from Guardian, Wednesday November
10, 1999
He became a cause célèbre for being the
youngest British soldier to be shot for desertion in the first world war. But today, on
Armistice day, historians will admit they got the wrong guy. John Linklater reports
Saving Private Byers
 A white tombstone in the
Belgian border town of Locre marks the remains of Private Joseph Byers, executed for
desertion by a British firing squad on February 6 1915. His fate is confirmed by court
martial papers and a death certificate, but for 10 years military historians have had the
wrong man in the grave.
Julian Putkowski, a London university lecturer,
will return to the grave today and admit a case of mistaken identity. He will tell an
audience in Locre that the story of Joseph Byers as a 16-year-old martyr of judicial
murder is a myth.
It grew from the book that Putkowski worked on for
seven years with co-author Julian Sykes. Shot At Dawn, first
published in 1989 and due for a major revision next year, is accepted as the standard
authority on 312 British and Commonwealth soldiers executed for military offences during
the first world war.
Joseph Byers was given the unhappy distinction in
the book as the youngest of the men. His offence was to fall out of a detail to collect
coal. He was arrested on the road between Poperinghe and Ypres, apparently trying to
relocate his regiment in the Royal Scots Fusiliers.
His story was that he had been in hospital for
several days with a throat infection. At his court martial he was unrepresented and
answered guilty to the charge of desertion, a suicidal plea which brought an automatic
death sentence. Approving sentence, General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, commander of the 2nd
army, noted:
"Discipline in the 1st Battalion Royal Scots
Fusiliers has been very bad for some time past and I think a severe example is very much
wanted."
Much of this detail emerged after publication of
the book, with the release of court martial papers after 1991. One persistent and
disconcerting fact was that Byers gave his age as 19 years and seven months to the
gendarme who arrested him. This was more or less consistent with a 1922 document which
listed Byers among executed soldiers under the age of 21, where his age at his court
martial was given as 19 years and nine months. He also was given the age of 19 on his
death certificate.
Undeterred, Putkowski and Sykes rationalised that
he must have been lying about his age. This was a common difficulty which beset their
research. Boys of 16 and under often claimed to be 18 or 19 in order to enlist. There
appeared to be corroborative evidence that Byers was unusually young. He was described as
"just a boy"' by a witness of the execution in Locre, when Bycrs faced the
firing squad along with a 41-year-old soldier, Andrew Evans, who admitted a charge of
being drunk for a fortnight after Christmas. Evans died in the first volley. It required a
third volley to put Byers out of his misery. The firing squad appeared reluctant to carry
out its duty. This was confirmed by a published war diary.
But the real difficulty for Putkowski and Sykes had
been matching Byers with birth records. The death certificate gave Scotland as his place
of birth. However, there was no Joseph Byers born in mid-1895 in Scotland, according to
civil records. The authors merely went to the nearest alternative, the Joseph Byers born
in Dumfries on September 22,1898. This was supported by the fact that the soldier with the
adjacent regimental number to Byers was from Stranraer, also in the south-west of
Scotland.
Unfortunately this process of elimination produced
an embarrassing blunder On the Friday morning of his supposed execution in Locre, the
Dumfries-born Joseph Byers has now been revealed to have been packing his schoolbag for
classes at Dumfries Academy. He would have found it difficult to concur with reports of
his earlier demise when he registered as a doctor in 1924. His 1965 obituary in the
British Medical Journal recorded a career as a medical registrar in Manchester and Kent.
He died visiting friends in Lancashire.
Putkowski will admit the case of mistaken identity
at an event in Locre entitled Without Honour, organised by Piet Chielens, director of the
In Flanders Fields Peace Museum in Ypres, as part of a growing European focus on the
executions. A larger symposium will be announced today for Ypres next May, and campaigners
are planning to take the cases of executed men in the British, French, Belgian and German
armies of the first world war to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg.
One of the embarrassments over the Byers myth is
that it may play into the hands of the opponents of pardons who argue that history cannot
be rewritten. Putkowski admits he will be adding hasty revisions of the Byers story to a
new book he is writing with Chielens, and he and Sykes will be correcting the record for
the new edition of Shot At Dawn next year.
For the British pardons campaign, the debunking of
the Byers myth has come as a major blow. Veteran campaigner John Hipkin, from Newcastle,
has been forced to destroy 3,000 leaflets featuring Byers as a 16-year-old, and his name
has featured prominently on placards, in memorium notices placed in national newspapers,
on wreaths laid at the Cenotaph and in lobbying material aimed at MPs. Byers had been fast
reaching icon status.
His was among the individual cases considered last
year by the then minister for the armed forces, Dr John Reid, before he announced that no
legal mechanism could be found to grant a blanket pardon. The case of Byers was taken up
by Russell Brown, Dumfries Labour MP, and it is no coincidence that a motion for pardons
will be presented to the Scottish Parliament today by Dumfries MSP, Dr Elaine Murray.
She admits that the Byers case was strongly
represented to both herself and Brown by campaigners and consituents, but they have now
both been made aware of the myth that he was a Dumfries boy of 16. Nevertheless, she
insists that the general principle of the injustice of the executions is more important
than individual cases.
Her motion argues that it is not too late to
restore the names of the executed soldiers, regrets deficiencies in giving them
opportunities to prepare adequate defences and considers the majority "were as
patriotic and brave as their million other compatriots who perished in the conflict."
This is likely to carry the support of the SNP
opposition today, and Dr Reid, now Scottish secretary of state, is known to be angered by
the Scottish Parliament's intention to prod the conscience of Westminster on a
constitutionally reserved issue of defence.
"I have heard that Dr Reid is unhappy,"
says Murray. "Tough! I presume that he took a hard line last year on the advice of
the ministry of defence, but the Labour party should be capable of allowing MPs to make up
their own minds."
All of this is likely to fire above the head of the
real Joseph Byers, whoever he was. Julian Pukowski is understandably reluctant to reveal
the identity of a new candidate until further research is completed.
Back
to News Clips Contents
|
Recent Additions
