11 November 2018

100th anniversary of the ending of World War One

Just thinking of this man today

Harry Patch was conscripted into the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry at the age of 18 in 1916 and was badly wounded in the battle of Passchendaele in 1917. He was the last surviving combat soldier of the First World War and briefly, the oldest man from any country in Europe. In his later years, he spoke about his experiences, and his anti-war, pacifist beliefs.

Harry Patch (Private) Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry

Born 17 June 1898, Combe Down, near Bath, Somerset. Died 25 July 2009, Wells Somerset

By his 19th birthday, Harry was in the water-logged trenches, on the front line of the Ypres Salient. On 16 August the Battle of Langemark, the second assault of the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) commenced and Harry went over the top for the first time. As he and his team advanced across Pilckem Ridge towards Langemark, they passed fallen men and men with horrific wounds. They finally reached a vacated German trench, spent the night listening to the fading cries and screams of the wounded. When they were relieved they were given a rest period before returning in September to the front line. That experience remained with Harry for the rest of his life.

On the night of 22 September 1917, near Langemark in Belgium, a German gun crew fired a shell in into the British lines. Harry had an incredible escape but three other men serving with the Lewis gun team were killed and none of their remains were ever found. Harry was blown off his feet and injured with a shrapnel wound. He was taken to a Casualty Clearing Station where a doctor removed the shrapnel without anaesthetic. He then got shipped back to England to a hospital in Liverpool and then to a convalescent camp at Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham where he met his wife, Ada Billington. After one year's rehabilitation, he was sent to the front in Ypres once again in 1918.

Harry never spoke about the war for 81 years, until a BBC researcher contacted him just after his 100th birthday. His story was told and he returned to Flanders Fields for the first time in 2003. Harry was a witness for all his comrades who fell in the mud of Passchendaele. 
The BBC persuaded Harry at 106, to return in the autumn of 2004, for a BBC documentary, The Last Tommy where he was filmed at Tyne Cot, the largest British war cemetery, containing almost 12,000 graves, many of them holding unidentified bodies. At the north east boundary of Tyne Cot,  The Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing bears the names of almost 35,000 officers and men whose graves are not known. 
On 27 September 2008, in a private ceremony attended by a few people, Patch opened a memorial on the bank of the Steenbeek in Langemark, at the point where he crossed the river in 1917. The memorial reads:

'Here, at dawn, on 16 August 1917, the 7th Battalion, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, 20th (Light) Division, crossed the Steenbeek prior to their successful assault on the village on Langemarck. This stone is erected to the memory of fallen comrades, and to honour the courage, sacrifice and passing of the Great War generation. It is the gift of former Private and Lewis Gunner Harry Patch, No. 29295, C Company, 7th DCLI, the last surviving veteran to have served in the trenches of the Western Front.’

Patch had refused to discuss his war experiences, until approached in 1998 for the BBC One documentary Veterans, on reflection of which and with the realisation that he was part of a fast dwindling group of veterans of "the war to end all wars".

Patch was featured in the 2003 television series World War 1 in Colour and said "if any man tells you he went over the top and he wasn't scared, he's a damn liar". He reflected on his lost friends and the moment when he came face to face with a German soldier. He recalled the story of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with God's Ten Commandments, including "Thou shalt not kill" and could not bring himself to kill the German. Instead, he shot him in the shoulder, which made the soldier drop his rifle. However, he had to carry on running towards his Lewis Gun, so to proceed, he shot him above the knee and in the ankle. Patch said,

I had about five seconds to make the decision. I brought him down, but I didn't kill him… Any one of them could have been me. Millions of men came to fight in this war and I find it incredible that I am the only one left.
          —Commenting on graves at a Flanders war cemetery, July 2007.

In November 2004, at the age of 106, Patch met Charles Kuentz, a 107-year-old Alsatian veteran, who had fought on the German side at Passchendaele (and served on the French side in World War II).^[22] Patch was quoted as saying: "I was a bit doubtful before meeting a German soldier. Herr Kuentz is a very nice gentleman however. He is all for a united Europe and peace – and so am I". Kuentz had brought along a tin of Alsatian biscuits and Patch gave him a bottle of Somerset cider in return.^[23] The meeting was featured in a 2005 BBC TV programme The Last Tommy, which told the stories of several of Britain's last World War I veterans.

In December 2004, Patch was given a present of 106 bottles of Patch's Pride Cider, which has been named after him and produced by the Gaymer Cider Company. In the spring of 2005 in an interview which he said of the First World War: "Too many died. War isn't worth one life" and in July 2005, Patch voiced his outrage over plans to build a motorway in northern France over cemeteries of the First World War.

When Harry died in 2009, the theme of his funeral service was "Peace and Reconciliation" and in addition to pallbearers from The Rifles (the successor regiment to the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry), Patch's coffin was accompanied by two private soldiers from each of the armies of Belgium, France and Germany.

In accordance with Patch's instructions, no guns were allowed at the funeral and even the officiating soldiers did not have their ceremonial weapons.

In his autobiography The Last Fighting Tommy, Patch wrote that “politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.”

An incredible life, Rest in Peace Harry.

English poet laureate, John Betjeman wrote a number of poems based on his experiences in Ireland between 1941 and 1943. This poem is set in west Co Waterford, with each stanza closing with the line "Dungarvan in the rain". Much researched and disputed by eminent academics, it recounts the story of his unrequited love for a woman called Greta Hellstrom.

The identity of this woman has been researched by biographers, and it was found that this wasn't the woman's real name. In fact, only one family knew who she was - until recently. Some individuals even claimed to be the woman Betjeman refers to as "my Swedish beauty", but no one matched the description.

The woman in the poem is in fact Emily Sears, who later married Ion Villiers-Stuart, member of a long-standing family of landed gentry, the Villiers-Stuarts of Dromana House. Betjeman knew them both. He used to visit the Yellow House in Helvick Head, a fishing lodge, which was then owned by the Villiers-Stuarts.

Betjeman "was stunned by my grandmother's extraordinary beauty, but though he worshipped her, it was only from afar, for she was in fact in love with my grandfather, Ion Villiers-Stuart, whom she married. They did, however, remain good friends right up to the end of his life," said Barbara Grubb, a member of the Villiers-Stuart family.

The poet tries to hide the identity of the woman by describing her as Swedish when, in fact, she was American, and by setting the poem in 1922. He was at school aged 16 in that year, and he only got to know the Villiers-Stuart couple in the early 1940s.

Betjeman married Penelope Chatwode in 1933 and they had two children. In 1941-1943, he took the post of British press attache in Dublin. During his time here, he and his family stayed in Collinstown House, near Clondalkin in Dublin. While in Ireland he attempted quite successfully to learn the Irish language.

During his time in Ireland he met Emily Sears. He visited her both in Galway and in Waterford. They spent many happy times both at Dromana and at the Yellow House at Helvick. He wrote Ireland with Emily after a bicycle ride through the Burren with her in the summer of 1943. In the same year, he and Chatwode returned to England. Betjeman was knighted in 1969 and he was made poet laureate in 1972. He died in 1984.

Grattan Square Dungarvan

The final lines of the poem show the poet's respect and his final acceptance of Emily's decision to remain friends and never to be lovers: "You were right to keep us parted:/Bound and parted we remain,/Aching, if unbroken hearted-/Oh! Dungarvan in the rain."

Dromana House

The Irish Unionist's farewell to Greta Hellastrom in 1922 

by John Betjeman

Golden haired and golden hearted
I would ever have you be,
As you were when last we parted
Smiling slow and sad at me.
Oh! the fighting down of passion!
Oh! the century-seeming pain-
Parting in this off-hand fashion
In Dungarvan in the rain.

Slanting eyes of blue, unweeping
Stands my Swedish beauty where
Gusts of Irish rain are sweeping
Round the statue in the square;
Corner boys against the walling
Watch us furtively in vain,
And the Angelus is calling
Through Dungarvan in the rain.

Gales along the Commeragh Mountains,
Beating sleet on creaking signs,
Iron gutters turned to fountains,
And the windscreen laced with lines,
And the evening getting later,
And the ache - increased again,
As the distance grows the greater
From Dungarvan in the rain.

There is no one now to wonder
What eccentric sits in state
While the beech trees rock and thunder
Round his gate-lodge and his gate.
Gone - the ornamental plaster,
Gone - the overgrown demesne
And the car goes fast, and faster,
From Dungarvan in the rain.

Had I kissed and drawn you to me
Had you yielded warm for cold,
What a power had pounded through me
As I stroked your streaming gold!
You were right to keep us parted:
Bound and parted we remain,
Aching, if unbroken hearted -
Oh! Dungarvan in the rain!

Saint Patrick's Day, 17 March.
Great day for the Irish. 

This song always seems appropriate for this time of the year, though it's a classic Irish song, made famous by the late, great Luke Kelly and Mary Black, you mightn't know that it was written by an Englishman!

Phil Colclough an English folk singer and songwriter wrote "Song for Ireland" with his wife, June Colclough.  Both came from North Staffordshire.

"Song for Ireland" was inspired by a trip the Colcloughs took to the Dingle Peninsula. Described as a "modern classic" it has been recorded by numerous artists, including Dick Gaughan, Luke Kelly, Mary Black, Ralph McTell, Celtic Spirit, The Dubliners, Brendan Hayes and Damien Leith.

Saint Patrick's Day definitely a day to sing a "Song For Ireland"

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig!

Song for Ireland - Dubliners (Lyrics)