Great-Uncle Harry

by Michael Palin

ISBN: 9781529152616

Published: 2023-09-28

Some years ago a stash of family records was handed down to Michael Palin, among which was a photograph of an enigmatic young man in army uniform. This, he learnt, was his Great-Uncle Harry, who perished at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 aged just thirty-two. The discovery both shocked him and made him want to know more. The quest that followed involved hundreds of hours of painstaking detective work, as Michael set out to trace his great-uncle's journey from the comfort of a middle-class Victorian childhood, via spells working on railways and tea plantations in India and on a farm in New Zealand, to the slaughtering grounds of Gallipoli and Flanders. He pored over surviving fragments of family correspondence and tantalisingly brief mentions in official documents. He scrutinised Harry's often frustratingly terse war diaries. He sifted through battlefield photographs to see whether his great-uncle appeared in any of them. He walked the route Harry took on that fatal, final day of...