Great-Uncle Harry

Some years ago a stash of family records was handed down to Michael Palin, among which was a photograph of an enigmatic young man in army uniform. This, he learnt, was his Great-Uncle Harry, who perished at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 aged just thirty-two. The discovery both shocked him and made him want to know more. The quest that followed involved hundreds of hours of painstaking detective work, as Michael set out to trace his great-uncle's journey from the comfort of a middle-class Victorian childhood, via spells working on railways and tea plantations in India and on a farm in New Zealand, to the slaughtering grounds of Gallipoli and Flanders. He pored over surviving fragments of family correspondence and tantalisingly brief mentions in official documents. He scrutinised Harry's often frustratingly terse war diaries. He sifted through battlefield photographs to see whether his great-uncle appeared in any of them. He walked the route Harry took on that fatal, final day of his life amid the mud of northern France. As he did so, he gained a personal insight into what it was like to be a child of the British Empire and to fight for king and country in one of history's most devastating conflicts. And a figure that had previously existed in the shadows was gradually revealed to him. Great-Uncle Harry is an utterly compelling account of an ordinary man who led an extraordinary life. A blend of biography, history, travelogue and personal memoir, this is Michael Palin at his very finest.