Harry Patch - The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life of Harry Patch, Last Veteran of the Trenches, 1898-2009

Harry Patch & Richard van Emden

United Kingdom

The Last Fighting Tommy

The Life of Harry Patch, The Only Surviving Veteran of the Trenches

2007, EN

Harry Patch, 110 years old, is the last British soldier alive to have fought in the trenches of the First World War. From his vivid memories of an Edwardian childhood, the horror of the Great War and fighting in the mud during the Battle of Passchendaele, working on the home front in the Second World War and fame in later life as a veteran, The Last Fighting Tommy is the story of an ordinary mans extraordinary life.

Table of contents

It was the men in the trenches who won the war. What they put up with, no one will ever know. Ive seen them coming out of the line, poor devils, in a terrible state, plastered with mud. They were like hermit crabs with all their equipment on and theyd plonk down in the middle of the road before somebody helped them up. How did they manage? They were at the end of their tether. They were worn out, absolutely done up. They could hardly put one foot before the other, they were gone, depleted, finished, all they wanted to do was sleep, sleep, sleep.

Air Mechanic Henry William Allingham N8289, N12 Squadron Royal Naval Air Service, 6 June 1896

Harrys father was keen on rabbiting. After he died, his sons found his gun. Nobody knew whether it had ever been licensed, so they threw it down Grannys well.

May Cooper, daughter of George Patch, and Harrys niece, born 1918

I dont think Harry wanted to fight, but he went in any caseI never heard him speak about the war, and I somehow doubt he ever spoke about it.

Margaret Ffoulkes, George Atkins daughter and Harrys god-daughter

When they launched the Somerset Poppy Appeal, they had a great big cannon that shot the poppies out of the muzzle. Of course everybody jumped in shock, but Harry didnt stir a muscle. He just said, You havent heard the guns like I have.

Pauline Leyton, manager at Harrys residential home

When I first knew Harry he was the champion of local causes. He hates injustice and never hesitated to write to the council or the local newspaper, usually firing on all cylinders when he did so.

David Isaacs, son of Betty Isaacs, Harrys neighbour

I was in the living room with my back to the television. Suddenly, I heard his distinctive voice and it made me feel quite peculiar. I was very still for a moment. I remember thinking, Oh my goodness, its Uncle Hal.

June Beeching, niece to Harrys first wife Ada, born June 1933

H arry Patch is 108 years old, and Britains second oldest man. With a good, if not a full, head of hair, and eyes that will recognize a friend at a hundred paces, his looks belie his great age. He is not a man who comes across as a potential record-breaker or statistical anomaly, but he is. He was born in 1898, one of fewer than thirty people in the United Kingdom today who can boast a nineteenth-century birth date.

Currently, there are about eight thousand centenarians, men and women, in Great Britain, compared to 102 in 1911, according to the Office of National Statistics. Nevertheless, fewer than 1 in 200 men reach the grand age of 100, and to survive to Harrys great age is, statistically, almost as rare as reaching a century in the first place. At the time of writing, April 2007, he is (without touching too much wood) just fourteen months short of passing another milestone, no, to join the group of so-called supercentenar-ians, of whom there have been fewer than a thousand authenticated cases worldwide in the history of mankind. It is disconcerting to note that Harry has just as good a chance of reaching such a landmark as he had of surviving unscathed at the age of nineteen when he went over the top with his battalion during the battle of Ypres in August 1917.

Harry has lived to become the last British trench fighter of the Great War and, as significantly, the last man to have gone over the top, perhaps the defining experience of that war. Surviving the conflict was fortunate enough, but now, ninety years on, he has lived to become the last survivor from among five million infantrymen who fought between 1914 and 1918, the last of 1.7 million soldiers serving with the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front in the summer of 1917, the last of the 759,615 casualties recorded by the BEF that year and of the 77,479 men who were lost in September, killed and wounded in the bloody salient in front of Ypres during the battle of Passchendaele.

Harry is aware that he is heir apparent to the title of Britains oldest man, and while he is a little bemused that he is alive Why Im still here, I cant fathom one has a sneaking suspicion that he is quite intrigued to see just how far he can go while he continues to enjoy life. Until her death, he sat most days on a sofa for two, next to his beloved Doris, his companion, some sixteen years his junior. The two were inseparable after she came to the home five years ago.

Doris was no ninety-two-year-old shrinking violet. A feisty Londoner, from Angel Road, Edmonton (a street that, sadly, no longer exists), and the daughter of a gas worker, she learnt as a child to look after herself, and not to let others put her down. My mother always told me, Doris said firmly, dont let people shit on you, and so she never did, but she had a soft side too. Her relationship with Harry was mutually supportive and caring.

It is clear that Doris was proud of Harrys achievements, but if she thought Harry might be getting too big for his boots she ran her finger up the underside of her nose, to indicate that the man beside her might have been getting just a touch too posh.

Doris died in March 2007, and this was hard for Harry. Loneliness is a recurring problem for anyone who has outlived his generation: everyone Harry knew as a child, teenager or young man has died, just one of the difficult aspects of living so long. It seems strange, more than sixty years since the end of World War II, that when Harry says after the war, you have to check which war he is talking about, for he served in both.

Henry John, as he was christened in 1898, is an unassuming man, now famous for four months spent on the Western Front in 1917, when as a young infantryman he served in the trenches in front of Ypres, the town that has come to symbolize the worst fighting of the Great War. His time at the front was brief in comparison with many others, but now he is the only man to have lived in the trenches who can provide a direct link to the war that forged European lives not just for a generation but for the rest of the century. He is self-effacing and self-reliant, a man born into a world where self-help and independence were expected. On the tours he has made back to Belgium since 2000, he has been the object of enormous attention but at the same time he has sought not to put anyone out; asked if there is anything anyone can do, he invariably replies, Im all right, dont mind me, in his distinctive Somerset accent.

Nine years ago, few people, if any, knew about Harry. His name was just one among approximately 350 British soldiers whose identity was published in the national press when the French Government awarded surviving veterans the Legion dHonneur for service on the Western Front. Only when the pool of soldiers dried up and the numbers in the lists were rapidly revised downwards did his name become more prominent. All of a sudden, people wanted to hear his story.

For eighty years Harry had never spoken about the war, and when he finally did there was a rawness to his voice which said as much about his former silence as it did about his service. Television took an interest. Harry could tell his story well. By this time there were perhaps seventy veterans left, but how many could tell their tale in a way that could translate easily to television screens? Not many, and most not as well as Harry. As the pool of veterans became ever smaller, so the attention grew.