by Peter Parker
The French, meanwhile, had buried the person they assumed to be their last veteran with due Gallic pomp among their national heroes in the Panthéon in February 2008. The Italian-born Lazare Ponticelli, who moved to France at the age of two, had fought with both the French and Italian armies during the war. After demobilisation, he returned to France, where he founded an engineering company in Paris, Ponticelli Frères, which made piping and did other metalworking. He became a French citizen in 1939 and, while keeping his company going by manufacturing equipment for soldiers, he also joined the French Resistance. Although he had originally declined the offer of a state funeral, he changed his mind when the supposedly penultimate French veteran, Louis de Cazenave, died in January 2008 at the age of 110. Ponticelli himself died a mere seven weeks later on 12 March 2008, also aged 110, and on 17 March the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, stood shoulder to shoulder before his flag-draped coffin, which had been laid in the cour d’honneur of the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris. Both presidents attended the funeral mass in the Cathédrale Saint-Louis (known as l’église des soldats) along with the French premier and most government ministers, a body of currently serving soldiers, members of Ponticelli’s family and representatives of the family company, which had continued in business after Ponticelli’s retirement as manager in 1960. Flags were flown at half-mast, and President Sarkozy unveiled a plaque commemorating all the veterans of the First World War. Ponticelli had also been France’s oldest living man, and in the wake of his death investigations to find out who now had claim to this title unearthed a 108-year-old former farmer called Fernand Goux. M. Goux, it transpired, had also served in the last months of the First World War, having been called up in April 1918. His initial job was to supply rations to the trenches and to bring back the dead for burial, but on 3 November 1918 his regiment was sent into the front line, where he spent eight days before the Armistice was signed. Although by most reckonings Goux would count as a veteran, according to French rules he was disqualified because he had spent less than ninety days in combat: the seven months he had spent in supply, however dangerous, simply didn’t count. Another French veteran, Pierre Picault, who was called up in April 1918 and served as a gunner, was already known to the French authorities but similarly excluded. This ruling saved the French government a good deal of embarrassment and, more importantly, meant that Lazare Ponticelli can rest in peace in the Panthéon as ‘le dernier poilu’ (officially).
In the event, neither Goux nor Picault long outlived Ponticelli, both dying in November 2008. The French case highlights the difficulties that face governments that wish to honour their last veteran. Even those with less stringent rules are sometimes caught in the dilemma of who ‘counts’. For example, the aforementioned Claude Choules was born in Britain and fought with the British but has lived in Australia for eighty-three of his 108 years. Is he, therefore, a British veteran or an Australian one? He has never been back to Britain since he arrived in Australia in 1926, and evidently regards himself as Australian. The British government agreed, and his name was never listed among those who ‘qualified’ as Britain’s last veteran – though Bill Stone, whom many thought did not really qualify because he was still in training when the Armistice was signed, apparently did (officially). Someone who did not was Netherwood Hughes, a veteran who was ‘discovered’ only in November 2008. In fact, the World War One Veterans’ Association had known about Hughes for some time but at the request of his family, who were concerned about the effect the publicity might have on Hughes’s fragile health, had not made their discovery public. Born in Great Harwood, Lancashire, on 12 June 1900, Hughes ‘remembered’ being called up in June 1918, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, and joining the 51st Manchester Battalion as an infantryman, but at the age of 108 his memory had deteriorated. ‘He remembers going to Fulwood Barracks in Preston but remembers very little other than that,’ Dennis Goodwin told the Daily Telegraph. This would not have mattered greatly had there been documentary evidence to confirm his war service. Unfortunately, no records existed, and without these the Ministry of Defence would not acknowledge his claim. ‘We have no reason to suspect that Netherwood Hughes is not a veteran of World War One,’ a spokesman said, ‘but due to the large numbers of military service records destroyed during the Blitz in the 1940s, it has unfortunately not been possible to verify that he is.’ The only evidence was an old photograph showing Hughes in uniform, but lacking any regimental badge that would confirm his claim. Hughes had no particular wish to enter what at times seemed like a contest to be Britain’s last veteran, and while the World War One Veterans’ Association quietly admitted him to their dwindling company, the MoD stood firm.
Hughes had been invited by Dennis Goodwin to attend a special ceremony at the Cenotaph on 11 November 2008 marking the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, but he had been too frail to make the journey to London from Accrington. Still officially unrecognised, he would die on 4 April 2009. Bill Stone had died three months before Hughes, on 10 January, which left only Allingham and Patch. Allingham achieved an additional distinction when, in March 2009, in addition to being the oldest man in Britain, he also, according to reliable records, became the oldest British man who had ever lived. On 19 June, a fortnight after his 113rd birthday, he became the world’s oldest living man after the death in Japan of Tomoji Tanabe, who was some nine months his senior.
In many ways, Allingham maintained a much higher public profile than the more retiring Harry Patch: he was more often interviewed and more often went to talk to schoolchildren or attend public occasions connected with the war. He received numerous honours, including the Légion d’honneur, awarded by the French government in 1998 to all surviving British veterans; a gold medal and the freedom of St-Omer, where he had unveiled the British Air Services Memorial to the 4,700 air personnel killed in the war, in 2004; honorary membership of the Fleet Air Arm Association (the aircraft division of the Royal Navy) in 2005; and the freedom of Eastbourne, the town in which he had lived for forty-two years, in March 2006. On this last occasion he was presented with a vellum scroll, a medal on a ribbon, and the additional gift of a bottle of malt whisky, this last a nod to his much-quoted remark that he owed his long life to ‘cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women’. Increasingly frail, but apparently indomitable, he had recently been persuaded to move from his flat to a residential home only after being certified blind and suffering a couple of falls.
His 110th birthday in June that year was noted in the House of Commons, where his local MP tabled a motion offering the House’s congratulations. The birthday telegram from the Queen he had now received by post for ten years was delivered in person by the Defence Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. While this birthday was celebrated in a local Eastbourne hotel, the following one took place aboard HMS Victory, at the invitation of the Royal Navy. In 2007 he also received Special Recognition at the Daily Mirror’s Pride of Britain awards, celebrating the country’s ‘unsung heroes’, ordinary people who had done remarkable things and voted for by members of the public. The award was made for his continuing work in educating children about the First World War. His 112th birthday in June 2008 was hosted by the RAF and marked by a fly-past. He was awarded the freedom of Brighton and Hove in April 2009 and an honorary doctorate in engineering from Southampton University a month later. He was already the recipient of the President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ Special Award for Outstanding Contribution and Achievements on behalf of the Engineering Profession, and received a further honorary doctorate of engineering from the Warsash Maritime Academy in Southampton that May. Two months later, on 18 July 2009, Henry Allingham died in his sleep, and his passing was headline news around the world. As a result Harry Patch became Britain’s Last Veteran.
No one doubts that Henry Allingham had a tough war, in which he served with great distinction, but as he himself said: ‘It was the men in the trenches who won the war.’ Harry Patch would m
ake no claim to have had anything to do with winning the war, but it is the infantryman who has become the most popular representative of all those who fought in it, and it therefore seems fitting that the Last Tommy should also become the Last Veteran. Patch seems truly representative of his generation and a lost world, much in the way George Sherston, that simplified version of the author in Siegfried Sassoon’s autobiographical trilogy, stands for the decent, ordinary public-school officers who led rankers like Patch into battle. Like many people born in the countryside in the Victorian era, he remained firmly attached to his local roots. For most of his life, apart from his war service, he rarely left Somerset, the county in which he was born and in which, 111 years later, he died and was buried. His voice retained a distinctive Somerset burr right to the end, even when it had been reduced to a whisper. As the then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, observed in ‘The Five Acts of Harry Patch’, the poem he wrote in March 2008 at the request of the BBC, the Last Veteran’s name had a Shakespearean ring to it, one that might have placed Harry Patch among the ragtag of ordinary soldiers fighting alongside Henry V at Agincourt. The history of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, with whom Patch served, stretches back to the early eighteenth century and the many battles in which the regiment took part down the years are resonant with English history: Dettingen, Corunna, Waterloo, Sebastopol, Tel-el-Kebir. Perhaps the regiment’s most celebrated action took place between 30 June and 18 November 1857 when, vastly out-numbered, it defended the Residency at Lucknow in one of the bloodiest episodes of the so-called Indian Mutiny.
Not that this roster of military glory and gallantry meant much to Patch, who was decidedly not one of those who rushed to the recruiting station as soon as war was declared in August 1914. He recalled people singing a song about his county’s military keenness, written by Somerset-born Fred Weatherly, whose ‘Roses of Picardy’, set to music by Haydn Wood, became one of the most famous songs of the First World War. The final verse of ‘Up from Somerset’ runs:
For we’m come up from Somerset, Where the cider apples grow,
For we’re all King’s men in Somerset,
As they were long, long ago,
An’ when you’re wanting soldier boys,
An’ there’s fighting for to do,
You just send word to Somerset,
An’ we’ll all be up for you!
Word may have been sent, but Patch was not inclined to respond. ‘While a lot of local lads went and joined up in the local regiment, the Somerset Light Infantry,’ he recalled, ‘I never gave it a second thought.’ Sixteen at the time, Patch ‘didn’t welcome the war at all, and never felt the need to get myself into khaki and go out there fighting before it was “all over by Christmas” […] I’m not saying I knew any different, but at my age I was keen to continue my apprenticeship.’ He was at the time apprenticed to a plumber, and his family had a long connection with the building trade.
The son of a master stonemason, Henry John Patch was born in the village of Combe Down near Bath on 17 June 1898, and his family’s roots were buried deep in the Somerset soil. His father, whose family originated in a village near Glastonbury on the other side of the county, had been born at Claverton, a mile or so from Combe Down, while his mother had been born in the neighbouring village of Monkton Combe. The Patches had thoroughly colonised this small corner of England, and by the outbreak of the war there were fourteen different Patch families in Combe Down, including those of Harry’s five paternal uncles, whose names were absolutely characteristic of the time and place: Herbert, Alfred, Eli, Walter and Harry. All six brothers, including Harry’s father, William, were intimately bound up with the surrounding landscape in their working lives, as builders, masons and gardeners, or, in the case of Herb, in the employment of ‘a nearby earthworks called Tucky Mill’. Harry was the youngest of three boys, the eldest of whom, George, became a carpenter and cabinetmaker, while the middle brother, William, became a bricklayer. As well as being master mason on such prestigious projects as the Empire Hotel in Bath, the boys’ father invested in local properties, renting them out or building new houses on adjoining land. He was an expert gardener, whose carefully tended plot at ‘Fonthill’ (a semi-detached house somewhat grandiosely named after William Beckford’s folly in neighbouring Wiltshire) boasted fruit trees, beehives, a small flock of chickens, pigsties and numerous beds of vegetables, which supplied the family with food the whole year round. Harry’s mother had been in service, eventually taking charge of the household staff of a prosperous local doctor, but such was the success of William’s enterprises that the family soon had staff of their own: a cook, a butler who waited at table, and a housemaid. This was not of course unusual at this period, when even very modest families who could afford it employed servants. The cook and housemaid lived in when the family moved to a larger house in Combe Down called Rosemount, which boasted ‘a nursery, four bedrooms, a drawing room, dining room, kitchen, scullery and conservatory’. Grand as this house was by local standards, it had no gas or electricity or internal plumbing. It was heated by open fires and lit by candles and oil or paraffin lamps, and all drinking water came from a well and had to be boiled before use. There was no bathroom: family members took a weekly bath in a tin tub filled by hand with water from a boiler heated by the coal range in the kitchen, and had to make do with an outside privy.
Neither did relative prosperity mean that the Patch boys were automatically sent away to smart boarding schools such as nearby Monkton Combe, where their father had worked on the chapel. Harry’s oldest brother attended a private school at the cost of 2d a week, but Harry himself, by his own reckoning, ‘wasn’t worth the expense’, and went instead to the local Church of England primary school from the age of five. Some two hundred pupils were divided into four classes and received a basic education as well as lessons in handicrafts for the boys and housekeeping for the girls. Although in history classes Harry learned about some of the wars and battles in which his future regiment had been involved, stories of British heroism did not inspire him to want to join the army: ‘I was content with my life.’ He was more interested in local history and archaeology than in distant battlefields, in the lives of ordinary people such as himself, traces of which from earlier ages could be found not only in nearby Bath but in his immediate surroundings. He enjoyed exploring Combe Down’s abandoned open-cast quarries and underground mines, which had supposedly supplied stone for the Romans and still bore the tool-marks of more recent workings. Combe Down had not only provided building materials for Georgian Bath and Bristol: in the nineteenth century blocks of limestone were hewn out of underground workings and shipped to London on the Kennet and Avon Canal in order to provide facings for such famous buildings as Buckingham Palace, Apsley House and All Souls, Langham Place.
Harry’s childhood was typical of its period, blessed with a freedom that now seems unimaginable. Unsupervised, Harry and his friends roamed the countryside, exploring mines in which people had been killed by tunnel collapses, messing about on the recently closed Somerset Canal, taking out boats on the river and deliberately steering them over weirs. In winter they skated on the Kennet and Avon Canal or tobogganed down a steep run that ended on a railway line, which meant keeping a wary eye on the signals. Moorhen nests were raided for their eggs and local birds, dogs and cats became the targets of boys bearing catapults. For their elders, social life was built around the church and the many pubs that were a legacy of the area’s mining industry, and poaching in order to supplement the family diet was widespread. The outside world barely impinged upon this rural community: the only newspaper Harry’s father read was the Bath and Wells Chronicle, and such national phenomena or tragedies as the Women’s Suffrage Movement or the sinking of the Titanic had little impact.
Harry knew that he was destined to leave school at fourteen, and when a new headmaster introduced evening classes, open to everyone, he joined these, reckoning that geometry and algebra might come in useful when he sought work. Toward
s the end of 1912, he began a five-year apprenticeship with Jacob Long & Sons, one of the area’s leading builders, in order to learn the plumbing trade. The outbreak of war two years later had little immediate effect on Harry, even though his brother William had joined the regular army the previous year – much to the dismay of their mother, who held the popular view of the time that only ‘scruffs and villains’ took the king’s shilling – and was immediately posted to France. As more and more men enlisted, however, Harry’s employers lost staff. This meant that apprentices such as himself were soon taking on jobs normally given to fully qualified men. Harry took advantage of this to further his career and enrolled in evening classes in order to prepare for the London Guild of Registered Plumbers exam, which he sat and passed at the end of 1915.