Peter Parker - The Last Veteran - Harry Patch and the Legacy of War

A small mutiny at Golden Hill Fort was easy enough to deal with, but by January 1919 much more worrying instances of military insubordination were occurring elsewhere. Fears of the sort of mass revolt that had occurred in Russia led to a misguided decision to keep British forces hard at it in order to distract them from any revolutionary ideas they might be entertaining now that they no longer had a war to fight and were anxious to leave the army as soon as possible. It was one thing to have demob delayed, quite another to be subjected to increased military discipline without any particular purpose in view.

The worst, most prolonged mutiny took place at Calais in January 1919 and was a direct result of the men’s impatience at the slow pace of demobilisation. Private John Pantling of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) stationed at the Val de Lièvre camp had been arrested and imprisoned for making a seditious speech to his fellow soldiers, some of whom subsequently broke into the jail in which he was being held and helped him escape. The sergeant who was guarding Pantling was then arrested, but released when the mood of the men was felt to be growing ever more dangerous. As on the Isle of Wight, a senior officer listened to the men’s grievances and agreed to some concessions and an improvement in conditions, but the subsequent setting up of so-called Soldiers’ Councils in the various army camps at Calais smacked too much of Soviet practices for the military authorities, and it was decided that Pantling should be found and rearrested. When he was, not a single one of the 2,000 men at Val de Lièvre answered the reveille. An equal number of men from a neighbouring camp joined the Val de Lièvre contingent in marching on GHQ to demand the release of the troublesome private. This was granted, but by now the mutiny had spread, with some 20,000 men involved. General Byng, a seasoned soldier who had led the Third Army to victory the previous year, was sent to Calais to put an end to the disturbances, but his troops simply joined the mutineers. Eventually a further meeting was organised at which further concessions were granted, and on 31 January the mutiny came to an end.

Such behaviour was not confined to troops still serving abroad, and January 1919 proved a testing time for Lloyd George’s coalition government, which – apparently without consulting the army – had promised rapid demobilisation. While General Byng was dealing with the RAOC in Calais, General Trenchard of the RAF had been sent to quell a disturbance at Southampton, where 20,000 soldiers had mutinied and taken over the docks. To his considerable surprise, Trenchard was manhandled by the troops he had come to address and was obliged to summon armed troops from Portsmouth together with a detachment of military police. These men surrounded the unarmed mutineers, who, perhaps aware of Trenchard’s reputation for ruthlessness, called off their action.

Mutinies were not simply confined to the army. Five hundred members of Trenchard’s RAF stationed in squalid conditions at Biggin Hill in Kent reacted to a particularly disgusting supper one evening by convening a meeting at which ‘The Red Flag’ was sung and a decision was taken to disobey orders. The following morning, as at Val de Lièvre, reveille was ignored and a deputation was sent to the commanding officer with a long list of demands. The authorities agreed to inspect the camp and capitulated almost at once, sending the men on leave while the whole place was overhauled. Meanwhile, there were small individual mutinies in the navy. The red flag was hoisted on a patrol boat at Milford Haven, while, encouraged by dockers and ‘agitators’, the crew of a large cruiser at Rosyth refused to sail to Russia. Further mutinies and demonstrations by soldiers awaiting demobilisation took place at Shoreham, Dover, Folkestone, Bristol, Sydenham, Aldershot and at Osterley, where in January 1919 some 1,500 members of the Army Service Corps, who had learned that they would be the last troops to be demobilised, commandeered lorries and drove them to Whitehall, where they obstructed the entrance to the War Office. The following month, finding food and transport entirely inadequate for their needs, 3,000 fully armed soldiers setting off back to France from Victoria Station decided instead to march on Horse Guards Parade. A nervous Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, receiving assurances that he could rely upon the loyalty of a reserve battalion of Grenadiers and two troops of the Household Cavalry, gave orders for the demonstrators to be surrounded and disarmed. Threatened with machine guns and fixed bayonets, the protesters surrendered, and like all the mutinies mentioned, this one ended without bloodshed.

Once demobbed, men still faced problems returning to civilian life. The thousands of servicemen who had been severely wounded in the war had to readjust to a drastically circumscribed world. Over 41,000 of those injured had lost one or more limbs, while a further 272,000 had suffered other sorts of incapacitating wounds. Others, who showed no visible signs of injury, were suffering from shell shock, ‘neurasthenia’, or other forms of battle trauma which made them unsuited to an immediate return to work: some 65,000 of them were awarded disability pensions. Even those who had emerged from the war able bodied and sound of mind often found themselves out of work. Andrew Bowie, who had served with the 1st Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders and would live to the age of 104, was just twenty-one when the war ended. ‘I was happy to get out of the army and to return home,’ he recalled, ‘but the prospects were very bad.’ Before the war he had worked in accountancy, but his small firm could not afford to re-employ him when he was demobbed. ‘You go away as a boy and come back as a man. What are you going to do? There were so many people like that. There seemed to be no future for you.’

Luckier veterans, mostly those who had been self-employed or in work as skilled craftsmen, found their jobs still waiting for them – though they were often expected to take a cut in wages. Many of the younger men had been apprentices before the war. This system, which stretched back to the Middle Ages, allowed youths to be taken on by a master craftsman who would teach them a trade in exchange for a guarantee that the apprentice would continue working for a set period after he had become skilled. A small wage would be paid while the apprentice learned his craft and the contract between him and his employer would be recorded in a document called an indenture, which would be cancelled at the end of the set term. Corporal John Oborne of the 4th Dorsetshires had been an apprentice joiner in Bath since the age of fourteen, and when the war started was put to work making boxes for shells and torpedoes while waiting to come of military age. After the war ended he stayed on in the army until the beginning of 1920 in order to save up the £50 he would need to buy a set of tools when he returned to his peacetime profession. His old firm was prepared to take him back to complete his apprenticeship, but the pay offered was less than what he would receive if he stayed in the army. He nevertheless completed his apprenticeship and remained with the firm until he retired in 1975, living on to the age of 104.

Harry Patch, on the other hand, refused to accept the terms offered by his old company, also in Bath. He had served three years of his apprenticeship as a plumber, from the age of fifteen, before being called up, and was expected to complete a further two years, at the same paltry wage of ten shillings a week, when he returned. ‘I was effectively being penalised for serving my country,’ he said. He was now twenty-one and about to be married and so refused the offer, doing odd jobs and private work instead. The problem for him now was that his old firm would not sign his indentures. He consulted his father’s solicitor, who offered the opinion that the war had rendered such contracts invalid. Even if Patch’s contract with his employer had not effectively been broken when Patch was called up, it was certainly broken by delayed demobilisation. Those who volunteered or had been conscripted had signed up only ‘for the duration’: by failing to release Patch from the army as soon as the war was over, the government had broken the contract once more. Patch nevertheless felt, as a matter of pride, that he was entitled to have his indentures signed. After a great deal of wrangling, and after he had accepted a job with another company, his employers eventually agreed. He remained in the plumbing trade for the rest of his working life.