I have been a supporter of a campaign to achieve pardons for those servicemen executed for cowardice, falling asleep at their posts, etc during WW1. The website for the campaign is here. (I would add that I have done very little apart from moral support). These servicemen were often executed on spurious grounds, and “to set an example”.
Last week I received an email from the organisers of the campaign. It said (in part)
The amendment granting posthumous conditional pardons received the full approval of the British Parliament after a two-hour debate last night. Following the usual parliamentary tradition, the Royal Assent of HM Queen Elizabeth will have affirmed the pardons today.
On behalf of the small nucleus of those actively representing the core of the pardons campaign, can I say a big and warm thank you for your continued support and encouragement. As time has progressed and developments achieved, this has become increasingly important. We are grateful for those who have pressed their Members of Parliament including those who have made representations to local councillors of importance. It has all helped tremendously."
In the end we did achieve a little.
Judging people in the past by modern standards seems useless, unfair and unwise. “The past is a different country. People there act strangely.” (Or something like that.)
Perhaps the descendants of those executed may feel a little better. It really doesn’t matter- I had a problem with the summary nature of the executions. The injustice. <shrugs>
Hmmm, I think there are one or two who might think about what that quote means.
Reputations can live on long after death.
Release of memoirs might well kill off a previously held reputation. If this was forseeable by the writer of those memoirs then indeed it might well be described as such.
With all due respect, after 90 years, the wives would be well over 100 years old, and even the youngest qualifying child (conceived on a date when the executed soldier was still at home, and possibly in utero at the end of WWI) is probably no younger than 88. Am I to accept that this measure was meant to grant this handful of survivors either a windfall (with interest) or a pittance (without interest) at the very end of their lives? The grandchildren, decades too young to have known Grandpa, would be retirement age, and grandkids wouldn’t qualify for survivor’s benefits anyway. Even most great- or great-great- grandchildren wouldn’t much care (if they even knew)
Translated for middle-aged Americans like myself: this is like posthumously awarding Civil War survivors benefits (or “40 acres and a mule”) during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, or Revolutionary War benefits during the Civil War. For that matter, the last major parcels “stolen from the Indians” by treaty violation was in that general timeframe. Shall we return those? Or are we only in a mood to remedy small injustices.
Please forgive my snarkiness. I only mean to note how long 90 years is, and re-ask the question: "what motivated this campaign. A cynical part of me wonders if this was only possible because few would benefit or care – a cheap gesture in both senses of the words.
I’d love to hear that I am mistaken in suspecting this.
You are possibly correct about it signifying nothing in the modern world, but WWI has not yet disappeared from the collective conscience here. The oldest remaining veteran, Henry Allingham (aged 110), made it over to France this past Armistice Day to lay his wreath. But it’s not just that there are a few handfuls of survivors of that war still alive, it’s because every small town and village in this country has a first world war memorial. It’s a very sobering experience to go to a tiny place from where your mum or dad’s family is from and see a memorial that includes names of family members who were barely children when they died. The lads who were shot for whatever reason that people have campaigned for just want the names included. Have you been to Thiepval? Go there and look at the tens of thousands of names carved there. Those were the ones they couldn’t find the remains of. And look about you at the fields, those lost boys were lost in the area that you can see, not the whole war but just there. Have a look at my family tree and wonder why my mum had so many spinster aunts and so many uncles and great-uncles who died before their time. And then the idiots had another war.
Gertie Harris (now 90) was the daughter of Private Farr who was executed for cowardice. She never found out what happened to her father until she was 40- the stigma was so great her mother (who never received a war pension) was too ashamed to mention it.
The campaign was not about obtaining pensions nor compensation.
What bothers me about this is the idea that my decisions somehow seem to be open to question by my grandchildren. Will I be convicted posthumously as a kidnapper for keeping a parrot?
What right do the living have to judge the dead? Is this fair? Is it just? Is it any of our business? Why?
Although it is difficult to put te same decision into the context it was at he time, I believe it is the role of society to address past mistakes. And executing fragile men, in cases where it was stated by the authorising officer that sufficient evidence did not exist to support a conviction, cannot be condoned.