WWI veteran Harry Patch dies
Updated on 25 July 2009
Harry Patch, the last British survivor of the first world war trenches, has died at the age of 111.
Mr Patch, known as the Last Tommy, passed away this morning at Fletcher House, the care home in Somerset where he was living. He became Britain's oldest man after Henry Allingham, another veteran of the war, died last weekend aged 113.
Mr Patch was a machine-gunner in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry and fought during the Battle of Passchendaele, in Ypres, which claimed the lives of more than 70,000 soldiers. He served in the trenches as a private from June to September 1917.
Born on 17 June 1898, Mr Patch grew up in Coombe Down, near Bath, and left school at the age of 15 to train as a plumber. He was 16 when war broke out and reached 18 as conscription was being introduced and after six months training he was sent to the frontline.
He was the number two in the Lewis gun team and his role was to carry and assemble the spare parts for the machine gun and ensure it worked. The five gunners made a pact not to kill an enemy soldier if they could help it but they would instead aim for the legs.
On 22 September 1917 a shell attack exploded above Mr Patch's head killing three of his comrades. Mr Patch was hit by shrapnel in the lower abdomen but survived.
During his recovery in Britain, he met his first wife, Ada, in 1918. They were married for almost 60 years and had two sons, Dennis and Roy, both of whom Harry has outlived.
Too old to fight in the Second World War Mr Patch became a maintenance manager at a US army camp in Somerset and joined the Auxiliary Fire Service in Bath. After the war he went back to plumbing and retired in 1963.
Following Ada's death in 1976, at 81 Mr Patch married his second wife, Jean, who died five years ago. His third partner Doris, who lived in the same retirement home, died last year.
It was only on his 100th birthday that Mr Patch first came to the spotlight as one of the last veterans of the First World War, when for the first time reporters and television crews visited his care home in Wells, Somerset. His autobiography, The Last Fighting Tommy, written with Richard van Emden, was published in 2007.
As well as launching poppy appeals, he became an agony uncle columnist for lads magazine FHM, had his portrait painted by artist and former England wicket keeper, Jack Russell, and had a special edition cider named after him.
In 1999 Mr Patch received the Legion D'Honneur medal awarded by the French government to 350 surviving first world war veterans who fought on the western front, dedicating it to his three fallen comrades.
At the age of 105 Mr Patch re-visited the Ypres battle field and in 2004 he returned for a BBC series to meet a German veteran Charles Kuentz. He also visited the British and German cemeteries, placing a wreath of poppies on one of the German graves.
In September 2008 he made his last trip to Langemark for the unveiling of a memorial.
Mr Patch believed "war is organised murder" and said: "It was not worth it, it was not worth one let alone all the millions.
"It's important that we remember the war dead on both sides of the line - the Germans suffered the same as we did."
Five Acts
In February this year, then Poet Laureate Andrew Motion was commissioned to write a poem in Mr Patch's honour, entitled "The Five Acts of Harry Patch".
I.
A curve is a straight line caught bending
and this one runs under the kitchen window
where the bright eyes of your mum and dad
might flash any minute and find you down
on all fours, stomach hard to the ground,
slinking along a furrow between the potatoes
and dead set on a prospect of rich pickings,
the good apple trees and plum trees and pears,
anything sweet and juicy you might now be
able to nibble around the back and leave
hanging as though nothing were amiss,
if only it were possible to stand upright
in so much clear light and with those eyes
beady in the window and not catch a packet.
II.
Patch, Harry Patch, that's a good name,
Shakespearean, it might be one of Hal's men
at Agincourt or not far off, although in fact
it starts life and belongs in Combe Down
with your dad's trade in the canary limestone
which turns to grey and hardens when it meets
the light, perfect for Regency Bath and you too
since no one these days thinks about the danger
of playing in quarries when the workmen go,
not even of prodding and pelting with stones
the wasps' nests perched on rough ledges
or dropped from the ceiling on curious stalks
although god knows it means having to shift
tout suite and still get stung on arms and faces.
III.
First the hard facts of not wanting to fight,
and the kindness of deciding to shoot men
in the legs but no higher unless needs must,
and the liking among comrades which is truly
deep and wide as love without that particular name,
then Pilckem Ridge and Langemarck and across
the Steenbeek since none of the above can change
what comes next, which is a lad from A Company
shrapnel has ripped open from shoulder to waist
who tells you "Shoot me", but is good as dead
already, and whose final word is "Mother",
which you hear because you kneel to hold
one finger of his hand, and then remember orders
to keep pressing on, support the infantry ahead.
IV.
After the big crowd to unveil the memorial
and no puff left in the lungs to sing O valiant hearts
or say aloud the names of friends and one cousin,
the butcher and chimney sweep, a farmer, a carpenter,
work comes up the Wills Tower in Bristol and there
thunderstorms are a danger, so bad that lightning
one day hammers Great George and knocks down
the foreman who can't use his hand three weeks
later as you recall, along with the way that strike
burned all trace of oxygen from the air, it must have,
given the definite stink of sulphur and a second
or two later the gusty flap of a breeze returning
along with rooftops below, and moss, and rain
fading over the green Mendip Hills and blue Severn.
V.
You grow a moustache, check the mirror, notice
you're forty years old, then next day shave it off,
check the mirror again - and see you're seventy,
but life is like that now, suddenly and gradually
everyone you know dies and still comes to visit
or you head back to them, it's not clear which
only where it happens: a safe bedroom upstairs
by the look of things, although when you sit late
whispering with the other boys in the Lewis team,
smoking your pipe upside-down to hide the fire,
and the nurses on night duty bring folded sheets
to store in the linen cupboard opposite, all it takes
is someone switching on the light - there is that flash,
or was until you said, and the staff blacked the window.
Published in Andrew Motion's collection, The Cinder Path, Faber and Faber, April 2009.
