At last the family shame has gone
Sunday TimesAugust 20, 2006
John-Paul Flintoff meets the family who last week won their 14-year
fight to lift the taint of cowardice from their grandfather, and
asks: are we sanitising history
Gertrude Harris was 40 when she finally learnt what had happened to
her father. Harris, now 93, was at a dinner with her extended family
when an aunt asked: "What's all this I hear about Harry?"
The aunt had left home after the first world war, ignorant of the
details of her elder brother's death. But her surviving brothers
declined to comment. "They said, `Oh, we don't talk about that',"
Harris recalls. That dinner took place in the early 1950s.
Afterwards, Harris confronted her mother, Harry Farr's widow.
"And she said, `Well, I've kept it to myself all these years, but
now I will tell you that your father was shot for cowardice'."
This week the Ministry of Defence announced a pardon for Private
Farr, along with 305 other servicemen executed between 1914 and
1918.
In the light of modern ideas about soldiery and a somewhat clearer
understanding of shell shock, or post-traumatic stress disorder,
most people have greeted the news with approval.
After all, the number of soldiers deserting and absent without leave
has more than doubled since the start of the Iraq war. Nearly 2,800
went missing from their units between 2003 and 2005. These days the
army tends to write them off in their absence, not even bothering
with a court martial. Just imagine the outrage, today, if they were
rounded up and shot. Or if the same fate attended the 800-odd troops
who have been sent home from Iraq for treatment at the Priory clinic
after developing psychiatric illnesses in the war zone.
Sceptics argue that a retrospective pardon of soldiers executed 90
years ago is meaningless. Correlli Barnett, the military historian,
says the decisions were taken from a different moral perspective.
Another, Sir John Keegan, says a pardon essentially seeks to
impose "a sanitised version of the past".
Farr's family has campaigned in the courts for years to achieve
this. The news, conveyed to Harris by telephone by John Dickinson,
her lawyer, on Tuesday, was utterly unexpected. "He said, `Gertie,
you've got it.' I didn't understand. I said, `Sorry?' And he
said, `You've got the pardon for Harry'."
That night she was unable to sleep at her home in Harrow, northwest
London. She kept the radio on and hourly news bulletins reminded her
that her father had been cleared.
Government figures, including John Major, the Conservative former
prime minister, and Geoff Hoon and John Reid, the Labour former
defence ministers, have persistently opposed a pardon, presumably on
the grounds that it might present an unwelcome precedent.
Des Browne, the current defence minister, was careful to emphasise
that the pardon was aimed substantially at easing the suffering of
the executed men's families: "Although this is a historical matter,
I am conscious of how the families feel today. They have had to
endure a stigma for decades."
Gertrude Harris was born a year before the war started. Her mother,
also called Gertrude, had met Farr when she was 16. Having already
served in the army as a regular soldier, he was among the first
troops sent to France.
He saw action at the battle of Neuve Chappelle in March 1915, when
11,500 British soldiers died or went missing in three days. In just
35 minutes, more ammunition was fired than in the entire Boer war.
In May he fought at Aubers Ridge, in which another 11,000 British
soldiers were lost. Shortly after, he was diagnosed with shell
shock.
Officers in similar situations were sent home to recover, but not
Farr.
After five months of treatment in France during which time nurses
had to write letters home because he could not hold a pen in his
shaking hand he was sent back to fight at the Somme in July 1916.
But he was not ready and by September he had lost his nerve
irretrievably.
He told the court martial: "On the sergeant-major's return I
reported to him and said I was sick and could not stand it. He then
said, `You are a f****** coward and you will go to the trenches. I
give f*** all for my life and I give f*** all for yours and I'll get
you f****** well shot'."
Two men were ordered to conduct Farr to the front. "They commenced
to shove me. I told them not to as I was sick enough as it was. The
sergeant-major then grabbed my rifle and said, `I'll blow your
f****** brains out if you don't go'. I then called out for an
officer but there were none there."
A captain in the 1st West Yorkshire Regiment reported that Farr had
shown good conduct and character except under fire: "I cannot say
what has destroyed this man's nerves, but he has proved himself on
many occasions incapable of keeping his head in action and likely to
cause a panic."
The tribunal disregarded Farr's medical history. "He was in hospital
for five months," says his daughter now. "Would they have kept him
there if he was well enough to fight? No, he was a helpless mess."
Farr represented himself at the tribunal, which lasted just 20
minutes. He was shot at Carnoy at 6am on October 18, 1916. He
refused to wear a blindfold.
Shortly afterwards his widow received an official letter: "It is
with regret that I have to inform you that Pte Harry Farr has been
shot for showing cowardice." It would have been bad enough to learn
that he had been killed in action. This was much worse. She shoved
the letter away and told nobody.
However, she started to look unwell and as people challenged her
over this she admitted the truth to her parents and in-laws. Harry's
own father was a military man. As soon as he was told, the blinds of
the home were drawn in shame. Nobody mentioned Harry in front of him
again.
Soon after, Farr's widow went to the post office to be told that her
pension had been stopped. She was 21 with a three-year-old girl to
support. Unable to pay rent, she was turned out onto the streets. So
she went looking for a job in service, eventually finding a post as
kitchen maid at a house in Hampstead, north London, where she was
allowed to take her daughter.
She had only one photograph of her husband and every year at
Armistice Day she suffered terribly. "Nobody knows the feelings,"
she once said. "Every year I feel worse because I look at all those
men who've been through it and came home and I think my husband
should be with them."
Mother and daughter kept the secret until the late 1980s when
Gertrude Harris's daughter, Janet Booth, said that she was taking
her family to France and wanted to visit her grandfather's
grave. "There was a look passed between my grandmother and my
mother," Booth recalls. "And my grandmother said, `He hasn't got a
grave'."
In 1990 the government released papers relating to the first world
war courts martial. Farr's widow watched a television interview with
Andrew MacKinlay, the Labour MP for Thurrock, who said that he was
going to try to secure pardons. Booth got in touch with him and
introduced him to her grandmother, then 99 years old.
They brought Julian Putkowski, a military historian who had written
extensively about the executed men. Putkowski recorded an interview
with Farr's widow in which she poured out her memories for the first
time. It was broadcast on Radio 4 and a copy remains in the archive
of the Imperial War Museum.
Three months later she died. But the campaign was unstoppable, Booth
says. "The reason I started was for my grandmother, and when she
died it was for my mother. It's been 14 years. It's taken a long
time, but we can't take all the credit. We have had so much help.
We're delighted that not only have we got a pardon for my
grandfather but also for the other 305. That's the icing on the
cake."
Later on in the war, relatives of executed men got letters saying
they had been killed "in action". Many relatives remained ignorant
of the truth for decades, Booth says: "One chap found out only two
days ago what had happened to his relative."
Of the 306 men who will now be pardoned, 266 were executed for
desertion, 18 for cowardice, seven for quitting their posts, six for
striking or showing violence to their superiors, five for
disobedience, two for sleeping at their post and two for casting
away arms. Another 37 were shot for murder and three for mutiny.
Gary Sheffield, professor of history at King's College London, says
a general pardon fails to distinguish between those who deliberately
let down their comrades and those who did not....
