Heritage

The deaths in July of two very old men can hardly be a surprise, and scarcely a cause for mourning outside their immediate families. We all have out span of years, which will eventually run out, and ultimately face the same fate as every other human and non-human that has ever lived. Death is as normal and inevitable as breathing and sleeping. But the two old men in question are worth a few moments of our time, because they were the very last of the many millions who fought in the trenches of the First World War, a war that shaped the course of the twentieth century and touches the lives of all of us today. Most families have their memories of men who went to the war, many never to return.

Henry Allingham died first. At 113 he was the oldest man in the world, the last survivor of the Battle of Jutland, the last founder member of the RAF and the last-but-one to have fought in the trenches of the Western Front. Harry Patch, a stripling of 111, died a week later, and with him went the final direct connection to the abattoir of trench warfare – the only man alive of the ten million or more who were sent to the trenches. His best friends were killed next to him in the muddy bloodbath of Passchendaele near Ypres in 1917. In the stoical way of that generation neither of them said much about the war until the last years of their lives, when they became public figures, speaking out against the madness of warfare, visiting schools and giving direct witness to children about the terrible things they had experienced so many years ago.

But is it really so long ago? This modern world dominated by fashion, youth and the constant demand for renewal of material goods, tends to dismiss anything more than a few years old as out of date, out of touch and ‘unsophisticated’. An old person’s youth and memories are patronisingly cast aside as belonging to another age. The experience of ordinary people is condescendingly dismissed as our celebrity culture focuses its history teaching on the famous, powerful and heroic. Myths of nation building squeeze out the ordinary, mundane lives of ordinary, mundane people like the overwhelming majority of our ancestors.

Our heritage is far more likely to be found in the memories of old men and women than in the sassy razzmatazz of the slick media that infiltrates into so many corners of our lives today. Talk to the old folk around you, get the children to do school projects that will keep alive the experience, knowledge and insight of the elderly. Nearly all of us will be very old one day, and we will want to be treated as valued resources, reservoirs of knowledge and respected for what we have achieved. It is so easy to lose touch with our family’s past; the oral tradition that passes on community history has disappeared from the so-called developed world.

The past is much closer to us than we realise. Henry Allingham 1896-2009 (his father died in 1897!): as a young man he will certainly have known people who lived through the horrors of the famines of the 1840’s. As a baby he will have met old people who were alive during the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps even met someone who witnessed the 1798 rising. Follow the same argument back another two generations and we are into the era of Cromwell. Four generations from direct memories of Cromwell. Our heritage is closer and more real than we think. By and large we are what we are because of the interplay between our environment and our ancestors. Just as we at Cabragh Wetlands are trying to conserve our natural heritage, so we should all do our bit to remember and preserve our human heritage.