THERE are many accolades and adjectives used to describe Henry Allingham.
Britain’s oldest man... Britain’s oldest war veteran... Britain’s oldest aviator.
Now add ‘Britain’s oldest author’ to the list, for at the tender age of 112 he has recounted his life story to long-time friend and champion of Great War veterans, Dennis Goodwin in Kitchener’s Last Volunteer (Mainstream, £17.99 ISBN 978-1-84596-416-0).
Today Henry Allingham is defined by (a) his age and ( his Great War service... and that’s a little unfair.
For Henry lived a remarkable life long before he became fêted as one of the dwindling band on WW1 survivors.
His job as a car mechanic ensured that he owned a car long before it became the norm, he loved sailing with his family in his boat The Teale, and visited the USA after his daughter moved there with her American husband post war.
The bulk of his memoirs are devoted to the Great War – and besides leading a varied life, Henry Allingham led a varied military career.
He volunteered for the RNAS in 1915. He asked for a posting to East Africa. Perhaps the recruiter misheard. He was sent to East Anglia as an air mechanic, second class.
And here Henry plugs a gap, for first-hand accounts of aviation are invariably pilot-centric. Lower-deck accounts, especially of the Great War, are scarce.
Officer or rating, the life of a WW1 aviator was often brief, certainly hazardous, always cold.
“You’d smear Vaseline on your face – if that wasn’t available then it was whale oil or engine grease. You wore gloves to protect you from frostbite. You were flying in an open cockpit with only a small windshield for protection,” Henry recalls.
And yet, aviation was “a great adventure for a bloke like me”. As soon as his flimsy aircraft touched down, the mechanic was “just itching to take off again”.
Henry is trumpeted in naval circles as the last survivor of the Royal Naval Air Service (precursor to the Fleet Air Arm) and the last survivor of Jutland. His ship, Kingfisher, spent the battle “on the periphery” – all he saw were the muzzle flashes of guns in the distance. Like most British sailors on May 31 1916, Henry Allingham found it “impossible to tell what was going on”.
His sea-going career ended in the autumn of 1917 when he transferred to the Western Front with No.12 Squadron RNAS. Battle over land proved no more enlightening than battle over sea – “jungle drums” provided the best source of news about the situation at the front.
And although he never served in the trenches in France, life was far from safe or comfortable in the air stations behind the front.
“We slept where we could, often under a lorry – it was a case of dropping down on the ground with a blanket,” Henry writes.
“There were food and supply dumps behind the lines – there was an unwritten agreement that they were never bombed. One day the Germans broke the code and shelled our dumps. They suffered a terrible retribution as we shelled their dumps for a week. It never occurred again.”
That was during the spring of 1918 – when the Germans made their bid for victory and when the RNAS was swallowed up by the new Royal Air Force.
Today, Henry is the sole survivor of the first days of the RAF – and he is courted by the Crabs. At the time, however, he concedes: “I still considered myself a Royal Navy man.”
A generation later, and with Britain at war again, Henry was working for Ford at Dagenham... alongside Malcolm and Donald Campbell of Bluebird fame. The latter was “a driven man” – and an affable one; the mechanic and the record break would regularly chat over lunch breaks.
It is these vignettes which make you realise there is so much more to Henry Allingham than his wartime service.
Indeed, if anyone has lived a full life, it is Henry (he played golf until he was 90 and cycled when he was 100). And he continues to lead a full life; last year, the 112-year-old attended 47 events.
Most had a Great War connection – and the media never fails to ask Henry about his wartime experiences, yet the veteran apparently never tires of passing on his knowledge and wisdom to today’s generation.
Among those to benefit were naval aviators earning their Wings at RNAS Yeovilton. Then Second Sea Lord Vice Admiral Sir Adrian Johns watched as the centenarian pressed the famous insignia on to their sleeves and spoke into their ears.
“It was quite clear that Henry was passing on something much more profound than just a cloth flying badge,” the admiral recalled.
“Something else was being passed between the generations.”
We can learn a lot from Henry Allingham: honour, respect, tradition, duty, bravery. And we’d be wise to heed the advice he gave to Admiral Johns (a mere whippersnapper at half his age): “Don’t look back, just look forward.”

An interesting book - very nicely illustrated - a very worthy tribute to the man.

there is one, but it says there are several copies, so how do you decide who pays what?

'These copies have been arranged.....'