Deviation Posting – Harry Patch RIP

No one with an interest in modern history can fail to be moved by the passing of Harry Patch at 111 – Britain’s last fighting Tommy, as he described himself in his autobiography. Patch was officially the last man left alive (from any country) to have actually fought in the trenches during World War One.

A working class Somerset lad training to be a plumber he was called up in October 1916 and, by June 1917, was a lance corporal in France with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and went over the top at Passchendaele. Later he was badly wounded in the chest. After the war he built a plumbing business, married and had a family. During World War Two he volunteered as a fireman during the Luftwaffe’s 1942 attacks on Bath. He outlived his wife and children.

Patch did not speak of the war and his experiences for 80 years until after his 90^th birthday and then when he did was adamant that war was awful and conditions for the Tommies in the trenches abominable – dirt, filth, fear and lice. In2005 he met a German veteran, Charles Kuentz. He also told Tony Blair that nobody during the first world war should have been shot for cowardice (as an alarming number of Tommies were with only superficial court martials), “War is organised murder,” he insisted, “and nothing else.”

Patch, when he appeared on the BBC occasionally, was never anything less than the ordinary man who has seen and experiences extraordinary things. He never shied away from saying what he really thought of the war and never glossed over the horrors realising than when forgotten they can too easily happen again. With his passing goes our living memory of the most awful of wars.

Henry John Patch, born 17 June 1898; died 25 July 2009