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

War Graves Commission needed hundreds of gardeners to tend the cemeteries it was building, and it recruited these from among former servicemen. By 1921, 1,326 veterans were employed by the Commission, and they had not only planted over 15 miles of hedges and 75 miles of borders, but had also seeded some 200 acres of bare earth with grass. Many of them spent the rest of their lives in France and Belgium, often marrying local women. Captain Frederick Osborne of the Royal Fusiliers, for example, joined up in 1914 with five friends and fought throughout the war, at the end of which he was the only survivor of the original group. After being demobilised, he returned to the Ploegsteert region and took a job looking after cemeteries. He married a Flemish woman, learned the language, and made his life in Belgium, staying on there after his retirement in 1962.

      Britain itself continued to be something of a battlefield during the early 1920s with Armistice Day becoming a focus not only of national mourning but of protests intended to remind everyone that those who had returned from the war were still awaiting a home fit for heroes. In October 1920, disturbed by the continuing rise in unemployment (which still included a large number of ex-servicemen), a group of London mayors headed by the Mayor of London and future leader of the Labour Party, George Lansbury, requested an interview with Lloyd George at Downing Street. In support of this deputation, large numbers of the unemployed, many of them wearing their combat medals, descended upon Whitehall. According to Wal Hannington, the trade union official who was leading a North London contingent that day, the crowd was orderly, doing little more than cheering and singing. Nevertheless, Whitehall became severely congested and in order to clear the street mounted policemen charged the crowds, who were packed in so tightly on all sides that they could not retreat and ‘were compelled to fight back at the police or simply stand still and be clubbed down’. Eventually, the police were beaten back and the crowd surged up towards Trafalgar Square, but were stopped by reinforcements who struck the workers down as they tried to escape. Hannington recalled that ‘dozens of men lay in the roads and on the side-walks groaning with pain as the blood gushed out from wounds inflicted by police batons’. Then a policeman was dragged off his horse, which was commandeered and mounted by an unidentified worker who broke through police lines at a gallop, while men on foot followed in his wake. He managed to reach Downing Street before being ‘clubbed down’. The police eventually restored order and the crowd dispersed.

      Wal Hannington’s Unemployed Struggles 1919–1936, from which this account is taken, may be one of the great classics of the British working-class movement, but it is a work of polemic and not always accurate. Hannington’s version of events, recalled some fifteen years later, is at odds with the contemporary reports of this incident in The Times, for example. The newspaper agreed that the crowd was ‘fairly orderly, though noisy’, and that the mounted police used newly introduced ‘long staves’ to belabour the protesters, between thirty and forty of whom suffered injuries, mostly to the head. The newspaper reported, however, that police had been obliged to intervene because a group of the unemployed decided to go to Downing Street to protest rather than, as had been originally planned, wait on Victoria Embankment for the deputation of mayors to report back on their interview with Lloyd George. These protesters ‘were heavily reinforced by many hundreds of irresponsible young hooligans who took a leading part in the afternoon’s disorders’. These young men apparently threw bottles, stones and brickbats at the police and caused considerable damage to government buildings: the stone balustrade of the Privy Council Office was demolished, several windows were broken at the Treasury and every single window was smashed on the ground floor of the War Office.

      Hannington’s claim that ‘The mayors had not been received by Mr Lloyd George. He was not apparently interested in hearing about the plight of the workless and had conveniently left London’ was untrue. Indeed, Lansbury emerged from Number 10 after a meeting with the Prime Minister and attempted to restore order among his supporters. Furthermore, Hannington’s ‘unknown hero on the white horse’ was neither an ‘ex-cavalry man’ nor even a member of the unemployed, but a nineteen-year-old packing-case maker from Hoxton called Edward Cannadine, who had been exercising a horse and had ‘turned into Whitehall to see the demonstration’. At Bow Street Magistrates’ Court the following morning, he claimed that ‘Someone struck the horse, which got out of control, and he was unable to prevent it charging the police’. Quite what someone from Hoxton was doing exercising a horse in the middle of London was not divulged, but the horse clearly hadn’t been taken from the police since it had no saddle. Nevertheless, the court declined to believe that Cannadine was an innocent passer-by caught up in events beyond his control and fined him 40 shillings for ‘insulting behaviour’. A number of other protesters were charged with a variety of offences, including three men who had taken the opportunity to break into a jeweller’s and make off with £3,000 worth of diamond rings.