The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  As early as 1936 plans were mooted by the government to organise volunteer battalions consisting of ‘ex-servicemen capable of guarding vulnerable parts of Britain in the event of war’. Nothing further was done about this until October 1939, when Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, asked the Home Secretary: ‘Why do we not form a Home Guard of half a million men over forty?’ This would naturally include ‘many [who] served in the last war’, which would in turn ensure that younger men were reserved for service abroad. The period from the outbreak of war in September 1939 until the German invasion of Belgium and Holland in May 1940 was dubbed the Phoney War because nothing much seemed to be happening. It looked rather different, of course, in Poland, where the Germans were very busy indeed, but the initial fears for Britain’s national security were temporarily allayed. Although the Luftwaffe had attacked British warships in Scotland, the predicted air raids on major cities had not materialised and children who had been evacuated to the comparative safety of the countryside began to trickle back to their urban homes. Once the Germans had occupied the Low Countries, however, it became clear that their next objective was to march into France. The air of phoniness rapidly evaporated and the threat of invasion in Britain became far more pressing. The Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, made a broadcast on BBC radio on 14 May in which he announced the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers, asking for those between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five not already in military service to go to their local police station and sign up for home defence duties. Some people did so even before the broadcast had finished, and the appeal brought around 250,000 volunteers within the week. By the end of July 1,500,000 people had reported for duty. One of the suggested requirements for joining this force was ‘a knowledge of firearms’, which could of course have suggested that poachers and gamekeepers would be of use (two sixteen-year-old volunteers said they had ‘knowledge of the use of an air-gun’); but it was evident that Eden as much as Churchill was hoping that those who had seen service in the trenches would come forward.

  And come forward they did. ‘The rally to Mr Eden’s call was proving worthy of the days of Queen Elizabeth or the Napoleonic Wars, and just as natural,’ wrote Charles Graves, father of the war poet Robert Graves, in his account of The Home Guard of Britain, published in 1943. ‘Hundreds and thousands of men had been waiting patiently for a chance to do something though they were too old for active service.’ Quite what these men were to do once they had volunteered remained something of a mystery. A major problem was lack of equipment, and the image of members of the Local Defence Volunteers still in civilian clothing reporting for duty armed with pitchforks is not entirely a caricature. Even the War Office was obliged to admit in an official pamphlet published in June 1940 that the LDV was ‘neither trained nor equipped to offer strong prolonged resistance to highly trained German troops’. It was felt that Volunteers would ‘therefore best fulfil their role by observation, by the rapid transmission of information, and by confining the enemy’s activities. They will also act as guards at places of tactical or industrial importance.’ Reports of units which had a mere 190 rifles for 15,000 men were not unusual, and there was an element of pragmatism in a government memorandum that declared that the LDV was ‘not designed for serious offensive fighting’. To those who had experienced front-line action on the Western Front and had volunteered to serve their country again, this seemed a waste of resources, and some former officers made a nuisance of themselves by lobbying the War Office or writing to the press demanding proper equipment and training. Rifles were hastily imported from Canada and America, but in the summer of the rout at Dunkirk, Britain’s Local Defence Volunteers were still hopelessly short of arms.

  Churchill, by now Prime Minister, had taken a personal interest in the LDV, and in a radio broadcast on 14 July 1940 he emphasised the vital role they would play in the event of an invasion. His preferred name, the Home Guard, was now adopted, and he insisted that its members had ‘the strongest desire to attack and come to close quarters with the enemy, wherever he may appear’. Keenness was not always matched by competence, and the popular and enduring image of the Home Guard is the one provided by the BBC television comedy series Dad’s Army (broadcast 1968–77), in which the very English coastal town of Walmington-on-Sea relies upon a motley assortment of non-combatants to keep it safe. Several members of Walmington-on-Sea’s troop are veterans not only of the First World War but of even earlier conflicts. Corporal Jones had fought in Sudan in the 1890s, and seen action on the Northwest Frontier and in the Boer War as well as in the trenches. He is supposedly in his early seventies and was based on a genuine veteran of the Battle of Omdurman (1898) with whom one of the series’ writers, Jim Perry, served in the Watford Home Guard. The doddering Jones’s famous catch phrase, ‘They don’t like it up ’em’, was used by this old professional when teaching Perry and his fellow volunteers bayonet drill. Almost as ancient were Private Frazer, the gloomy local undertaker, and Private Godfrey, a weak-bladdered former employee of the Army & Navy Stores who acts as the platoon’s medical orderly. Whereas Jones was played by a heavily made-up Clive Dunn, who was only in his late forties at the beginning of the series’ run, both Godfrey and Frazer were played by actors in their seventies who, like their characters, had seen active service in the First World War. Godfrey had been a conscientious objector who had nevertheless served as a medical orderly and won the Military Medal on the Somme. He was played by Arnold Ridley, who was eighty-one by the time the series ended. Himself a veteran of the Somme, where he had been severely wounded, Ridley had also seen active service in the Second World War, taking part in the evacuation of Dunkirk before being discharged on health grounds. John Laurie, who played Frazer, was a year younger and, like his character, had seen active service in the First World War and served with the Home Guard in the Second World War.

  Although these three characters were comic caricatures, many people who served in the Home Guard recalled similar fellow volunteers, some of whom were well beyond the official upper age limit. Charles Graves noted that the medical standard for service was merely that volunteers had to be ‘capable of free movement’. Furthermore,

  The generous age-limit for LDVs attracted a considerable number of elderly gentlemen whose spirit and enthusiasm were not easily to be overcome. Those gallants showed an astonishing vagueness when the awkward question, ‘Date of birth?’, came to be answered. It was not infrequently suggested by the sympathetic but sceptical people attending to the task of enrolment that some of them had first been in action at Bannockburn or Agincourt.

  As in the First World War, many volunteers, both old and young, lied about their age in order to serve. A presumably youthful-looking member of the 10th London Battalion gave his age as thirty-nine because he believed the upper age limit to be forty. He was in fact seventy-one, but when this was discovered he was allowed to remain a member of the LDV. Attempts by several other ancient veterans to do their bit became causes célèbres. According to Graves, the oldest volunteer accepted by the Home Guard was Alexander Taylor, an eighty-year-old veteran of the Egyptian campaign of 1884–85. Not only had he been sent to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum, but he had also served in the Boer War and seen action in the First World War as an RSM. It was reported that he still possessed ‘the clear, agile, adaptable and soldierly mind which enables him to appreciate the new and deadly weapons’ of the present war, and so he was allowed to join the Crieff LDV in Perthshire. Taylor was generally agreed to be Britain’s oldest serving soldier, but when a fellow Scot called Harold Breen, who had been decorated in the First World War, was rejected by the Greenock Home Guard on the grounds that he was seventy, questions were raised about him in the House of Commons. Eden commended Breen for his ‘patriotic spirit’ but suggested it was inappropriate for men over sixty-five to serve with the Home Guard.

  Age was not the only barrier to veterans who wanted to join this volunteer force. A man called Jack White, who had been
awarded the VC in the First World War, had been initially accepted but was then asked to leave when it was revealed that in spite of his very English name he was technically a ‘foreign national’ and therefore debarred from service. His father had come to Britain from Russia at the age of seven, but had never taken out naturalisation papers. For this reason, even though he had been born in Britain, White was deemed ‘foreign’. White himself believed that the fact that he was Jewish counted against him. The case was taken up by the News Chronicle, and once again questions were raised in Parliament, where in July 1940 Sir Edward Grigg, the Under-Secretary for War, decreed that former war service would in future overrule ‘foreign’ nationality as a qualification for serving with the Home Guard.

  In contrast to the bumbling hopelessness of the Walmington-on-Sea veterans in Dad’s Army, many ex-servicemen were considered valuable assets in the Home Guard. Clearly those who had seen active service and become used to drilling, parades and route marches could form a useful backbone to any new part-time force. Furthermore, many veterans of the First World War were still only in their forties. A high proportion of those who volunteered were former officers: in Northamptonshire, for example, twenty-seven of the county’s fifty-five platoon commanders had held commissions in the First World War. In spite of (or perhaps because of) previous service, not all veterans wanted to command platoons, or even take a sergeant’s or lance corporal’s stripes. Many ‘old sweats’ who had kept their heads down during the First World War were content to do the same in the Home Guard and remain in the ranks. Though estimates varied, veterans undoubtedly formed a significant proportion of Home Guard volunteers. In July 1940 Lloyd George (by now in his late seventies, but still taking an active interest in politics) announced that veterans formed 40 per cent of the force, while in November Churchill put the figure at 50 per cent. The following year one newspaper upped the figure to 75 per cent, but a War Office estimate that same year remained at 40 per cent.

  It was in the Home Guard that several men who lived on to become Britain’s last surviving veterans served: Alfred Anderson (1896–2005), William Elder (1897–2005), Fred Lloyd (1898–2005) and Arthur ‘Smiler’ Marshall (1897–2005) all joined the

  force, even though the last named had lost an eye between the wars. Others – Bert Clark (1899–2005), John Oborne (1900–2004), Harry Patch (1898–2009), Ted Rayns (1899–2004) and Charles Watson (1899–2005) – joined other civil defence organisations such as the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) and the AFS (Auxiliary Fire Service), did a spot of fire-watching for their employers, or became temporary members of the police force as special constables. Harold Lawton (1899–2005), who had been taken prisoner by the Germans in 1918, and subsequently became a lecturer in modern languages at Southampton University, spent part of the war patrolling the city’s docks as a special constable. He then gave lectures to troops, including some who would take part in SOE (Special Operations Executive) operations, about French customs and language. This resulted in his name being placed on one of the Nazis’ lists of ‘wanted’ men. These lists were widely thought to exist to identify people the Nazis would target should they successfully invade Britain. The alarmingly well-informed Gestapo Handbook for the Invasion of Britain, produced in 1940 by the SS general Walter Schellenberg, was just such a book, though its existence was kept a secret for some fifty years after the war. The principal reason the book remained classified was that it had been compiled from information provided under duress by two captured British agents, with additional material supplied for a fee by a rogue British intelligence officer. It included a Special Wanted List containing the names of 2,820 politicians, writers, academics, scientists, entertainers and trade union officials who were to be seized the moment the Nazis invaded Britain. One name on it was undoubtedly that of Arthur Halestrap, who had been working since the end of the First World War for Marconi and joined the Royal Corps of Signals in 1939. From 1942, he was seconded to the SOE, sending agents behind enemy lines in Europe. He became chief signals officer at Grendon Hall in Buckinghamshire, the communications centre for the SOE and its agents in the field. His son, serving as a navigator with the RAF, was killed at the age of twenty in 1945. At the end of the war in Europe, Halestrap went to Germany as a member of the Allied Control Commission, but after a motor accident he returned to England to join the Diplomatic Wireless Service. In 1963 he was appointed MBE for his work with this organisation, from which he retired in 1970 at the age of seventy-two.

  Other veterans were in jobs of national importance and found themselves supporting the war effort as part of their everyday jobs. Henry Allingham (1896–2009), who had become an engineer after service in the First World War with the Royal Naval Air Service, worked on ways of dealing with the magnetic mines the Germans were using to destroy British ships. These had to be safely disabled, but Allingham also worked on a device to be placed in ships to neutralise the mines. Having served in the front line with the Durham Light Infantry, George Rice (1897–2005) found a job with Austin at their plant in Longbridge. During the Second World War he worked in a factory in Coventry producing anti-barrage-balloon devices to be installed in Halifax bombers. Scenes of devastation produced by air raids on Coventry, with injured people crying out for help from beneath the rubble, revived with horrible vividness his grim memories of the trenches in France.

  Harry Patch was similarly affected, and spoke for many veterans when he recalled that ‘for those of us who had been through the 1914–1918 war, the idea that we were going to go through it all again was difficult to accept’. He was just too old for military service, but wishing to do something for his country in the event of war, he had joined the Auxiliary Fire Service around the time of the Munich Crisis in 1938. As someone who ‘knew about water’ from his long experience as a plumber, this seemed the obvious service for him. He was still living in Combe Down, the Somerset village in which he was born, and as a member of the AFS was in the third line of defence as outlined by the government, the first line being the navy, the second being troops in training in combination with the Home Guard. Apart from iron railings being removed and melted down for the war effort and people being made to observe the blackout, the war did not greatly affect Combe Down at the beginning of the war. The AFS nevertheless had regular training on Sunday mornings, often demonstrating their skills to local crowds by way of entertainment and reassurance, and sometimes going on exercise with the professional firefighters of nearby Bath. Dealing with major blazes caused by air raids on Bristol, which began in 1940, would remain the duty of the regular force, while the AFS were left to deal with any other emergencies that might arise while the Bath professionals were assisting their Bristol colleagues. There were three AFS fire crews at Combe Down, and they operated not unlike troops in the front line in Patch’s own war: No. 1 crew would attend any fires that broke out, No. 2 crew would stand by in reserve, and No. 3 crew would be resting. A temporary fire station was created in one of the vicarage’s stables: the fire engine was kept on the ground level, while the hayloft above was converted to sleeping quarters for the crews.

  Bath remained poorly defended and so was unprepared for the so-called Baedeker Raids in April 1942, when the Germans targeted British cities of cultural importance in revenge for RAF raids on the medieval city of Lübeck. The British targets – Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York and Canterbury – were supposedly selected according to the high ratings given to them in the famous Baedeker guidebooks, first published in the 1820s. The target on 25 and 26 April may have been the stately crescents of Bath, but bombs dropped rather closer to home on Wells Way, part of the old pilgrims’ road which led from Combe Down to Bath. It was not merely the fires and the damaged buildings which were dangerous: a bomber dropping flares for illumination flew low over Patch’s crew as they were trying to douse some flames and opened fire on them with a machine gun. In all, Patch dealt with four major raids. ‘Did the bombs remind me of Ypres?’ he asked sixty-four years later. ‘Of course they did; I was going t
hrough it again, and it was tough.’

  When not working for the AFS, Patch was attempting to pursue his ordinary job as a plumber. He had built up his own small company during the 1930s, but all three plumbers who were working for him in 1939 were called up and he had been forced to sell the business. In 1942 he saw a newspaper advertisement placed by the Ministry of Works for someone too old for war service to oversee the plumbing and sanitation of several military camps in Somerset, which were being prepared for the arrival of American troops. Patch described the job of Garrison Camp Engineer as ‘money for old rope, really’, but because it made him privy to troop movements during the build-up to D-Day, he had to sign the Official Secrets Act. The actual date for the Allied invasion of France was of course kept from everyone: Patch arrived for work on 6 June 1944 to find the camps, which had been packed to bursting with troops the previous evening, entirely deserted. Assisted by POWs from a nearby camp, he was subsequently employed to dismantle the sites and return the sheets of corrugated iron that had been used to construct the huts to an army depot at Shepton Mallet. Told at the depot that this material could not be accepted because it was of American origin, Patch tried another one at Taunton, only to be given the same answer. He ended up selling the sheets and anything else he found lying about in the deserted camps to local farmers, donating some of the proceeds to police funds and pocketing the rest. A further unexpected bonus came at a camp where there were four petrol pumps which the Americans had disabled before they left. Putting his plumbing skills to good use, Patch managed to extract gallons of petrol, storing it for future use in old hot-water cylinders which he kept in some Nissen huts in nearby Street. Since petrol was strictly rationed, this hoard was very valuable: as well as using it for his own car, Patch joined the black market economy by selling it, his main customer being the chief superintendent of police at Glastonbury.