This obituary has been republished as part of The Telegraph's commemoration of the end of the First World War. As well as the generals who planned missions and the poets who immortalised them, many ordinary British men and women helped bring about the Armistice on November 11 1918. Here, we remember them
Private Harry Patch, who died on July 25 2009 aged 111, was believed to be the last surviving British soldier to have gone into action on the Western Front, an experience about which he retained bitter memories.
As the last Tommy, the last British trench fighter of the Great War, the last man to have gone over the top, and latterly and briefly - after the death a week ago of Henry Allingham - Britain’s oldest man, Patch bore his celebrity with bemused dignity. “Why I’m still here,” he remarked at the age of 108, “I can’t fathom.”
When the television documentary makers started to interview the small corps of centenarian veterans at the turn of the 20th century they found that several retained vivid memories of the trenches. But Patch was the one who burned with the strongest indignation - at the constant danger, the noise, the rats, the lice and the biscuits that were too hard to eat at Passchendaele.
Of his four months in the trenches at Ypres, Patch vividly remembered the fear and bewilderment of going “over the top”, crawling because to stand up meant the certainty of being mown down by the German machine guns.
As his battalion advanced from Pilckem Ridge, near Ypres, in the summer rain of 1917 the mud was crusted with blood and the wounded were crying out for help. “But we weren’t like the Good Samaritan in the Bible, we were the robbers who passed them by and left,” said Patch.
At Passchendaele, his unit came across a member of the regiment lying in a pool of blood, ripped open from shoulder to waist. The man was pleading to be shot. But before anyone could draw a revolver, the man died with the word “Mother” on his lips. “It was a cry of surprise and joy,” recalled Patch, “and I’ll always remember that death is not the end.”
First World War veterans Henry Allingham, Harry Patch and Bill Stone in 2008CREDIT: REUTERS/ALESSIA PIERDOMENICO
When they reached the enemy’s second line, four Germans stood up, and one ran forward pointing his bayonet at Patch who, with only three rounds left in his revolver, wondered what to do. He then deliberately fired at the man above the ankle and again above the knee.
At 10.30pm on September 22 his five-man Lewis gun team was crossing open ground single file on the way back to the support line when a shell exploded, blowing the three carrying the ammunition to pieces. Patch was hit in the groin by shrapnel, and thrown to the ground. Waking in a dressing station he realised that, although very painful, his wound was little more than a scratch.
The following evening a doctor explained that he could remove a two inch piece of shrapnel, half an inch long with a jagged edge, but there was no anaesthetic available. After thinking over the prospects Patch agreed to have the sliver removed, and was held down by four men as it was extracted with tweezers. The operation took two minutes, during which - he recalled - he could have killed the doctor.
The son of a master stonemason, Henry John Patch was born at Combe Down, near Bath, on June 17 1898 and educated at the local Church of England school. On leaving at 15 he was apprenticed to a plumber. One of his brothers, a sergeant-major in the Royal Engineers, had been wounded at Mons, so young Harry knew enough to have no wish to go when he was called up at 18.
Sent for six months to the 33rd Training Battalion near Warminster, Wiltshire, he learnt to lock up his kit after his boots were stolen, and earned his crossed guns badge for marksmanship, which came with an extra 6d a day.
On landing in France in June 1917 Patch became a Lewis machine-gunner with “C” company of the 7th Battalion, Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry at Rouen, and was in the trenches on his 19th birthday. Although he did not go into action that day, he saw the Yorkshires and Lancashires climbing out of their dugouts to be mown down before reaching the German line.
While watching through his firing aperture two dogs scrapping for a biscuit, he found himself wondering why he was fighting for “19d a flipping day”. Nevertheless there were some compensations, such as the comradeship, and learning to smoke with his pipe upside down so that there was no glow at night, or by getting under a groundsheet to ensure no smoke showed by day.
He would receive occasional parcels from home, though one containing a slice of his brother’s wedding cake and an ounce of tobacco had become so scrambled up that they had to be thrown away. There was also the respite offered by Talbot House behind Ypres, where there was a sign “Abandon all rank ye who enter here” and the Reverend “Tubby” Clayton offered games and led the singing.
After being evacuated to England, Patch was sent to a series of hospitals; he met Ada Billington, his future wife, when he knocked her over while running past a cinema in Sutton Coldfield. By the time he was fully fit again, the Armistice had been declared, and he only wanted to forget.
The Prince of Wales shares a joke with Harry Patch in 2003CREDIT: PAUL EDWARDS, SUN WPA ROTA
He never watched a war film, or talked about his experiences, even to his wife, with whom he had two sons. Instead he concentrated on returning to plumbing. He did not go back to his old firm because the foreman insisted that he must complete the final two years of his apprenticeship, though a lawyer told him that the contract had been broken when the firm failed to release him from his indentures in 1918.
After flirting with the idea of joining the police, Patch spurned an offer of his old job back at the full rate and worked on a housing scheme at Gobowen, Shropshire, before being invited to work on the Wills memorial tower being built at Bristol University.
With financial help from his boss, he passed the exam to become a member of the Institute of Sanitary Engineers and was made manager of his company’s branch in Bristol, to which he cycled 12 miles each day from his home during the General Strike. After 10 years he bought his first car, an Austin Seven, and set up his own business.
At 41 Patch was too old to be called up for the Second World War, but he joined the Auxiliary Fire Service in Bath, and was trained to use a Vickers machine gun if the Germans arrived.
In 1942 Patch found himself called to deal with the results of the “Baedeker raids” and fought fires all night, not only in Bath but also in Bristol and Weston-super-Mare. The pumps ran out of water because the drains were fractured, and he found himself diving under his fire engine as it was sprayed with bullets from a low-flying aircraft.
After three of his plumbers were called up, Patch sold his business and moved to Street, in south Somerset, having seen an advert for a sanitary engineer to service military camps.
He bought a partnership, and found that the job meant that he knew about all troop movements, except the launch of the Normandy invasion. Returning to one camp the next morning he found plenty of food and the fires still burning. The Americans had left behind large amounts of equipment which, after finding no one prepared to take it, he sold.
Starting up again after the war, his business flourished and by the time he retired in 1963 aged 65 he had charge of 10 plumbers and 18 fitters.
With his second wife Jean, Patch was invited to visit the Normandy battlefield by a friend who had two seats going spare on his coach. Patch was moved to tears on Omaha beach, thinking of the Americans he had known, and had no desire to go again.
Harry Patch shows his medalsCREDIT: ANDREW CROWLEY
But after the death of his second wife, and his admission to an old people’s home when he was 100, Patch’s wartime memories were stirred again. Prompted by the light outside his room as he lay in bed, a recurring nightmare recreated the flash of the bomb that had hit his unit.
By then there were television crews eager for interviews. While agreeing to appear in Richard van Emden’s programme The Trench, in which veterans talked about their experiences, he still voiced doubts to the camera. “You can make the programme,” he said, “you can imitate a shell burst by a thunderclap firework... you can improvise everything, except the fear.”
Roundly declaring that anybody who claimed not to have been afraid at the front was a liar (pronounced in his defiant West Country burr), he expressed satisfaction that he had never killed a man. No war was worth the loss of a couple of lives, let alone thousands, for what was nothing but “a family row”, he said, though he admitted he would have shot the Kaiser and Hitler to save millions of lives.
As one programme followed another Patch became a new phenomenon of the age, a centenarian - and latterly a supercentenarian - celebrity. He had a cider, Patch’s Pride, named after him, and was awarded an honorary degree by Bristol University, where he had worked on the Wills memorial tower 80 years earlier.
He also received the Légion d’Honneur from the French government and was persuaded to meet a veteran from Alsace, who had fought on the German side at Passchendaele, and found him “a very nice gentleman”; they exchanged gifts of a bottle of cider and Alsatian biscuits, then attended the Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate.
Harry Patch’s two wives predeceased him, as did the two sons of his first marriage. When he went into the old people’s home he found a lady friend in her eighties but the thought of the fuss the press would make put him off marrying again.
In the end it was the loss of his three friends on the night of September 22 almost 90 years before that haunted him. “Those chaps are always with me. I can see that damned explosion now,” he would say.
Private 29295 Patch never fitted comfortably into a hero’s mould; he had been a reluctant conscript, considered Remembrance Day “just showbusiness”, and war “organised murder, and nothing else”.
Asked about talk of a state funeral, as his country’s last Tommy, Harry Patch insisted: “It’s not for me.” His wish was to be buried alongside his family in the village churchyard at Monkton Combe. “Why,” he asked. “would I want to be anywhere else?”
This obituary was originally published by The Telegraph on July 26 2009
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