Great-Uncle Harry: A Tale of War and Empire

by Michael Palin Narrated by Michael Palin

Overview

Michael Palin recreates the extraordinary life and tragic death of a First World War soldier-his great-uncle Harry.

Some years ago a stash of family records was handed down to Michael Palin, among which were photos of an enigmatic young man in army uniform, as well as photos of the same young man as a teenager looking uncomfortable at family gatherings. This, Michael learned, was his Great-Uncle Harry, born in 1884, died in 1916. He had previously had no idea that he had a Great-Uncle Harry, much less that his life was cut short at the age of 32 when he was killed in the Battle of the Somme. The discovery both shocked him and made him want to know much more.

The quest that followed involved hundreds of hours of painstaking detective work. Michael dug out every bit of family gossip and correspondence he could. He studied every relevant official document. He tracked down what remained of his great-uncle Harry's diaries and letters, and pored over photographs of First World War battle scenes to see whether Harry appeared in any of them. He walked the route Harry took on that fatal, final day of his life amid the mud of northern France. And as he did so, a life that had previously existed in the shadows was revealed to him.

Great-Uncle Harry is an utterly compelling account of an ordinary man who led an extraordinary life. A blend of biography, history, travelogue and personal memoir, this is Michael Palin at his very finest.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"An important historical record and a well-paced story in its own right, Great-Uncle Harry is also much more than that: a tremendous act of love." —The Guardian

“Palin’s Great-Uncle Harry . . . was a feast. Ostensibly, it was a tribute to Lance Corporal H.W.B. Palin, slain on the Somme in September 1916. But he did not merely recreate the life of a man whose body was ‘known unto God.’ Through years of research and hard writing he created a life.” —The Critic

“A remarkable work of forensic genealogy, reassembling the absent bones of a man who left scant clues, told with quiet, affectionate persistence. There was an obstinate opacity to the man, and yet Palin manages to revive him.” —StarTribune

“Palin’s skill as a storyteller lifts the unremarkable story of his great-uncle Harry into a moving tribute to all soldiers lost in World War I.” —Business Post

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159347725
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

PREFACE
The short Life of my Great-uncle
 
At the gates of Shrewsbury School, where three generations of Palins were educated, there is a war memorial on which stands an elegant likeness of Sir Philip Sidney, poet, courtier, scholar and personification of all the finest qualities of the first Elizabethan age.
 
He died at the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, at the age of thirty-one.
 
Listed below are the names of 329 other former pupils of the school who gave their lives for their country. Among them is H. W. B. Palin. He died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, at the age of thirty- two.
 
Much has been written about the distinguished life of Sir Philip Sidney. Nothing has been written about the life of H. W. B. Palin. But he was my great-uncle, and I felt his story should be told.
 
Not – I have to confess – that I’ve always thought that. Throughout my childhood and early adult years I was more preoccupied with the present and the future than the past, more interested in making sense of the course of my own life than that of anyone else. So far as I was concerned, the past was something to be dealt with by people who had time on their hands. It was a luxury.
 
So when in November 1971 we received a batch of family documents, including a black leather-backed notebook which contained a travel diary kept by my great-grandfather, a detailed Palin family tree stretching back two centuries, and five barely legible diaries kept by a great-uncle, I’m afraid they seemed nowhere near as relevant to my life as trying to earn a living writing and recording material for a new Monty Python series. Oddly enough, my father and mother seemed equally incurious. The whole bundle of documents ended up being set aside in some dusty cupboard.
 
Six years later I recorded in my diary the arrival at my parents’ cottage in Reydon, near Southwold, of an Austin 1100, driven by a late-middle-aged lady called Joyce Ashmore, an unmarried cousin of my father. She seemed to be the nearest we had to a custodian of family history, and it was she who had sent the first tranche of documents. Now she had more. ‘A very capable lady with a brisk and confident well-bred manner,’ I wrote. ‘She has a rather heavy jaw, but seems exceedingly well and lively. She is down-to-earth and unsentimental about the family, but interested in and interesting about stories of the Palins.’ It was from her that I first heard the extraordinary tales of the lives of my great-grandparents and how they had met.
 
Before Joyce left, she handed over, rather apologetically, a further stash of Paliniana, among which were some photographs. One of these caught my eye. It was of a young man in a military uniform wearing a wide-brimmed hat and throwing a guarded glance at the camera.
 
I asked Joyce who he was. She was dismissive. It was an unfortunate younger son, she said. Killed in the war. Not much known about him and, by implication, not much worth knowing.
 
Rather in the same way that being told not to laugh makes you laugh more, her dismissal of this mysterious young man piqued my curiosity. But before I had a chance to do any digging, along came Life of Brian and A Fish Called Wanda and eight televised journeys around the world, and my great-uncle slipped to the back of my mind.
 
Years later, in 2008, I came across his name again while I was working on a documentary about the last day of the First World War. It was on the wall of another war memorial, this time in one of the Somme battlefields. Just a name, not a grave. H. W. B. Palin. One of many thousands ‘Known Only Unto God’.
 
I knew then that I had to know more.
 
PRELUDE
 
Henry William Bourne Palin, known throughout his life as Harry, came into the world on Friday 19 September 1884.
 
Consulting the On This Day website I find that no one of particular note was born on that day, and that nothing worth recording happened in the wider world.
 
Harry was delivered in a spacious upper room at the rectory in the village of Linton in Herefordshire. It looks out across rolling hills towards the Welsh border to the west and the Forest of Dean and the Wye valley to the south. At the time of his birth, his mother, Brita, was forty-two. His father, Edward, the vicar of Linton, was two days short of his sixtieth birthday.
 
Counting all the servants, upwards of a dozen people would have been in the house to hear Henry’s first cries, and in the mild, dry, early-autumn weather of that month the sounds would have wafted out through open windows to the men working on the home farm.
 
At that time husbands were kept well away from wives in labour, and as their seventh child was being thrust into the world, Edward would most likely have been down in his study mapping out Sunday’s sermon or hearing tales of hardship from distressed parishioners. But like everyone else inside or outside the house, he would have been listening out for the sounds from the bedroom above. And not without some anxiety.
 
By the time Harry made his entrance Brita had had half a dozen children in ten years, the last one being born more than six years earlier. Bearing a child at the age of forty-two was not without risk in an era when so many mothers perished giving birth. For Brita, another pregnancy, so long after the previous one, might well have been something of an unwelcome shock. In any case, of course, she already had a substantial family.
 
But then, large families were common in those days. With contraception methods limited to abstinence, withdrawal or the rhythm method, it’s not so surprising that the average number of children born to middle-class couples married in the 1860s was far above the two that it is now. Charles and Emma Darwin, for example, had ten.
 
The impressive stone-walled vicarage at Linton which was the infant’s first home was built in the fashionable Gothic Revival style – part French chateau, part German schloss. It was no ordinary rural rectory, but then Brita and Edward Palin were no ordinary couple. The story of their life together was remarkable by any standards. It was one of achievement, sacrifice and an unrelenting sense of purpose. A Victorian success story of which Henry William Bourne was the latest manifestation.

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