Henry Allingham: + 18 July 2009

Les · July 18, 2009

Obit from the Guardian: 18 July 2009

Henry Allingham

First world war veteran and world's oldest man

Henry Allingham, who has died aged 113, maintained naval aircraft during the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the greatest sea battle of the first world war, and was later transferred to the western front in time for the last Ypres offensive. He was Britain's oldest man, reportedly the oldest man ever to have lived there, and for the last month of his life Guinness World Records claimed him to be the oldest man alive.

Allingham was born in Clapton, east London, the son of an ironmonger, a year before Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee of 1897 and three years before the Boer war broke out. The Klondike gold rush was just starting and Kitchener was campaigning in the Sudan.

On leaving his local council school, Allingham started training as a surgical instrument maker at Bart's hospital in central London, but found the work too dull and soon moved on to learn to make bodywork for cars. Allingham had just turned 18 when the first world war broke out and wanted to volunteer for the army as a dispatch rider. Instead he continued to support his ailing mother until her death in 1915.

Captivated by the sight of an aeroplane circling a reservoir ? the Wright brothers' powered flights had come only a dozen years earlier ? he then applied to the rapidly expanding Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) and qualified as an air mechanic in September 1915. Posted to the naval air station at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, he helped maintain a wide range of fragile aircraft, and flew in some.

In May 1916 he was posted to the armed trawler Kingfisher to help maintain its single seaplane. The vessel was attached to the British Grand Fleet at the end of the month, when the great naval clash both sides had been hoping for finally came about. The German High Seas Fleet had left its North Sea harbours in the hope of destroying British ships and a sprawling and confused engagement ensued.

Nowhere near as destructive as it could have been, it was named the Battle of the Skagerrak by the Germans who won the first day's action on 31 May when the British lightly armoured battlecruisers clashed with their heavy guns: the British lost three to the Germans' one. The British claimed victory in what they christened the Battle of Jutland on 1 June, when the two main bodies of battleships chased each other. Kingfisher was involved in shadowing the German heavy ships.

Tactically it was a German victory. The British Grand Fleet lost 111,000 tonnes of warships, or 8.84% of its strength, while the German High Seas Fleet was reduced by 62,000 tonnes, or 6.79%. But strategically the British won because their surviving ships were significantly less damaged than the enemy's. Admiral Jellicoe, the British commander-in-chief, reported his fleet ready for duty 24 hours after the battle; the Germans needed three months for repairs. In fact the High Seas Fleet never came out in strength again.

As air activity at sea declined, many RNAS units were transferred to the western front in 1917. In June, Air Mechanic First Class Allingham was assigned to No 12 squadron, training other transferred RNAS units. After five months he was posted to a depot at the port of Dunkirk on France's border with Belgium, where he experienced aerial bombing and shelling from land and sea as his unit struggled to repair and recover damaged aircraft. Casualties were high when the airmen were covering the Third Battle of Ypres in the latter part of 1917, frequently taking refuge in shell holes and filthy trenches.

On 1 April 1918, Allingham and his comrades swapped their naval uniforms for the grey-blue kit of the brand new Royal Air Force, an amalgamation of the RNAS and the army's Royal Flying Corps.

Allingham was sounded out about taking an RAF commission after the war but decided instead to marry his sweetheart, Dorothy, whom he had met in Great Yarmouth in 1915. Their marriage in 1919 lasted more than half a century until her death in 1970; they had two daughters, who also predeceased him.

He was formally discharged from the RAF in April 1919, when he joined the Ford motor company, and later Rolls Royce, working as a coach builder for the rest of his employed life. Already too old for active service when the second world war began in 1939, Allingham undertook important war work as a mechanic, including helping to protect ships against magnetic mines (degaussing).

He lost his 1914-18 medals in the blitz on London in 1940 and received a replacement set at a special ceremony in Eastbourne, where he lived in retirement, over half a century later. He was admitted to the French Legion of Honour in 2003 and awarded a special medal and the freedom of the French town of Saint Omer.

In 2004 he was one of four centenarian veterans who laid a wreath at the Cenotaph to mark the 90th anniversary of his war. It was only in the following year that he gave up his independence and moved into a home. Concerned that the world should not forget the sacrifice made by the millions who died in the first world war, he turned out again with two other veterans, Harry Patch and Bill Stone, at the Cenotaph in November 2008; Stone died last January.

Allingham's memoir, Kitchener's Last Volunteer, was written with Dennis Goodwin and published in 2008. He is survived by five grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, 14 great-great-grandchildren, and one great-great-great-grandchild.

Henry William Allingham, first world war veteran, born 6 June 1896; died 18 July 2009

About this article

Henry Allingham

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 15.01 BST on Saturday 18 July 2009. It was last updated at 15.01 BST on Saturday 18 July 2009.

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Henry Allingham: + 18 July 2009

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