James Delingpole James Delingpole

The last Tommy says: ‘It was a waste of time’

Harry Patch, 109, recalls his career in Kitchener’s army

Harry Patch, 109, recalls his career in Kitchener’s army

Two years ago, when he was a mere spring chicken of 106, the last surviving Tommy, Harry Patch, was invited to inspect the Lewis guns at the museum of his old regiment, the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, in Bodmin, Cornwall.

To help jog his memory, a young major in his party fumblingly demonstrated how to change the magazine. ‘I said: “Major, you’d have to be quicker than that in action,”’ recalls Harry in his soft Somerset burr. ‘I said: “Here. Give me the Lewis gun and set your watch.” So I took the magazine off and put a new one on. “There. Now how long was that?” I said. “Two seconds,” they said.’

How marvellous it is to be in the presence of living history. At 109, Harry may be only Britain’s second oldest man but he holds distinctions far more extraordinary than that: he is the only man left to have fought at Passchendaele; the only one left to have gone over the top. Indeed, of the five million infantrymen who fought between 1914 and 1918, Harry Patch is now the last man standing.

‘No idea,’ says Harry, when you ask him the obvious: how on earth he made it so far. He doesn’t drink; he gave up smoking when he was 60; he does a little light stretching when he feels like it, but that’s about it. ‘I’m happy and I don’t have any ambitions. I achieved what I wanted when I became a member of the Royal Sanitary Institute, when I wanted to be either a building inspector or a sanitary engineer.’

Which does, rather, put Harry’s world view into perspective. As far as Harry’s concerned he’s a retired plumber whose rich and varied life — at least by the cloistered standards of his rustic-idyll childhood in Combe Down, near Bath — has included two marriages, two sons and stints as fireman in Bath during the Blitz and working with GIs during the build-up to the Normandy landings.

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