The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  At the end of his trip to Ypres, Patch finally agreed to return to Pilckem Ridge, where he laid a small wreath at the 20th (Light) Division’s memorial bearing the inscription: ‘In remembrance of my friends in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry who were lost in 1917. They have never been forgotten.’ It was this inability to forget the fates of three men which explained both Patch’s refusal to mention the war for eighty years and his later willingness to speak out against it. Always standing at an angle to other veterans, he even dismissed Remembrance Sunday celebrations as ‘simply a military show’, and had not joined his four fellow veterans – Henry Allingham (108), Fred Lloyd (106), John Oborne (104) and William Stone (103) – laying wreaths at the Cenotaph on the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of war the previous month. Public piety about the Fallen meant nothing to him – and little, he suggested, to the vast majority of people displaying it. ‘I don’t think there is any actual remembrance except for those who have lost someone they really cared for in either war,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘That day, the day I lost my pals, 22 September 1917 – that is my Remembrance Day, not Armistice Day.’ In contrast with the very public occasion at the Cenotaph every November, Patch’s own Remembrance Day was a strictly private occasion: ‘I’m always very, very quiet on that day and I don’t want anybody talking to me really.’

  Like the last British veterans of the war, Charles Kuentz had seen it as a duty to talk about his own personal experiences of warfare in order to promote peace and to prevent more young men and women being sent into battle. He visited schools and gave talks, and was dismayed by the war in Iraq. One of his daughters said that once he started talking about the war, ‘it was as if you had turned on a tap’. Harry Patch, although very outspoken about warfare, was more retiring than either Kuentz or his British fellow veteran Henry Allingham. The Last Tommy had made him a celebrity, but he never enjoyed the attention quite as much as Allingham, who was a natural and very engaging showman. He complained that the war was now ‘usually all people want to talk about, and I’m tired of talking about it. I appreciate the fact that people want to write to me about that time, but it’s too much: photographs, autographs, letters asking for an interview, you get fed up. I’m not available!’ Clearly one of the reasons for writing his autobiography was to answer all the questions researchers or the merely inquisitive wanted to put to him. He was also determined that the war should take no more a disproportionate place in his autobiography than it did in his life, that his life should be seen as a whole.

  By the time the book was published in August 2007, the ninetieth anniversary of Passchendaele was being marked, and the previous month Patch had found himself at the age of 109 once more returning to Ypres. By now, his visits to Belgium were international news, and on a report for BBC television he was filmed at the place near Langemarck where he had gone into action for the first time ninety years before. A contemporary panoramic photograph of the battlefield was unrolled before him as he sat looking over the same ground, now grassed over. He repeated what had become his mantra, each word separated by a pause: ‘War is a calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings.’ He was photographed wherever he went, including the Dochy Farm New British Cemetery, apparently undaunted by the CWGC’s warning that there was ‘wheelchair access with some difficulty’. The cemetery, on the road from Ypres to Zonnebeke, is named after a farm that in 1917 had been a German stronghold. It was created after the war had ended to gather together bodies from the battlefields of Passchendaele, St-Julien, Frezenberg and Boesinghe which had ended up in isolated graves, and contains 1,439 burials, 958 of them unidentified. Here Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and South Africans lie among their British allies, most of them killed after Patch had been invalided home. He also visited Talbot House and the Menin Gate, where on 29 July, with the support of friends, including Richard van Emden, and leaning heavily on a walking frame, he spoke the familiar lines from Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’. He had complained in his autobiography that at the Menin Gate ceremony people failed to preface the recitation of Binyon’s lines with the words Tubby Clayton had always used: ‘With proud thanksgiving let us remember our brethren who fell.’ Now was his chance to remedy this oversight, with his own addition of ‘… on both sides of the line’. He failed to get Binyon’s words exactly right, and had to be prompted, but it was a memorable performance.

  Nor would it be Patch’s last return to Ypres. The following year would mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice and Patch would take a leading role in the commemoration. The inducement to revisit Belgium this time was that he was to unveil his own special memorial at the exact place he had crossed the Steenbeek ninety-one years earlier when going into action for the first time. He had paid for the memorial out of the royalties received for his autobiography, money that also helped fund a lifeboat in memory of his partner Doris, who had died in 2007. The stone plaque bore his regiment’s badge and the inscription:

  HERE, AT DAWN, ON 16 AUGUST 1917, THE 7TH BATTALION, DUKE OF CORNWALL’S LIGHT INFANTRY, 20TH (LIGHT) DIVISION, CROSSED THE STEENBEEK PRIOR TO THEIR SUCCESSFUL ASSAULT ON THE VILLAGE OF LANGEMARCK.

  THIS STONE IS ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF FALLEN COMRADES, AND TO HONOUR THE COURAGE, SACRIFICE AND PASSING OF THE GREAT WAR GENERATION. IT IS THE GIFT OF FORMER PRIVATE AND LEWIS GUNNER HARRY PATCH, No. 29295, C COMPANY, 7TH D.C.L.I., THE LAST SURVIVING VETERAN TO HAVE SERVED IN THE TRENCHES OF THE WESTERN FRONT.

  SEPTEMBER 2008

  A group of young soldiers from Patch’s old regiment had travelled from where they were stationed in Germany to attend the ceremony, at which Richard van Emden read from Patch’s autobiography and there were addresses by the military historian Peter Barton and the Mayor of Langemarck. After the sounding of the Last Post, Patch removed the British and Belgian flags covering the memorial and laid a small bouquet of flowers. Attached was a simple message: ‘in remembrance’, under which Patch had signed his name. The war, meanwhile, was still giving up its dead: the day before, the remains of three recently discovered British soldiers had been buried at Cement House Cemetery, a few hundred yards farther along the road.

  It would be the last ever visit to the Western Front by someone who had actually fought there, and it was recorded for a BBC television documentary. As had by now become customary, Patch visited Talbot House and attended the ceremony at the Menin Gate, once again reading Binyon’s lines, during which many of those in the large crowd were moved to tears. He then laid a wreath at the monument bearing a label reading ‘Remembering Both Sides of the Line’. In pursuit of this equal remembrance, he once again visited Langemarck Cemetery to place a small wooden cross bearing the words ‘Comrades All. H.P.’ on the grave of a German soldier. He collected two acorns from beside the grave, taking them back with him to Fletcher House to plant. During this trip he also signed copies of his book and a map of the battlefield to be presented to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. He had become reconciled to his celebrity and even took pleasure from it, particularly at Ypres, where he was a much-loved and admired figure, applauded wherever he appeared. He had to be protected from well-wishers who crowded round wanting to greet him or simply touch him, the last surviving person who had fought to drive the Germans out of Belgium. In recognition of all this he was that year appointed Knight of the Order of Leopold, the country’s highest honour, by the Belgian king, Albert II. The medal was presented to Patch by the Belgian ambassador at his residence in London on 22 September 2008, Patch’s own Remembrance Day.

  He was equally popular back in Britain and, like Allingham, had been awarded numerous honours over the years, including the freedom of the city of Wells and an honorary degree from the University of Bristol. The Wills Memorial Building, on which he had worked over eighty years before, had undergone major restoration, and Patch was invited to reopen it at a ceremony in 2008. Other honours were highly individual. In 2004 the Gaymer Cider Company of Shepton Mallet in Somerset had produced a special batch o
f a ‘premium quality sweet cider’ named ‘Patch’s Pride’. Patch had been involved in the development of the drink, tasting several different versions until he was satisfied. The 106 bottles, one for every year of his life, were not for public sale but made for Patch and his friends, with several bottles being sent to the Duke of Cornwall Light Infantry’s regimental museum at Bodmin. Those unable to buy a bottle of ‘Patch’s Pride’ could nevertheless place a bet on ‘Harry Patch’, a bay gelding named in the veteran’s honour by the trainer Michael Jarvis. On the Friday before Remembrance Sunday in 2009 the two-year-old was the 4–1 favourite in the 1.30 at Doncaster and romped home to win the race. The Western Daily Press had placed a £20 bet and donated its £100 winnings to the British Legion. Perhaps the most unlikely honour paid to Patch was when in September 2007 he was invited by the men’s magazine FHM to guest as an agony uncle. Presumably it was felt that this ‘century-straddling king of the wrinklies’ was well placed to advise men of a much younger generation. One reader, ‘fed up with following my generational flock to places like Australia, Thailand and Ibiza’, asked Patch about other holiday destinations: ‘Where have you been that has stuck with you throughout the years?’ Weymouth, Patch replied. As long as you were in enjoyable company, he added, ‘there’s no need to travel all over the planet’. He advised the questioner to go camping in the UK. Another asked whether he should allow his girlfriend to become a topless model: Patch thought not. Other questions were more serious and relevant to Patch’s own experiences. A soldier who had been in Iraq for six months complained that no one seemed very interested that he’d been risking his life on their behalf. Patch admitted that returning home after a war was never easy, but said one just had to ‘get on with life and look to the future’. He advised the soldier not to be resentful because those who had not been in a war simply had no idea what it was like: ‘They are lucky.’

  In his official capacity as Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion wrote ‘The Five Acts of Harry Patch’, a sequence of sonnets based on Patch’s autobiography and conversations with the veteran. At a reception at the Bishop’s Palace in Wells in February 2008, Motion read the poem aloud to Patch and an audience of local dignitaries. The poem was subsequently used as the basis of a choral work by the Master of the Queen’s Music, Sir Peter Maxwell-Davies, commissioned by Portsmouth Grammar School and premiered in the city’s cathedral on Remembrance Sunday. Embraced by the Establishment, Patch was invited to Downing Street and was introduced to several members of the Royal Family. He may have been modest, but he was not in the least afraid to state his opinions to whoever he might be talking to. The war had left him with a lifelong hatred of injustice, and in the 1980s he had been a regular and persistent champion of local causes who ‘never hesitated to write letters to the council or the local newspaper, usually firing on all cylinders when he did so’. His determination to see justice done undimmed by age, he took advantage of a visit to No. 10 to tell the Prime Minister that he fully supported the ‘Shot at Dawn’ campaign, which had lobbied Parliament and the Ministry of Defence to gain formal pardons for the 306 British soldiers who had been court-martialled and executed for cowardice or desertion between 1914 and 1918. The campaign had been started by relatives of the executed men when the official papers relating to their cases were declassified in 1990. The shame surrounding the deaths of these men had lasted down the years and many families had often felt stigmatised, but in November 2000 a large number of them and their supporters marched past the Cenotaph. In June the following year a Shot at Dawn Memorial was unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. A 10-foot-high statue of a blindfolded soldier tied to a post (modelled on a real seventeen-year-old soldier shot for desertion) is surrounded by a semicircle of 306 wooden stakes recording the names of all those executed. Campaigners argued that a great many of those shot at dawn were suffering from shell shock or some other form of battle trauma which had made them no longer responsible for their actions. Although this was clearly not always the case, in August 2006 the government eventually agreed to a blanket pardon on the grounds that ‘everybody involved in these terrible cases were as much victims of World War I as those who died in the battlefield’.

  For the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, Patch was called upon to launch the British Legion’s Poppy Appeal on board HMS Somerset in Avonmouth docks. He was joined by Simon Weston, a well-known veteran of the Falklands War, who had suffered extensive and disfiguring burns when his ship was bombed at Bluff Cove. The continuing human cost of warfare was emphasised not only by Weston’s participation at the launch but by the revelation that the number of young servicemen who had applied to the Legion for help had more than doubled in the past year thanks to the continuing military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army Air Corps flew over the Somerset, dropping poppies, and more of the red flowers were fired over the ship from dockside cannons.

  The Queen, as usual, led the nation in the service at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, which fell on 9 November, but Patch and his two fellow veterans, Henry Allingham and Bill Stone, were called upon to lead a special ceremony in Whitehall two days later, marking the exact moment when, ninety years before, peace had been declared. In his autobiography Patch had, with characteristic outspokenness, declined to consider Stone a true veteran, pointedly declaring that the honour of being the Last Veteran should be awarded to a person ‘who had seen action on the Western Front, not to anyone who happened to be in uniform when the war ended’. He nevertheless put aside his reservations for the occasion, which was attended by the Prime Minister, the Defence Secretary, the Duchess of Gloucester, who was patron of the World War One Veterans’ Association, and a crowd of thousands. Unlike the Remembrance Sunday ceremony, this one was focused specifically upon the First World War. It included readings by young actors of a letter written from the front and poems by A.E. Housman and Siegfried Sassoon, and a military band played the Elegy for Strings written in 1915 in memory of Rupert Brooke by his friend F.S. Kelly, who survived Gallipoli, but was killed on the Somme the following year. It was an extraordinary circumstance that the last three veterans should each have fought with a different service, the army, the air force and the navy. Now Patch, Allingham and Stone, each bearing a wreath for his own force, were wheeled one at a time to the foot of the Cenotaph, assisted by three representatives of the present armed forces, all of them decorated: Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, who’d been awarded the VC in Iraq; Flight Lieutenant Michelle Goodman, the first ever woman to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, also in Iraq; and Marine Mkhuseli Jones, who had been awarded the Military Cross in Afghanistan. The laying of the wreaths was followed by the Silence, after which the Bishop to the Forces, who had led the brief religious service, intoned ‘For the Fallen’, prefacing it with Tubby Clayton’s words about remembering ‘our brethren who fell’, but omitting Patch’s customary addition of ‘on both sides of the line’. Keen as he was to avoid the ‘show business’ of Remembrance Sunday, Patch declared himself very happy to participate in this additional event. ‘It is not just an honour for me but for an entire generation,’ he said, adding (to make up for the Bishop’s omission): ‘It is important to remember the dead from both sides of the conflict.’ The ceremony was followed by a reception at Downing Street, while at Tate Britain three black-and-white portraits of Patch, Allingham and Stone taken by the veteran war photographer Don McCullin and commissioned by the Ministry of Defence went on display. Patch also made an appearance to a standing ovation at the Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall: even the Queen stood with the rest of the audience as he came onstage.

  On 9 March 2009 the French ambassador visited Fletcher House in order to enrol Patch as an Officer of the Légion d’honneur. The same honour was bestowed on Allingham, upgrading Britain’s last two surviving veterans from their previous honour as Chevaliers of the order. ‘I greatly appreciate the way your people respect the memory of those who fell, irrespective of the uniform they wore,’ Patch
told the ambassador. ‘I will wear this medal with great pride and when I eventually rejoin my mates it will be displayed in my regimental museum as a permanent reminder of the kindness of the people of France.’ On 17 June 2009 Patch celebrated his 111th birthday with a party in the garden of Fletcher House. ‘Happy Birthday’ was played by pipers and he received a pile of handmade birthday cards from local schoolchildren. The following day a portrait of Patch went on display at the National Portrait Gallery as part of the annual BP Portrait Award exhibition. Dan Llywelyn Hall’s painting, depicting a relaxed-looking veteran, his collar undone and striped tie loose, his jacket hung with medals, was used on the poster advertising the exhibition all over London. It was, in its way, Harry Patch’s last public appearance. At 9 a.m. on 25 July, only a week after the death of Henry Allingham, the man who finally and briefly became Britain’s Last Veteran died at Fletcher House. He had been the oldest man in Europe and the third-oldest man in the world, but had remained alert and articulate until the end, still planning a fortnight before his death to make one more visit to Belgium.