learn to shirk with impunity; attacks fail, and losses run into untold thousands because the most dutiful of our men are not backed up.
Dunn eloquently makes the case for the use of the death penalty, and his frustration at the implications of not using it comes across very clearly. In contrast Plowman (2001) shows a different perspective on desertion: ‘I understand desertion. A man distraught determines that the last act of his life shall at least be one of his own volition; and who can say that what is commonly regarded as the limit of cowardice is not then heroic?’
In addition, Lieutenant-Colonel Meyler, who became MP for Blackpool and was subsequently to speak up in support of Ernest Thurtle, made the point: ‘You train your soldiers not to be impressed by fear, to despise fear, and then you go and bring out … this death sentence which is supposed to improve their discipline by means of fear. The whole thing is illogical.’ (Moore)
Meyler, therefore, believed that the use of the death penalty was illogical, and this was a view that Thurtle also shared when he wrote that the War Office, as a last resort, had defended the death penalty on the grounds of military necessity. He interpreted this as demonstrating that it was only the threat of being shot by men of their own side that kept the British soldier fighting, even though, as he pointed out, the death penalty had not applied to the Australian soldiers.
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There was obviously some disquiet within the British Army and among politicians, because after the war, papers detailing the proceedings of court martial where the death penalty was imposed, were deemed to be so secret that they were not to be released for 100 years. In the end, this embargo was lifted after seventy-five years, after the names of those shot had been made public in the book Shot at Dawn. As a result, it was 1990 before families, campaigners and historians had their first opportunity to examine them all. In many ways it is fortunate that they still existed, as an attempt was made in 1972 in the House of Commons by Don Concannon, MP, to have them destroyed. Fortunately, the government of the day disagreed and Geoffrey Johnson Smith, the Minister of State for Defence, stressed the need to balance protection of the individual from unnecessary pain, and recognition that they constituted important historical documents.
With those condemned to death already dealt with, it could be assumed that ‘the protection of the individual’ referred to above related to their families, curiously seeking to protect them from something that many, if not all, were already aware of. It is interesting to speculate that the protection
of the individual perhaps instead referred to those who had participated in the court martial, as their names were stated on the official papers, and the concern was more likely to be that they could have been subject to some form of retribution, both physical and legal, from the families and friends of those executed.
One of the first casualties of war is truth, as the military and the politicians seek, for a variety of reasons, to control the type and flow of information made available to the public. This is as true today as it was 100 years ago – Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction being a recent example of this, and over time some of those reasons seem more indefensible. The First World War was fought in a time when the actions of politicians were not subjected to the same degree of scrutiny that, quite rightly, is the norm today. The flow of news was strictly controlled – not the case today with twenty-four-hour news coverage and embedded journalists – and so the public remained largely unaware of the numbers of men being executed and the manner of their deaths.
As discussed earlier, a search of the battalion/regiment diaries of those executed, held at The National Archives, was striking in that they do not appear to contain any references to these events. Putkowski and Sykes (1996) wrote about the practice of ‘weeding’, or redacting as it is now called, where, prior to the release of material relating to court martial or disciplinary matters, information was removed to ‘thwart the inquisitive’. This immediately leads to the question – what was there to hide?
In the years after the war, the army was challenged on a number of occasions to reveal court papers where the death penalty had been enacted, but had argued that it could not do this because, under section 124 of the Army Act, only the condemned man was entitled to obtain a copy of the court proceedings, and as they were dead then that constituted an end to the matter. This precluded the families of those shot, the abolitionists and Members of Parliament from gaining access to the papers, and again the question has to be asked – why? What was there to hide? It is only possible to conclude that the politicians must have colluded with the military, because it would have been well within their powers to have changed this nonsensical situation.
The British Army, in the form of its senior officers, desperately wanted to retain the death penalty and argued against its abolition, and yet, despite the bullish comments of ex-officers in Parliament, it appeared in some way embarrassed and wanted to hide what went on from the civilian population. The British Army might have been further embarrassed by the fact that the executions appear to have been unregulated and subject to the proclivities of individual commanding officers.
On the basis of the evidence gathered, the abolition of the death penalty in the military was justified, and it is certainly the case that the actions of the military hierarchy and a number of politicians appear to be questionable. Furthermore, there was to be a long campaign to obtain pardons for those executed, excluding those shot for murder or mutiny.
8
THE CAMPAIGN
FOR PARDONS FOR
THOSE EXECUTED
In 1983, the Lord Chancellor’s Department had allowed Judge Anthony Babington to read the surviving courts martial papers. This resulted in his book For the Sake of Example, Capital Courts Martial 1914–18:The Truth being published in 1983. Babington was critical of both the secrecy involved and the conduct of the courts martial, but he did not name the men shot. The book was a success and demonstrated the public interest in this aspect of the First World War.
The question of whether the men who had been executed should be pardoned divided opinion as the country approached the last decade of the twentieth century, and it still does to this day. The campaign to obtain pardons really took off with the publication of Putkowski and Sykes’ book Shot at Dawn in 1989, as this was the first publication to enter the public domain that named the men who had been executed and which also called for the exoneration of ‘all 351 men executed by the British Army in the First World War’. While this book could be viewed as central to the subsequent campaign, it unwittingly made the first of two mistakes that were to provide ammunition to those opposed to the granting of pardons. The figure of 351 men included the thirty-seven men who had been found guilty of murder and had, therefore, received the same sentence that they would have in the civilian world. Those opposed to the granting of pardons seized on this and made it a central part of their case; in arguing against murderers being pardoned, they sought to stop the others being pardoned as well. The book’s second mistake will be discussed later.
The campaign for those executed to receive pardons rested on a triumvirate of three people – Julian Putkowski, Andrew Mackinlay and John Hipkin – working in harness. Mackinlay acted as the spearhead in Parliament, Hipkin campaigned outside Parliament and Putkowski provided them both with the details of those executed.
The Shot at Dawn campaign was organised by John Hipkin, a retired Newcastle school teacher, in the early 1990s to fight for pardons for the men who had been executed in the First World War, and it was to prove to be a highly effective single-issue pressure group. Hipkin himself was particularly concerned with the executions of soldiers who were underage, both at the time of their enlistment and their death, and he had been particularly moved by the case of Private Herbert Burden of the 1st South Northumberland Fusiliers. Private Burden had lied about his age and had joined up when only 16 years of age, and on 21 July 1915 he was executed, having been found guilty of desertion. At the time of his death he was still only 17 and therefore too young to be officially in his regiment. John Hipkin said, ‘I couldn’t believe it was true, but when I looked into it there were others, and this really angered me.’
For sixteen years John Hipkin and his supporters carried on with the campaign, tirelessly writing to many politicians, as well as the Queen, coordinating leaflet campaigns and public meetings. John Hipkin became a familiar figure at political and other gatherings around the country, standing silently with his protest placard; he attended meetings at home and abroad. He was arrested on a number of occasions, unjustly in the eyes of his supporters, and was nicknamed the ‘Silent Protestor’ as he stood quietly with his placard whenever and wherever he felt he could make an impact; in expectation of arrest, he always had an overnight bag with him. On 9 November 1997, his own forty-third wedding anniversary, John Hipkin was arrested for trespass when he displayed a placard in Westminster Abbey’s garden of remembrance demanding pardons for those executed. He was taken to Charing Cross police station and released after twenty minutes, but not before he had been threatened with a night in the cells if he returned to Westminster Abbey.
John Hipkin explained what motivated him to start his campaign:
I still find it very difficult to believe that the British Army would order its officers to shoot boys of 17. Boys who were patriotic enough to fight for Britain and boys that should have been sent home. That’s what I’m fighting for. I’m fighting for the boys … I was brought up to believe that officers were gentlemen. We were almost brainwashed to respect the Empire. But gentlemen do not shoot boy soldiers.
The Shot at Dawn campaigners were frustrated because some politicians – especially those who were in opposition at the time – promised help, only to change their minds after gaining power. In 1992, the Labour MP for Thurrock, Andrew Mackinlay, became interested in the campaign and wrote to the then prime minister, John Major, who replied, ‘We are able to learn from history and the experiences of earlier generations but I think it would be wrong to try and rewrite the events of the past to accord with modern philosophies and outlook.’
As the Conservative government could not be stirred into action, Mackinlay moved a Private Members Bill in 1993, which sought to ‘provide for the granting of pardons to soldiers of the British Empire forces executed during the Great War of 1914 to 1919’. Mackinlay’s bill, however, did not include provision for pardoning those executed for murder or mutiny but sought to have a tribunal consisting of three judges set up to review, report and make a rec
ommendation as to a pardon on the remaining cases. The content of the bill would have been welcomed to varying degrees by both sides of the debate, but it went further by seeking to provide for compensation to be paid at the discretion of the Secretary of State on a case-by-case basis.
John Hipkin in June 2001, shortly before the unveiling of the statue of Northumberland Fusilier Herbert Burden, who was shot at the age of 17. The statue is at the National Memorial Arboretum (see image opposite). John Hipkin holds a model of the 10ft-high sculpture.
A Private Members Bill is never likely to be passed unless it is supported by the government, and this one was to be no different, as was the case with an Early Day Motion (No.53) tabled on 23 November 1993, which asked:
That this House calls upon the Government to issue pardons to those men executed by firing squad during the First World War, many murdered at the orders of their own officers, without proper trial or defence, despite being shell shocked or otherwise mentally ill, thereby removing the unfair shame and stigma suffered by their families even to this day.
This Early Day Motion attracted eighty-one signatures, mainly from Labour MPs, and was followed by another Early Day Motion on 30 November 1994 (No.154), which asked:
That this House calls upon the Prime Minister to posthumously pardon those United Kingdom citizens executed in the First World War on orders of officers who often failed to observe the Army Act; and notes that some citizens were obscenely executed in abattoirs to the permanent disgrace of this country and its officer corps.
It attracted forty-five signatures, mainly from Labour MPs again, with no support once more from the Conservatives.
Executed at Dawn Page 12
