Remembering John Hipkin, the man who secured pardons for 306 British soldiers

Amidst the recent international mayhem—a massacre in France, a failed coup in Turkey, race killings in America, government crisis in Britain—there came sad but inspiring news about a retired school teacher.

John Hipkin became Britain’s youngest prisoner of war in 1941 when the ship on which he was a 14-year-old cabin boy was sunk off Newfoundland by the German battleship Scharnhorst. He had only been at sea for 21 days.

Hipkin and the rest of the crew were taken to a Prisoner of war camp in Germany. “Conditions were horrible,” he said. “It was a dumping ground for the defeated countries of Europe.”

But he survived and upon liberation in 1945, entered the academic world and became a well-loved teacher in the north of England.

One day, Hipkin read about another boy warrior, a World War One infantryman, Herbert Burden, from a local regiment, the Northumberland Fusiliers. In 1915, Burden left his front-line post to comfort a recently bereaved friend stationed nearby. He was court-martialled for desertion, sentenced to death, tied to a stake and shot at dawn. He was 17.

Outraged, Hipkin launched a campaign, Shot at Dawn, to seek pardons for the 306 soldiers, four of them aged 17, who were executed by their own side on charges of cowardice or desertion between 1914 and 1918. Every year, he organised a march to the Cenotaph in London, with relatives of the executed men. Modern science suggests the condemned soldiers were not responsible for their actions, that under incessant artillery bombardments they were rendered catatonic—a condition originally named shell shock, but today known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

After 15 years of non-stop campaigning, Hipkin’s efforts succeeded in 2007 when all 306 men were pardoned. “Incredible news, at last,” said the teacher-activist joyfully.

Two weeks ago, aged 90, John Hipkin died peacefully in a care home surrounded by his family. His funeral at the church of St Columba’s, Wallsend, was attended by many former teaching colleagues and ex-pupils.

It would be nice to think that somewhere up there, Fusilier Burden was waiting, heels together, back straight, head up, giving him a deserved salute.

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There is a tendency in Britain to sneer at the middle class. Its members are condemned as dull, unimaginative and conformist, they are laughed at for eating fancy foods and their traditional attitude to right and wrong is scorned as “middle class morality.”

Well, I dunno. I spent four evenings recently at the opera, a classic bastion of the middle class, listening to Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

What I saw were a lot of dark suits and grey hair and dumpy figures, some posh Fortnum and Mason picnic hampers containing bottles of champagne and smoked salmon for the long intervals, but many more cool bags with Prosecco and home-made, brown bread sandwiches. During the entire 15 hours of music, not a single mobile phone went off, nobody unwrapped crackly sweet papers, consulted their programmes or whispered to their neighbour, and if there was any coughing, it was swiftly muffled. At the same time, I never so often heard “please”, “thank you”, “excuse me”, “you’re welcome”, “terribly sorry”, “my fault” and “not at all”. And by the fourth and last evening, for the Twilight of the Gods, people were addressing their neighbours as old friends. “It’s as if we have been on a long train journey together,” said the lady on my left from Yorkshire.

However, now it was time to part and like true middle-class British people, everybody said, “How wonderful to meet you, and if you are ever in our neighbourhood, you really must look us up”.

And like true middle class British people, when it came to “you really must look us up”, well, they were really only being polite.

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The burglars keep doing it. Colin Ayre broke into a house under renovation, stole £500 (Sh66,000) worth of building equipment—plus a can of Foster’s lager, which he quaffed on the spot. Inevitably, his DNA was found on the empty can and Ayre was quickly picked up. Because he had spent seven months in custody awaiting trial, he got a suspended prison sentence.

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A married man joined his pals in the pub after work one Friday, intending to have one beer then go home. But one beer became two, and two became three, and three became four, and it all ended with the man spending the entire weekend on a spree with his mates.

Eventually creeping home late on Sunday night, the husband faced a three-hour tirade from his wife. Finally, she demanded, “How would it be if you didn’t see me for two or three days?”

“Fine by me,” said the relieved husband. He didn’t see her next day, nor on the Tuesday either. By Wednesday, his eye was opening just enough to see her partially …

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