Last British survivor of World War 1 dies.

Dozen Wicked Words

Harry Patch, last survivor of the trenches of World War One has died at the age of 111.

A great man, who said War was the "calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings" and said that "war isn't worth one life."


RIP

Obituary:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6954937.stm

piby

I think it's almost a romantic notion that he passed away a week to the day after his comrade Henry Allingham.

It seems we have now entered the era in which WW1 really is just a thing for the history books now that those last few links to the tenches are gone.

Tenger

piby wrote: »

I think it's almost a romantic notion that he passed away a week to the day after his comrade Henry Allingham.

It seems we have now entered the era in which WW1 really is just a thing for the history books now that those last few links to the tenches are gone.

And the 3rd last guy (Shame on me ,can't recall his name,he was in the Royal Navy in both World Wars) passed away in February. So last November when all 3 were at the Cenotaph really was the last living rememberance of WWI.

None of them wanted a big deal made of the last man passing away,hopefully their wishes are followed. There had been talk of giving them a full State funeral.

A sad moment, as WWI ceases to be 'Living History'.

Hagar

Bill Stone aged 108 AFAIR.

iceage

Harry Patch got a mention on Gerry Ryan this morning. Another section of history slips away into the past.

BigDuffman

Harry Patch got a new lease of life when he became an Agony Uncle in FHM. Last of the old breed. It was interesting for readers to get advice based on a century worth of experience.

Latchy

Harry Patch said in a recent interview '' We always must remember our war dead but dont forget the Germans either '' .

A man who knew and understood the real horrors of war

Fratton Fred

here's the times obituary.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6728124.ece

RIP old fella.

goldie fish

An Irishman's Diary


In search of answers: the grave of Pte James Murphy, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, First Battalion, at Hooge Crater Cemetery in Flanders.
Photograph: Tom Farrell

THE FINAL thread of human memory has been snapped. With the recent death of Harry Patch (aged 111), the last of millions of lights has winked out. In a Somerset nursing home last month, the fighting experience of the Western Front shifted forever from the warmth of the living brain to the cold pages of the history book, writes Tom Farrell .
It was pure coincidence that Harry Patch was in Ypres, western Flanders, last September, on the same weekend as my own visit.
Every evening at 8pm, courtesy of a local fire brigade band, the last post blasts out from under the barrel-vaulted interior of the Menin Gate. On September 27th, Harry Patch paid his final visit there.
Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield and completed in 1927, the gate is a neo-classical victory arch, etched with 54,896 names, a kind of architectural corollary to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. For the Menin Gate commemorates not remains without a name, but names without remains.
They are etched into the panels, the soldiers known to have died, but whose bodies were devoured by the mud of the Ypres Salient.
As the fading eyes of Harry Patch, eyes that first opened to see Victorian England, wandered over those walls one last time, he perhaps contemplated how close fate brought him to becoming another name there.
As a 19-year old private at the third Ypres (Passchendaele) Battle in 1917, he took shrapnel in the groin and was recuperating when the armistice was signed.
Random fate was something I contemplated the morning after his visit, as I crossed the highway that links Ypres with Ghevulelt. It was 90 years to the day that my own great grandfather was killed somewhere near that road, one of nearly 35,000 Irishmen lost in the war.
The task of researching family members is made easier by the internet. A few taps of the keyboard and up comes the website of the Commonwealth War Graves Commissions (CWGC). With a name and an address, I was able to learn the exact date and grid reference for his death.
But even online, there are gaps in the picture. So I went to Pearse Street Library and got out Neill’s Blue Caps , a history of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers by Col HC Wylly. But the picture still remains obscure.
My family have postcards, carefully stitched with the British and Belgian flags, wishing my grandfather a “Happy birthday from Daddy”. These would have been sent in October 1917. The Military Medal he was awarded suggests he survived Operation Michael, the terrible German offensive of spring 1918 where the Dublins were decimated.
What Wylly’s book did divulge was that on September 27th, 1918, a heavy and continuous bombardment of the entire front began. Early on September 29th, the Lancashire Fusiliers attacked along the front line under an intense barrage of high explosive and smoke. The Dublins, held in reserve, followed to capture territory and pushed forward until by dusk, the 86th Brigade held the line just off the Dadizeel-Gheluvelt Road.
The CWGC informed me that my ancestor was killed a day before and Neill’s Blue Caps notes that the Allies inadvertently took casualties at the start of the bombardment.
Was my great grandfather felled by German fire or did he fall victim to what these days would be called a “friendly fire” incident? It is unlikely I will ever know.
Still, unlike those whose Australian, Canadian or Scottish accents had whispered around the recesses of Menin gate the previous evening, I at least had a grave to visit.
The Hooge Crater Cemetery, designed by Edwin Luytens, takes its name from a roaring detonation that threw a tower of pulverised earth hundreds of feet skywards in July 1915.
As with the more famous Messines Ridge, where southern Irish soldiers and Ulstermen fought alongside each other, a tunnel had been burrowed under the German positions weeks before. It was packed with ammonal, the most potent explosive of the era.
The grey-white slabs of Hooge, kept moss and lichen-free by the CWGC, stretched away and blurred in the distance. Occasionally a wreath or fading poppy was affixed to the headstone of some young Welshman or New Zealander. Of the 5,924 British and Commonwealth graves there, around 3,600 of them were “known unto God”. He was 20 rows from the rear: Private James Murphy, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 1st Battalion. He had been moved to Hooge in July 1919 along with the bodies of two other Dublin privates named Nugent and Horsham, recorded as killed the same day.
Bucolic as the Flanders countryside now looks, it takes only a little effort to visualise the mud and iron nightmare of nine decades ago. But no living person can truly imagine its scale. How can anyone today grasp the awfulness of the moment when the guns fell silent and the men stood with bayonets fixed? The wail of officers’ whistles would have been that of a banshee, calling men and boys to their doom. Scrambling over sandbags, past coils of barbed wire, instant oblivion from a bullet was probably the quickest, cleanest way to die.
It has taken nearly a century for that world to fade forever from human memory. With Harry Patch gone, we will forever look at the first World War across a gulf that can never be crossed.
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times

Maverick88

Went to the Menin Gate on for a history project at secondary school. The most amazingly moving place I've ever visited. The names stretching from floor to ceiling of this huge gate. Then the local fire brigade doing the last post. Will always remember that visit. Just couldn't comprehend the numbers involved who had never been found and had no known grave.

My great grandad (mother's side) was there, as was my grandad (dad's side) oldest brother, both came home. Grandad's brother suffered shell shock.

Zambia

Is that the last surviving serving soldier from every side...?

mikemac

No.

I believe there is a British sailor who now lives in Australia.
And also an Canadian soldier still around

Not sure where I read that, it was probably here

Zambia

Sure we will hear about it in some news report when they pass on. Hope the old bloke passed on peacefully.

gizmo555

mikemac wrote: »

No.

I believe there is a British sailor who now lives in Australia.
And also an Canadian soldier still around

Not sure where I read that, it was probably here

Patch was, with Claude Choules, one of the last two surviving British veterans of the First World War, and along with Frank Buckles and John Babcock, one of the last four worldwide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Patch

Choules was a sailor, while Buckles was a US army ambulance driver and Babcock a Canadian infantryman who was lucky enough not to have been put into combat before the war ended.

Zambia

So could you safely say the last person who actually saw the first world war has left us?

goldie fish

Zambia232 wrote: »

So could you safely say the last person who actually saw the first world war has left us?

That is indeed the case.
I discovered a relative on the wall when I visited there last year. He had otherwise vanished from family memory, as he was an older brother, and his younger sisters, given the time, never spoke of him again.
It is great that at least in one place in the world, his name is forever remembered.

It struck me that we in ireland have decided to forget a significant part of our history, and most irish families have someone who followed Redmond to flanders, or the somme, or even Mesopotamia or Gallipoli.
Perhaps the schools should start teaching about Redmond, and not just giving the impression that Irish History begun in 1916, then nothing happened till 1919, and meanwhile the foreigners were having an oul war.

Hagar

I'm moving this to the WWI, it's more fitting I think.