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I had hoped that a bit of cash might have been found down the back of HMG’s sofa to pay for a bit of bronze in the shape of Harry Patch and Henry Allingham – the last two resident British WW1 veterans standing – to be installed in an appropriate public space. Harry was in the Army in Flanders where he lost all his machine gun squad by one German shell; Henry in the RN Air Service at Jutland, subsequently sent to the Western Front where RNAS joined with the RFC, and transferred into the shiny new RAF as a founder member. One of his duties as a maintainer was to crawl out into No-Man’s Land at the dead of night with a selection of spanners as weapons to scavenge useful parts from downed aircraft. He said he came face to face with some nightmarish sights on those tasks. Neither man ever accepted their efforts were heroic; as Henry once said (in a voice as strong and loud as a foghorn) ‘the real heroes were those left behind, those that gave their life for the Country’.
Indeed Claude Choules could join them as the representative of the RN’s ships’ companies; the cheerful fellow really was the last man standing.
Very British heroes. None wanted anything like a state funeral, but they probably wouldn’t mind a statue.