Alfred Finnigan

Veteran of the Somme whose only wartime injury was a horse-bite

As a lead driver of a team of six horses pulling an 18-pounder gun, Alfred Finnigan first saw action during the Somme offensive of 1916. His battery was then moved to Italy to fight against the Austrians before returning to face the full might of the German offensive of 21 March 1918. His death at the age of 108 leaves only 12 British survivors of the Great War.

Alfred Finnigan was born near the Thames docks in Bermondsey in 1896, five years before the death of Queen Victoria and three years before the outbreak of the Boer War. At the age of seven he was taken by his father to Australia. Most of the businesses that his father started soon collapsed and from an early age Alfred had mixed opinions of him. He was glad that his father had introduced him to Gilbert and Sullivan and encouraged him from an early age to read - but resentful at his failure to grasp reality and the consequences for the family.

At the age of 10, with most of his father's money spent, the family returned to Tottenham in north London. The young Finnigan would much have preferred St John's Wood, so that he could watch the cricket at Lord's. However, his father did take him to watch Australia beat England in the second Test at Lord's in 1909.

At the outbreak of war in August 1914, Alfred Finnigan volunteered for the Army but was turned down because he was only 5ft 3in and had a weakness in one eye. But, six weeks later, he managed to join 2-6 Royal Field Artillery as a driver. In his training in Hyde Park, he was bitten on the chin by a horse: this was to be his only wound during the war. His final training was in Wiltshire, where he became the leading driver of a gun team - it took three drivers to control the six horses who pulled the 18lb gun and ammunition limber.

Finnigan arrived in France at the end of the Somme campaign in September 1916 and was soon in action in the Béthune-La Bassée area. One dark night, he was detailed to pick up a gun and, having got it limbered, made for the canal bank. The team was pulling hard when all of a sudden Finnigan saw the gleam of the water and just in time reined in the horses, preventing the whole team from falling in the canal to almost certain death.

That winter was particularly severe: "The conditions were dreadful," he said:

Freezing snow, sleet and ice. I cannot describe it, how the poor horses suffered. They stood nearly to their hocks in the mud many dying through hard work and exposure, some we had to shoot.

We got some Canadian knee-length boots which were better than ours. I chose a pair of size 10s - but only wore 7s. It was the best choice I ever made. Like the other chaps, I rubbed grease all over my feet, covered them with two pairs of thick woollen socks then stuffed clean hay into the boots and laced them on. Ahh - but they were warm!

Our hands were always frozen. Gloves didn't last long as the traces just wore them away. Over our heads we wore balaclavas - and a bit of straw under our tin hats helped keep the cold away. Around our necks we had woollen mufflers, then greatcoats covered with groundsheets, I don't know what I looked like, I can only describe myself as a military vagabond.

The food was not too good either:

Once when we complained about the quality of the pork-and-beans ration we got the reply from HQ: "On opening a tin of pork and beans, soldiers must not be disappointed if they find no pork. The pork has been absorbed into the beans."

In the spring of 1917, Finnigan's unit moved to take part in the capture of Vimy Ridge by the Canadians. As he drove through, he encountered shellfire and also sustained an attack of gas:

The tear-gas shell half-blinded me which would have meant finishing up in a ditch. I used my rubber mouthpiece and nose clips in case there was any poison gas in the mix.

During one night, on the move on the Lens-Arras road, his gun got stuck in the mud. They added two horses, then another two, until 10 horses were used to get the gun out. But in a lighter moment that September, they held a race meeting near Habarq and a concert-party group aptly named the Whizz Bangs gave Finnigan the only entertainment he saw in the war.

At Hellfire Corner, his leading offside horse shied from a shell explosion and slipped into a crater. Under intense shellfire and at great risk to their lives they struggled to pull him out. "He was a great favourite of mine, but he was windy and no use as an Army mount," Finnigan said:

He should never have been in the Army. He was screaming and thrashing about so much that I finally decided there was nothing else for it but to shoot him and cut the traces. It was then that, suddenly with no reason, he broke free and struggled out.

In the morass of Passchendaele, the Hooge Crater held hundreds of wounded. On a number of occasions Finnigan had to lead his team through the area, weaving carefully between the casualties. He remembered how gently the horses stepped around the wounded men.

On 22 September, exhausted, he and his friend Fred Smith fell asleep under a hedge. He was later to recall in his diary:

It was poor Fred's last bit of pleasure under the sun and the fresh wind - he was killed later that day and buried hastily near our guns. His body was blown up a few days after and scattered about over the mud and slime. He was a jolly fine fellow and was my very good friend. I hope if there is another and better world that he is there.

At the end of 1917, Finnigan's battery, with the whole of the 5th Division, was moved to Italy. He recalled how beautiful the train journey was and how glad he was to be out of the mud and horror of Passchendaele, which he described as "hell with the lid off". He soon found himself in the front line at the River Piave, where the Austrians and Germans had inflicted heavy losses on the Italians, who were on the side of the Allies in this war.

With the news of the proposed German big push in March 1918, his battery returned to northern France and was to play a vital part in preventing the German advance on Hazebrouck just north of Béthune. He was, ironically, back where he had started in 1916:

We repulsed each of their four attacks with good infantry and artillery work - we sweated our horses black, up and down from the division field to guns with ammo all day. It was gruelling work on a hard road in fine weather. Two and a quarter million rounds of small arms ammunition was sent up to replace what we had expended.

Like many men who returned from the war, Finnigan found civilian life difficult and after a number of rootless years he signed on as a deckhand on the three-masted ship William Mitchell. He sailed for many years to Australia and South America and earned his seaman's ticket.

A quieter life followed for this adventurous man. Having married in 1933, he returned to London to work in a large firm of accountants until he retired in 1961. When he married, Finnigan made a conscious decision that he would have no children: "I was not prepared to produce cannon fodder for the Army, nor fodder for industry."

In his last years he was cared for by his niece and her husband, surrounded by 42 dogs.

Max Arthur