by Peter Parker
Any awareness of the First World War came by a less direct route. We did not learn about the war in history classes at my preparatory school, but boys spent long hours in the hobby room constructing a huge papier-mâché trench system, from which miniature Airfix model soldiers clambered out to stagger across no man’s land. Model aircraft were suspended by cotton from the ceiling over the battlefield, and their names – Sopwith Camel, de Havilland, Handley Page – became familiar even to a boy as uninterested in warfare as I was, and remain with me even though I could not actually identify one in a museum. Model aeroplanes and troops of the Second World War were also available, but were for some reason much less popular. Even so, I made no connection between the miniature battles recreated in the hobby room and the experiences my grandfathers had undergone in real life.
Nor did I readily connect war memorials with my grandfathers. I was brought up in the Marches, so when we went on picnics or to the seaside we usually headed into Wales. Along the route were markers by which we measured our progress: the garage where we always stopped to buy ice lollies, the field in Pen-y-bont where there were always donkeys, and so on. For me there was another marker, one I never commented on but which haunted me. It was the New Radnor war memorial, a stone soldier standing sentinel above the road leading west out of the town. This lone figure filled me with a sort of dread. Even though I was too young to understand what he represented, I knew instinctively that it was something sad or frightening. Many years later, while writing this book, I remembered this memorial and went to look at it again. The town has long since had a bypass, which is why I hadn’t seen the statue for such a long time. There are a mere six names, but someone thought they deserved this striking monument. The soldier is an ordinary Tommy, his head lowered, his rifle reversed, with some sort of stylised plant – perhaps an olive branch – growing from it. I cannot have seen much detail as a child being driven past in a car, but I now recognise that the expression on the soldier’s face beneath his tin helmet is indeed haunting. The look is less reverent than desolate, with heavy lids lowered over sorrowful eyes as if drawn down under a weight of grief.
As the twentieth century drew to its close the group of First World War veterans who, their medals clinking, marched past and saluted the Cenotaph every Remembrance Sunday became smaller and smaller. Often referred to inaccurately as the ‘Old Contemptibles’ (a name in fact adopted by the BEF regulars in 1914 after Kaiser Wilhelm II had unwisely referred to them as ‘Sir John French’s contemptible little army’), these men had become a notable but increasingly aged and infirm element of the yearly commemoration, many on sticks and some in wheelchairs. Not all veterans took part in these proceedings, though Harry Patch was more vehement than most in his rejection of the annual commemoration. ‘For me, 11 November is just show business,’ he wrote late in his long life. This was clearly a minority view, but anything veterans could tell us not only about their experiences of the war but also their attitudes to its aftermath and commemoration began to seem increasingly vital as their numbers dwindled. People began compiling national statistics of survivors and the yearly headcount began.
The notion of a Last Veteran was not entirely new, but had in the past been a minor curiosity rather than a major news story. This was partly because in the past the media had been less sophisticated and widespread, but it is also a fact that no war had left such a mark upon so many people as the First World War. Astonishingly the last veteran of the Boer War long outlived many veterans of both world wars, not dying until 12 April 1993, aged 111. George Frederick Ives was born on 17 November 1881 and was working in his father’s grocery business in Bristol when British forces suffered three consecutive defeats at the Battles of Stomberg, Magersfontein and Colenso during the so-called ‘Black Week’ of December 1899. One reaction to this disaster was a rush to enlist back in Britain, and Ives was among the new intake of volunteers, serving with the 1st Imperial Yeomanry as a mounted infantryman. Only seventeen of the 122 men who enlisted with him at Cheltenham survived and, as many veterans would do after the First World War, Ives returned to England to find widespread unemployment. He emigrated to Canada, where he remained for the rest of his life – although he returned briefly to Britain in 1992 in order to attend the Albert Hall Festival of Remembrance. There he experienced something of the attention the last veterans of the First World War would receive.
Farther back, the last survivor of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, Edwin Hughes from Wrexham in Wales, also became something of a celebrity. Popularly known as ‘Balaclava Ned’, he had been injured in the famous and foolhardy assault on the Russian guns on 25 October 1854 when his horse had been killed under him. He managed to extricate himself from under his dead charger and make his way back to his own lines. He left the regular army in 1873, after over twenty-one years’ service, but immediately re-enlisted as a sergeant-instructor in a volunteer regiment, remaining there until forcibly retired at the age of sixty-five. He died in 1927 at the age of ninety-six, outliving by four months the last survivor of the Thin Red Line, which famously held off a Russian cavalry charge at Balaclava on that same day, Charles Ellingworth of the 93rd Sutherland Highlanders. Neither man was in fact the last British survivor of the Crimean War, since both were long outlived by the splendidly named Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, who enlisted as a naval cadet at the age of eleven and took part in the Siege of Sebastopol. The proud possessor of two campaign medals by the age of twelve, he returned to England to continue his education at Harrow, became a well-known engineer and did not die until 1940.
The farther back you go, the less easy it is to establish who the last veteran of any conflict or battle really is. The last British veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar was once thought to be a rating called John Rome or Roome, who died in December 1860. He had served on board HMS Victory and in old age claimed to have been the person who hoisted Nelson’s signal ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’. Since he had subsequently deserted, then rejoined the navy under a pseudonym, it is not at all clear whether his claim could be trusted. In any case, even if he had been the last survivor to have served on the Victory, he certainly wasn’t the last veteran of Trafalgar. Stephen Hilton, who had been a master’s mate on HMS Minotaur and was one of three brothers who all served at Trafalgar, died in 1872. Meanwhile, a tombstone in the churchyard of St Laurence at Cholesbury in Hertfordshire marks the grave of David Newton, who survived being wounded while serving on HMS Revenge and died at the age of ninety-six in July 1878. It seems, however, that all these claimants were outlived by one Joseph Sutherland, who was probably born in 1790, which would have made him around fifteen at Trafalgar, and died in 1890 at the age of 100. This would seem to clinch the matter, but powder monkeys could be as young as twelve, and there may well have been one who lived on longer than Sutherland but never identified himself.
Seeking out and verifying veterans of the first war of the Modern Age also has its problems, but matters were made easier in 1987 when Dennis Goodwin and his son Stephen founded the World War One Veterans’ Association. The impetus for this was less idle curiosity than a concern for the welfare of those who had fought in the war. Both Goodwins were professionally involved with residential care homes, Stephen as a registrar and Dennis as a lay inspector, and in the course of their work met large numbers of elderly men who seemed to be rapidly and unresistingly fading away. They gradually realised that these old men had one thing in common: they had all fought in the First World War. Although the war had taken place in their increasingly distant youth, it often remained the most significant experience of their lives; but it was something neither the much younger staff nor the women residents, who greatly outnumbered the men, could share or understand. As Dennis Goodwin put it, these men ‘simply retreated into their own shell hole of memories as the effects of benign institutionalism eroded their willingness to fight the ravages of the ageing process’. He recognised that getting old soldiers to talk about their war servic
e was genuinely therapeutic for them, giving meaning to their experiences. If these men could be brought together, it might revive the sense of camaraderie that prevailed in the war itself. Since few of the men had ever returned to the battlefields, the Goodwins decided to organise an expedition for fourteen of them. This was a considerable undertaking, given the veterans’ age and infirmities, but it proved a great success. Battlefield visits were less common then, and this one was reported in the press, after which many people contacted the Goodwins, who founded their Association in response. Numerous further visits to France and Belgium followed and this raised awareness among younger generations, who became interested both in visiting the battlefields themselves and in meeting men who had fought there a lifetime ago. The veterans were rescued from isolation and were reconnected not only with those who had shared their experiences but with the larger world.
One of those whose lives were changed by Dennis Goodwin was Henry Allingham, who would become fêted as one of Britain’s last two surviving veterans. The son of a clerk in the family ironmongery business, Allingham had been born in modest circumstances in Upper Clapton, London, on 6 June 1896. He had sat on his grandfather’s shoulders to watch Edward VII’s coronation procession, seen W.G. Grace batting at the Oval, witnessed the first British airship over London and the gradual disappearance of horse-drawn vehicles from the city’s streets. It was the sighting of an early aeroplane that made him enlist with the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) in June 1915. He would have joined up earlier, but his widowed mother had been horrified when he visited a recruiting office during the first week of the war. As her only child, he promised not to leave her, but felt able to volunteer when she died of cancer the following year. As an air mechanic, he kept planes airworthy, flew patrols over the North Sea, and witnessed the Battle of Jutland. From September 1917 he served on the Western Front as a mechanic on the ground and as an observer, gunner and bomber in the air. Although never in the trenches, he was exposed to all kinds of danger, not least simply by going up in the highly unreliable early aeroplanes, and he suffered a shrapnel wound when the Germans bombed a depot. On 1 April 1918, the RNAS was merged with the Royal Flying Corps and so Allingham ended his war as a founder member of a new service, the Royal Air Force.
Like the majority of the veterans who lived into the twenty-first century, he had for the most part led a wholly unremarkable life. He had left school at the age of fifteen and found employment with a car- and coachbuilder. After the war he briefly joined a company that assembled aircraft, then returned to the car industry, where he spent the rest of his working life. He married happily and produced two daughters, one of whom married a GI and emigrated to America. His spare time was devoted to bicycling, sailing and playing golf, and he eventually retired to Eastbourne. For many years he never talked about the war, but as the old world gradually receded and those around him died, including his wife and the daughter who had remained in Britain, he ended up alone and housebound. When he was first contacted by Goodwin in around 2000, his eyesight and hearing were fading and he was ‘literally waiting to die’. At first he insisted he did not want to talk about the war, but Goodwin eventually managed to convince him that ‘there was a world out there that wanted to meet him and hear his stories’. Once persuaded, Allingham took to his new role with great enthusiasm, and it was precisely his ability to remember the war and remind later generations of its cost which gave him a sense of purpose and kept him going for so long.
The same could be said of many of the veterans. Historians had for some time been seeking out and interviewing survivors, recognising that unless their stories were preserved a hugely significant part of British history would be lost. Richard van Emden, who had interviewed 120 of those who fought in the Great War, worked on one of the first books and television documentaries to showcase their testimonies. Veterans was published in 1998 to accompany a BBC television series of the same name, and was followed in 2005 by Britain’s Last Tommies. That same year the popular historian Max Arthur published Last Post: The Final Word from Our First World War Soldiers. It was in fact very far from being the final word.
Once encouraged to talk about their war, many veterans felt it their duty to tell others what it was really like to have been at the front. This was not merely so that their own war should not be forgotten by later generations or reduced to accounts of battle plans and strategies by historians. Some veterans wanted to ensure that when politicians with no direct experience of warfare talked blandly of the regrettable necessity of sending troops into action to defend our freedoms, people should realise what this meant in the front line. A reporter who sought Allingham out to ask his opinion of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was told that all wars were bad:
Ask men who have been to war and they will all tell you the same. Yes, Hussein was an evil man. But the Americans should have toppled him the first time they fought the Iraqis. I felt sorry for the soldiers who would once more be risking their lives. It was not the same as my war. We were fighting for our country and our homes and this is completely different. We had a lot more to lose if we failed.
Allingham was intent upon honouring those who fought in the First World War, and while keen to ensure younger generations did not forget or underestimate its perils, he was disinclined to speak disparagingly of it. He did, however, conclude that in general ‘War’s stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first, you have to talk last anyway.’
Other veterans were more forthright. William Roberts, who had been in the Royal Flying Corps, dismissed the war towards the end of his life as ‘a lot of bloody political bull’, while George Charles, who had served with the Durham Light Infantry, described it as ‘a complete waste of lives’. ‘The First World War was idiotic,’ concluded Alfred Finnigan, who had served in it with the Royal Field Artillery at Passchendaele and elsewhere. ‘It started out idiotic and it stayed idiotic. It was damned silly, all of it.’ Harry Patch went so far as to describe himself as ‘a pacifist’ and dismiss the annual ceremony at the Cenotaph as ‘nothing but a show of military force’. He never pretended that war was anything other than a waste of young lives and said that ‘the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder’. His anger was shared by his fellow veteran Cecil Withers, who had lied about his age in order to join up at the age of seventeen. He first went into action at Arras on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, two months before his nineteenth birthday, and in August was hit by shrapnel and temporarily blinded. Lying in a trench, semiconscious and bleeding heavily from the head, he was mistaken for dead and was nearly carted off for burial. Having recuperated back in Britain, he was transferred to the Royal Fusiliers and returned to the front in January 1918, serving there until the end of the war. He could not forget his experiences and made sure no one else would, commenting towards the end of his life:
People still talk a lot of rubbish about the war. I’ve always let people know what really went on […] I’ve let people know so that the truth could be a warning to them. When the war was going on, the horrors were kept quiet and the full display of dreadful things only came later […] These days, if any trigger-happy politician wants to start another war, it’s my job to let people know what that means. Politicians today are pitiless humbugs. What do they know? Only those who were there can tell you what really happened.
It soon became clear that these voices would very shortly be stilled. By the time the paperback edition of Richard van Emden’s Britain’s Last Tommies appeared in 2006, Roberts, Charles and Withers had all died. Van Emden itemised what else we had lost: the last survivors of Gallipoli, Jutland and the first day on the Somme; the last holders of the Military Cross, the Military Medal, the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the 1914/15 Star; the last Old Contemptible, the last Kitchener Volunteer, the last cavalryman, the last artilleryman, and the last prisoner of war. The last army officer to have served at t
he front, Lieutenant Norman Porteous of the 13th Royal Scots, had died in September 2003, and it was somehow appropriate that the only surviving British veterans who had seen active service were just ordinary servicemen who had obeyed orders and done what they were asked to do: Henry Allingham and Harry Patch. Van Emden worked with Patch on an autobiography published in 2007 as The Last Fighting Tommy, a title claiming a distinction that separated Patch from Allingham, who had of course fought with the Royal Naval Air Service. Allingham’s admiring words about those who fought in the trenches were used as the book’s epigraph. A year later Allingham responded with his own memoirs, Kitchener’s Last Volunteer, co-written with Dennis Goodwin. Its subtitle suggested some friendly rivalry with Patch: The Life of Henry Allingham, Britain’s Oldest Man and the Oldest Surviving Veteran of the Great War.
In the summer of 2008, Allingham and Patch had reached their 112th and 110th birthdays respectively. Another veteran of the Royal Navy, Claude Choules, was still alive at 107, but although he was born in Worcestershire he had spent the majority of his long life in Australia, having emigrated in 1926 and transferred permanently to the Royal Australian Navy, remaining in the service until his retirement in 1956. There was one American veteran left, 107-year-old Frank Woodruff Buckles, popularly referred to as ‘the Last Doughboy’, and one Italian, 109-year-old Delfino Borroni. There were in fact two Italians left when I first wrote this sentence in mid-June 2008: a week later Italy’s other surviving veteran, Francesco Chiarello, was dead at the age of 109, and Borroni himself followed in October. There were no German veterans left, and the last veteran to have fought for the Central Powers, Franz Künstler of the Austro-Hungarian army, had died on 27 May. The last soldier to have fought for the Ottoman Empire, Yakup Satar, had died in March at the age of 110, while Poland’s last veteran, 105-year-old Stanislaw Wychech, died at the end of June. The last surviving woman to have served in the war, as a barrack waitress for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and Women’s Royal Air Force, was Gladys Powers, who although British had for many years lived in Canada, where she had celebrated her 109th birthday in May. She died three months later. Also surviving were a number of veterans who had not seen active service, including the British William (Bill) Stone and Sydney Lucas, the Canadian John Babcock (all 107) and the Australian John Campbell Ross (109). Like Choules, Lucas had emigrated to Australia in the 1920s: both men served with the Australian forces during the Second World War.