Forgotten Soldiers

The Story of the Irishmen Executed by the British Army during the First World War

Stephen Walker

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780717162215
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

Drawing upon war diaries, court martial papers and interviews with veterans and family members, award-winning BBC journalist Stephen Walker explains how, often exhausted by battle, or suffering shell-shock, men who refused to fight were branded as cowards, and shot at dawn by a firing squad.

From the cities and townlands of Ireland to the killing fields of the Western Front and Gallipoli, Forgotten Soldiers traces the lives of men who enlisted to fight an enemy but ended up being killed by their own side.

For decades the full story of how the Irishmen died has largely remained a secret, but now one of the most controversial chapters in British military history can at last be told. In 2006 the British government finally pardoned those soldiers who were shot at dawn. Forgotten Soldiers is the first book to chronicle how relatives and campaigners fought to clear the men's names.

Chapter 1

NINETY YEARS ON

We are going to have to sort this out.

—TOM WATSON, MINISTER FOR VETERANS’ AFFAIRS, 2006

London, 2006. On a summer’s day at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, 92-year-old Gertie Harris sat in one of the large-windowed rooms that overlook the Thames. The city’s tourist season was in full swing, and in the bright sunshine visitors and office workers were enjoying the warm weather. Outside the building, civil servants were having a smoking break; others were chatting and sipping takeaway coffee, and in the distance the London Eye was slowly turning.

Inside the offices that house the leading personnel in Britain’s military establishment it was a particularly busy time. Officials were answering phones, preparing presentations and holding meetings. With British forces on duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a constant stream of enquiries to answer.

At the rear of the building, in one of the ministerial rooms, a group of people had gathered to discuss the army’s behaviour in a foreign land; but it was not a modern conflict they had come to consider. As Gertie Harris, the daughter of Harry Farr, gathered her thoughts and members of her family settled into their seats she was thanked for coming, and then the man sitting beside her leaned forward and spoke. ‘Now, Gertie, I am just going to listen to your story. Myself or my staff won’t interrupt you; we are just here to hear your story. You take as long as you like.’¹

For the next forty minutes the small audience listened carefully as she spoke movingly and quietly about a man she never knew. He had been a soldier, a husband and a father. She talked of how proudly he went to war, only to be killed by his own side. A survivor of the Battle of the Somme, he had been in hospital for five months with shell-shock and then later was found guilty of cowardice. He was so convinced of his innocence that at his execution he refused to wear a blindfold as he faced the firing squad.

Then Gertie Harris explained how the stigma and shame had affected her mother, how they were left penniless, with no army pension, and then made homeless. She recalled how his execution had been kept a family secret for decades, how her mother refused to talk about it, and why ninety years later it was time his name was cleared. When she finished her appeal she looked to her host, the newly appointed Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Tom Watson, who was beside her. He was so overwhelmed and emotional from what she had told him that tears welled in his eyes.

The Minister composed himself and after a few words brought the meeting to an end. He thanked the Farr family for coming and then organised tea for his guests. Afterwards, as he escorted his visitors out of the building, he promised them that he would do everything to find a resolution.

Watson’s officials were shocked by what they had just witnessed. They had not expected to see their Minister in tears, and the meeting was not the one they had planned for. They had come prepared to rebut the family’s arguments and had counselled the Minister to choose his words carefully during the encounter.

For months the Farr family and the Ministry of Defence had been locked in a legal battle, and Tom Watson had been warned by his legal advisers not to admit liability and to remain neutral. The tears were not part of the plan. The new Minister’s response to meeting the Farr family was genuine, and he was surprised at how the encounter had affected him. He had not expected to become emotional, as he had never previously thought strongly about the issue of pardons for those shot at dawn. The meeting with Harry Farr’s family changed all that. When his visitors left the building he turned to his officials and said, ‘We are going to have to sort this out.’

The issue of war pardons was not a new political challenge for officials in Whitehall, and the questions running through the new minister’s mind were the same that had been asked of previous government ministers.

For decades successive Conservative and Labour governments had rejected the idea of granting posthumous pardons, and officials at the Ministry of Defence were well versed in the arguments. The campaigners often argued that the original trials were unfair and badly run and that soldiers were not given fair treatment. Those against the pardons stated that it was wrong to apply the standards of today to the events of the past. Critics also suggested that such a move would be interpreted as historical revisionism, and many argued that the move was impracticable, as there simply wasn’t enough evidence available to re-examine each case.

It was these arguments that were traditionally used by government ministers. In 1993 the Conservative Prime Minister John Major rejected the call for pardons, saying it would be rewriting history. Similarly in 1998, after he personally reviewed a hundred of the cases, John Reid, then a junior defence minister in the newly elected Labour government, concluded that pardons were not possible because the evidence was insufficient. He insisted that it was not possible to determine from the records who was innocent and who had deliberately deserted their colleagues.

Tom Watson’s radical departure from the Whitehall script was a U-turn in government thinking and was not universally accepted by his staff. Some were not prepared to countenance a change of policy without further discussions; and one official privately challenged Gertie Harris’s version of events.

Watson remained convinced that he had heard a powerful story of injustice, and he was determined that his department would bring comfort to the Farr family. Within hours his tearful reaction to Gertie Harris’s story had become common knowledge throughout the corridors and offices of Whitehall. The news became a topic of conversation, and days later the new Minister was offered tea and sympathy when a member of the catering staff remarked with a knowing smile, ‘I heard you had a difficult meeting with Mrs Harris the other day.’²

Recently promoted as a junior defence minister, the MP for West Bromwich East was enjoying the biggest job of his short political career. Elected in 2001, Watson had a typical CV that mapped out his Labour credentials. Before he was elected to Parliament he was a spokesman for Labour students and had worked as a full-time trade union official. He arrived in the department in May 2006 as part of a Cabinet reshuffle, changes that saw Des Browne take the top post of Secretary of State for Defence. Browne’s predecessor, John Reid, moved to the Home Office after Charles Clarke was sacked.

At thirty-nine, Tom Watson knew that this promotion was a golden opportunity to progress up the ministerial ladder, and he was keen to make his mark. Before he arrived in the department he sought out his predecessor, Don Touhig, to get an understanding of what awaited him in his new position. As a former Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Touhig had served under the previous Secretary of State for Defence, John Reid, and would prove helpful to Watson.

Touhig was very experienced in the machinations of government, having been Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, and later a whip in the House of Commons before he became a minister in the Welsh Office. When he took up his role in 2005 as Minister for Veterans’ Affairs he began to take an interest in the pardons issue and started by reading the court martial file of Private Harry Farr. When he read the notes he was alarmed at what he saw and quickly concluded that the Farr family had a good case. He realised that the Ministry of Defence needed to come up with a response that would satisfy not just the Farr relatives but all the other family members related to executed men.

He privately floated the idea that the government could simply issue a statement of regret, but after taking soundings from MPs sympathetic to the pardons campaigners he knew that would not be acceptable. Eventually he came to the conclusion that the only way to solve the issue was to bring in legislation granting a statutory pardon to all the executed men.

He knew it would be difficult to convince John Reid that a new response was needed, as Reid had originated the 1998 inquiry and would probably be against revisiting the issue. Touhig then invited his officials to discuss what steps the department should be considering, but this was not greeted with universal support:

The officials were not being wholly cooperative and were deliberately awkward. I thought they were putting barriers up. I was repeatedly told this was a complex and difficult issue.

It reminded me of that famous Gladstone quote about Ireland: that every time he came up with a solution to the Irish problem the Irish changed the problem. That was the same here: every time I suggested a solution I was told it was too difficult.³

Convinced that he was being thwarted, he pursued the issue with John Reid and told him that he believed the only way the pardons issue could be dealt with was through new legislation that would result in a pardon for all those guilty of battlefield offences such as desertion and disobedience. At first Reid was resistant but he eventually allowed Touhig to ask his officials to explore the idea and draft some legislation, which he would examine in detail. Although Reid endorsed this move, Touhig doesn’t think he was particularly enthusiastic about it.

I don’t think his heart was in it. I think I was being indulged. I am convinced that John Reid felt that such a move would bring him into conflict with the defence chiefs and former defence chiefs in the House of Lords.⁴

As the officials began drafting legislation, Touhig wanted to inform other government officials in relevant departments about their plans, but he claims he was told by one official to keep the issue secret until more work was done.

However, in May 2006, when he was sacked in the Cabinet reshuffle, Touhig felt he could at least confide in his successor. He told Tom Watson about the plans for the ‘shot at dawn’ cases but warned him that, as the review was confidential, officials in Whitehall would be wary if he appeared to have knowledge of it. When Watson got to the Ministry of Defence some days later he questioned one official about the pardons, and the reply was exactly as Touhig had predicted. ‘Oh, you know about that, do you? That’s meant to be confidential.’

Secrecy had haunted the pardons debate for decades, and campaigners had made political capital out of the fact that the original court martial papers had been hidden from public view for most of the twentieth century. The files were originally expected to be stored in government archives for a hundred years, but in the early 1990s many of the papers were made public. The court martial files for all the executed soldiers are stored in the National Archives in London, and they vary in size and content. Some are short documents that reveal little and contain only brief accounts of what the offenders were charged with and what the evidence was. Others have more detailed information, often containing summaries of what happened at the court martial and a history of the soldier’s disciplinary problems. They often include medical reports and testimony from senior officers and colleagues.

Over the past ninety years the soldiers’ files and the correspondence associated with them have generated filing cabinets full of paper at the Ministry of Defence. Tom Watson was keen to get a sense of what the documents revealed. He asked that briefing documents surrounding the latest government review be delivered to his office. When they arrived he was staggered when close to a thousand pieces of paper thundered down on his desk. He wondered whether his officials were trying to make a point.

I think they were basically trying to show me how difficult this problem was and perhaps making a visual point that this is a difficult issue which I was not going to solve quickly. I looked at it and thought, somewhere in the middle of all this lies the answer. However, I did read every single piece of paper that was placed in front of me.⁵

The new Minister’s reading matter included a 53-page report that had been gathering dust in the Ministry of Defence for eighteen months. The document was significant not just for its contents but because of its origins. The report had been submitted to the British government in October 2004 by the Irish government, which believed that twenty-six Irish-born soldiers had been unjustly executed and should be pardoned. The Irish investigation had started after officials had been lobbied by the Irish Shot at Dawn campaign, run by Peter Mulvany, a former merchant seaman.

In his fifties, Peter Mulvany, who had an interest in military history, was also involved in a campaign to secure compensation for Irishmen who had been taken prisoner by the Germans during the Second World War. He realised that the backgrounds and religions of the executed men meant that there was the potential to attract cross-community support, and he quickly won endorsements from all the major political parties, north and south of the border. His campaigning paid off in 2003 when the then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Cowen, agreed to support the group’s objectives and vowed to take the matter up with the British government. Within months Irish officials had met their British counterparts and asked for the files of the Irish-born soldiers to be copied and forwarded, so that officials in Dublin could make an assessment of the ‘shot at dawn’ cases. After studying the files, Irish officials wrote a damning report that condemned the executions as unjust and alleged an apparent disparity in the treatment of Irish-born soldiers.

The report’s authors concluded that the men should be pardoned. Brian Cowen took the matter up at ministerial level with his British counterpart and publicly made this appeal:

As we approach the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War, and the world prepares to once again remember those who sacrificed so much during those terrible years of trench warfare, a retrospective action by the British government to redress the condemnation of those ‘shot at dawn’ would be widely welcomed, both in Ireland and further afield.⁶

Mulvany was amazed that the government was prepared to push the pardons campaign so forcefully, and he had not seriously expected his own government to commission a report or raise the matter with British Ministers:

I didn’t think they would come across with the support that they came across with. Remember, this was a nationalist government, who would call themselves republicans with a small ‘r’, and they supported a campaign such as this. All I expected was a letter coming from the Irish government simply expressing support. Wh...