Michael Palin recreates the extraordinary life and tragic death of a First World War soldier—his great-uncle Harry. Some years ago a stash of family records was handed down to Michael Palin, among which were photos of an enigmatic young man in army uniform, as well as photos of the same young man as a teenager looking uncomfortable at family gatherings. This, Michael learned, was his Great-Uncle Harry, born in 1884, died in 1916. He had previously had no idea that he had a Great-Uncle Harry, much less that his life was cut short at the age of 32 when he was killed in the Battle of the Somme. The discovery both shocked him and made him want to know much more. The quest that followed involved hundreds of hours of painstaking detective work. Michael dug out every bit of family gossip and correspondence he could. He studied every relevant official document. He tracked down what remained of his great-uncle Harry's diaries and letters, and pored over photographs of First World War battle scenes to see whether Harry 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. And as he did so, a life that had previously existed in the shadows was 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. "An important historical record and a well-paced story in its own right, Great-Uncle Harry is also much more than that: a tremendous act of love." — The Guardian “Palin’s Great-Uncle Harry . . . was a feast. Ostensibly, it was a tribute to Lance Corporal H.W.B. Palin, slain on the Somme in September 1916. But he did not merely recreate the life of a man whose body was ‘known unto God.’ Through years of research and hard writing he created a life.” — The Critic “A remarkable work of forensic genealogy, reassembling the absent bones of a man who left scant clues, told with quiet, affectionate persistence. There was an obstinate opacity to the man, and yet Palin manages to revive him.” — StarTribune “Palin’s skill as a storyteller lifts the unremarkable story of his great-uncle Harry into a moving tribute to all soldiers lost in World War I.” —Business Post MICHAEL PALIN has written and starred in numerous TV programs and films, from Monty Python and Ripping Yarns to The Missionary and The Death of Stalin . He has also made several much-acclaimed travel documentaries, his journeys taking him to the North and South Poles, the Sahara Desert, the Himalayas, Eastern Europe and Brazil. His books include accounts of his journeys, novels ( Hemingway’s Chair and The Truth ) and several volumes of diaries. From 2009 to 2012 he was president of the Royal Geographical Society. He received a BAFTA fellowship in 2013, and a knighthood in the 2019 New Year Honours list. He lives in London. PREFACE The short Life of my Great-uncle   At the gates of Shrewsbury School, where three generations of Palins were educated, there is a war memorial on which stands an elegant likeness of Sir Philip Sidney, poet, courtier, scholar and personification of all the finest qualities of the first Elizabethan age.   He died at the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, at the age of thirty-one.   Listed below are the names of 329 other former pupils of the school who gave their lives for their country. Among them is H. W. B. Palin. He died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, at the age of thirty- two.   Much has been written about the distinguished life of Sir Philip Sidney. Nothing has been written about the life of H. W. B. Palin. But he was my great-uncle, and I felt his story should be told.   Not – I have to confess – that I’ve always thought that. Throughout my childhood and early adult years I was more preoccupied with the present and the future than the past, more interested in making sense of the course of my own life than that of anyone else. So far as I was concerned, the past was something to be dealt with by people who had time on their hands. It was a luxury.   So when in November 1971 we received a batch of family documents, including a black leather-backed notebook which contained a travel diary kept by my great-grandfather, a detailed Palin family tree stretching back two centuries, and five barely legible diaries kept by a great-uncle, I’m afraid they seemed nowhere near as relevant to my life as trying to earn a living writing and recording material for a new Monty Python series. Oddly enough, my father and mother seemed equally incurious. The whole bundle of documents ended up being set aside in some dusty cupboard.   Six years later I recorded in my diary the arrival at my parents’ cottage in Reydon, near Southwold, of an Austin 1100, driven by a late-middle-aged lady called Joyce Ashmore, an unmarried cousin of my father. She seemed to be the nearest we had to a