Matt Vickers MP has raised his campaign in the House of Commons with the Secretary of State for Defence to honour the hundreds of men wrongly shot at dawn.
200,000 serving soldiers were officially court-martialled by the British High Command in WW1. Of those, 20,000 were found guilty of offences that carried the death penalty, while 3,000 are said to have officially received it, though many of these sentences were subsequently commuted.
Of these 3,000, 346 executions were carried out by firing squad, 306 of these have now received official pardons. The Shot at Dawn Memorial in Staffordshire commemorates those who have been pardoned, one of which represents the case of Private George Hunter.
Before the war, while working at Anderson’s Foundry at Port Clarence, Private George Hunter had suffered a terrible industrial accident which left him with a mental impairment that affected his short-term memory. Nevertheless, George enlisted in the 4th (Reserve) Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry and was sent to France in 1915, leaving behind a wife and two toddlers.
After George Hunter’s sentence of death had been passed his commanding officer noted on the proceedings that he thought Private Hunter was suffering from a mental abnormality and recommended that he should be seen by a doctor specialising in mental diseases. However, rather callously no notice was taken of his superior’s statement and Hunter was duly executed in a back area of the Ypres Salient.
George Hunter and comrades like him have since not been awarded medals posthumously.
Matt said:
"At the Arboretum memorial in Staffordshire stand 306 wooden stakes to symbolise the 306 soldiers who were wrongly 'shot at dawn' during the First World War and subsequently pardoned.
"One of those was Private George Hunter. He lived in Stockton and left behind his wife and two children to serve in the Durham Light Infantry Battalion before being unjustifiably murdered by his own in Ypres.
"It is a sad reality that Private Hunter and his fellow comrades who suffered such a great injustice have still not been posthumously awarded any of the medals they should have received for their service.
"I will be fighting to ensure that these men receive the recognition they rightly deserve and are awarded the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal."
