(the picture above is not of the men mentioned in this issue but in memory of all who gave their lives, (and still do), for freedom).
End of an era: WWI hero Harry Patch died yesterday as the oldest man in Britain
He said: 'Harry Patch was the exemplar of a generation that sacrificed itself for the sake of the freedoms we enjoy today.
'To us from failing hands he throws the torch, and in recognition of the nearly one million British war dead, we must mark his passing with a national tribute.'
The Queen led a flood of emotive tributes last night to Mr Patch.
The former plumber, who became a frontline machine-gunner at 18 and a hero for successive generations, passed away peacefully in his sleep at a nursing home in Wells in his native Somerset, surrounded by family and friends.
He had become Britain’s oldest man seven days earlier when another Great War veteran and friend, Henry Allingham, died in Sussex, aged 113.
The only British First World War veteran still alive now is Claude Choules, 108, who served in the Royal Navy and lives in Perth, Australia.
Henry John ‘Harry’ Patch was born in the reign of Queen Victoria on June 17, 1898, at Combe Down, near Bath.
Private Patch was conscripted into the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and served as an assistant gunner in a Lewis machine gun team.
Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1202104/Harry-Patch-Britains-oldest-man-survivor-Great-War-trenches-dies-aged-111.html#ixzz0MOfuPBEt
