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Honorary degree awarded to WWI veteran

Press release issued: 16 December 2005

Bristol University awarded an Honorary degree to a very special visitor at Friday’s annual meeting of the University Court held in the Wills Memorial Building. Mr Harry Patch, a 107 year old veteran of the Great War and a member of the workforce that constructed the Wills Memorial Building in 1925, was honoured with the degree of Master of Arts at a special ceremony.

Bristol University awarded an Honorary degree to a very special visitor at Friday’s annual meeting of the University Court held in the Wills Memorial Building.

Mr Harry Patch, a 107-year-old veteran of the Great War and a member of the workforce that constructed the Wills Memorial Building in 1925, was honoured with the degree of Master of Arts at a special ceremony.

Born on 17 June 1898 in Combe Down, near Bath, Harry left school in 1913, and at the age of 15 began an apprenticeship to a plumber.  In 1917, Harry was conscripted to the Great War joining the 7th Battalion, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry at Rouen, France.

At that time many of the major battles of the Great War in which the British Army was engaged such as the Marne, Ypres, Loos, the Somme, and Arras were over.  One was yet to come, Passchendaele in Belgium, a battle synonymous with endurance, sacrificial courage and slaughter. Harry found himself in the middle of it.

One night on September 22 1917, Harry and four other members of his Lewis Gun team were coming out of the front-line trenches when a German shrapnel shell burst in the air above them. Three of the party were killed. Harry suffered a serious shrapnel wound resulting in his hospitalisation and did not return to France before the war ended.  For him September 22 is Remembrance Day, for his three friends in the Lewis Gun team who were killed on that day.

In 1918 Harry was demobbed and in the same year he married Ada Billington from Hadleigh, Shropshire. They were together for 58 years until her death in 1976. They had two sons. Both have predeceased him.

After the war, Harry returned to civilian life as a plumber and was one of the craftsmen who worked on the construction of the University’s landmark Wills Memorial building. He was at the topping-out ceremony and remembers placing the newly minted coins under the lead sheeting covering the trapdoor at the top of the tower. He attended the formal opening of the building by King George V and Queen Mary on June 9 1925.

Harry continued his working life as a plumber, with an interval during the Second World War as a fireman and as a plumber working for the Army, until retirement in 1961.  He now lives in Wells.

 

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