Showing results by narrator "Alan Howard" in All Categories

Harry Patch, the last British soldier alive to have fought in the trenches of the First World War, is now 109 years old and one of very few people who can directly recall the horror of that conflict. After a rural childhood in Somerset, Harry left school in 1913 to become a plumber. Three years later he was fighting in the mud and trenches during the Battle of Passchendaele. He saw a great many of his comrades die, and in one dreadful moment the shell that wounded him killed his three closest friends.

It was a nightmare from which he was furious to have been woken which triggered Robert Louis Stevenson's most successful and famous work. Having been stirred from what he termed 'a fine bogey tale', Stevenson set about putting his nightmare onto paper. It reputedly took him only three days to write, but the story of a split personality warring with itself between righteousness and immorality is as much a part of modern thought as it became in 1885.