Private Thomas Highgate: A Life and Legacy Shaped by Tragedy
Updated: Sep 8
Thomas Highgate was the first British soldier executed for desertion in the First World War, shot by firing squad just 35 days after the fighting started. He was nineteen, could barely read or write and had spent years of his childhood shut away in a Lewisham workhouse before he ever picked up a rifle. His court martial lasted less than a day, his own regiment had been shredded at Mons days earlier so there was almost nobody left who could speak for him, and he was dead before most of Britain had worked out where Mons even was. What happened afterward is almost as bad as what happened that morning: even after the government admitted the whole system had been wrong, his own hometown spent years fighting not to say his name.
Quick answers
Who was Thomas Highgate and why was he executed?
He was a teenage private in the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment who left his post during the chaotic retreat from the Battle of Mons in September 1914. He was found hiding in civilian clothes, court-martialed within a day and shot for desertion on September 8, 1914, just over a month into the war.
Was he really the first British soldier executed in WWI?
Yes. Of the roughly 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers executed for military offences over the course of the war, Highgate holds the grim distinction of being first.
Did Thomas Highgate ever get a pardon?
Yes, along with the other 305 men, in 2006, under Section 359 of the Armed Forces Act. It's a lighter pardon than it sounds, though. The law says outright that it doesn't overturn his conviction or sentence, so legally he's still a convicted deserter. What actually changed was official acknowledgment that shell shock and combat trauma weren't properly understood at the time, not the verdict itself.
Is his name on a war memorial today?
It's complicated. His name still isn't on the memorial in his hometown of Shoreham despite a 2000 local referendum showing overwhelming support for adding it, and the space once reserved for him there has since gone to a different soldier entirely. He is listed on a memorial in Sidcup alongside his two brothers, though, and on both the national Shot at Dawn Memorial and the La Ferté-sous-Jouarre Memorial in France.
A childhood in the workhouse
Highgate was born on May 13, 1895, in Shoreham, Kent, to farm labourer John James Highgate and his wife Alice, the fourth of five children behind older siblings Robert and Emily and ahead of younger brothers Joseph and Charles. Between the ages of seven and fifteen, he spent stretches of his childhood as an inmate of the Lewisham workhouse, one of the grim Victorian institutions built to warehouse Britain's poor. School records show five separate admissions across roughly seven years as the family shuttled between Egham, Shoreham, Sidcup, Catford and Deptford chasing whatever work his father could find, and by the time he left school he was, by his own record, barely literate. None of this made him unusual for an Edwardian working-class kid, but it's the backdrop everything else in his story sits on top of.
A sailor before he was a soldier
At just twelve years old, in May 1907, Highgate joined the Royal Navy, training aboard the ship Exmouth before going to sea as a deck boy on the SS Oriana. His few years at sea were rough even by naval standards. He survived two shipwrecks and contracted yellow fever off the West African coast, an illness that left him with documented, lasting memory problems. A medical memorandum written years later noted that these injuries and illnesses would amply account for occasional lapses of memory, language that reads very differently once you know what it was eventually used to explain.
Trouble in the ranks before the war
Highgate joined the West Kent Regiment's special reserve battalion in 1912 at sixteen, then transferred into the regular 1st Battalion on February 4, 1913. His attestation papers describe a slight young man, five foot four and a half, around nine stone, with brown hair, hazel eyes and naval tattoos already on his arms. He wasn't a natural soldier. His record shows him turning up late for duty, swapping duties without permission and carrying a rusty rifle, and in early 1914 he deserted outright, earning himself 48 days' detention. In July 1914, weeks before the war even began, he was recorded absent from a regimental tattoo in Dublin, which is probably how a Kent farm boy ended up with an Irish sweetheart waiting for him. None of this looked good on paper, and none of it mentioned the yellow fever, the shipwrecks or the memory loss.
Mons, and a retreat that broke men
Highgate landed in France with the British Expeditionary Force on August 15, 1914, and eight days later found himself at the Battle of Mons, the first major clash between British and German troops of the war. The scale alone tells you what kind of introduction to combat this was: around 85,000 British troops faced roughly 160,000 Germans, and by the end of the day Britain had suffered close to 1,500 casualties to Germany's estimated 5,000. What followed was worse in a slower way, a fighting retreat that dragged on for roughly two weeks and covered something like 250 miles, with exhausted, half-starved men marching and fighting through what one historian later called organized chaos.
An hour of panic near Tournan
On September 5 or 6, depending which account you read, Highgate slipped away from his unit during the retreat. He later said he'd only meant to relieve himself and ended up wandering, eventually lying down in an empty farmhouse near the village of Tournan and, in a moment nobody has ever fully explained, changing into civilian clothes. A local gamekeeper, himself a former soldier, found him there and later testified that Highgate told him, “I have lost my army, and I mean to get out of it.” Highgate always maintained he'd meant he wanted to find his way back to his unit, not away from the war altogether, though the court didn't buy it. The historian Julian Putkowski, who has spent decades researching British military executions, later estimated the entire episode lasted no more than an hour or two from the moment he left his post to the moment he was found.
A trial that was barely a trial
Highgate was court-martialed the very next day, September 7, with no time and no real means to mount a defense. The legal safeguards a soldier would normally get, including the right to call witnesses and have an officer represent him, were waived under the army's “proximity of the enemy” exception, and in any case most of the men who could have vouched for him were dead, wounded or captured at Mons. His documented history of shipwrecks, yellow fever and memory loss, the very things that might have explained his behavior, was never raised at trial. Field Marshal Sir John French and General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien signed off on the death sentence, and it was carried out the following morning.
Also, a memorandum regarding Private Highgate from June 1914 from Captain Tate, Medical Officer at Richmond Barracks, Ireland, to the Adjutant of the 1st Battalion, Royal West Kent’s, states:
‘I have spoken to this man and find his memory good at present. His history of two shipwrecks [Highgate had been a seaman before joining the Army], a fall from a loft and yellow fever on W[est] coast of Africa would amply account for occasional lapses of memory. His manner is stated to be peculiar at times’ – Private Thomas James Highgate, 10061, 1st Battalion, Royal West Kent Regiment).
Executed 35 days into the war
At 7:07am on September 8, 1914, Highgate was shot by a firing squad drawn from the 1st Battalion Bedfordshire Regiment. He'd had less than an hour's notice of his fate, and accounts from the scene say he cried and called for his mother in his final minutes. Before he died, he wrote a will leaving what pay he was owed to his girlfriend in Dublin, Mary McNulty. She never received it. Smith-Dorrien reportedly ordered the execution publicized as widely as possible, specifically so soldiers from other regiments would hear about it and understand exactly what happened to deserters. Highgate was nineteen years old, and the war itself was only thirty-five days old.
A family that paid for it twice
Alice Highgate was reportedly informed of her son's execution abruptly, without the kind of sympathetic notification that usually accompanied a soldier's death in service. The army also stripped Highgate of the Mons Star, the campaign medal he'd otherwise earned for serving in that first battle. It wasn't the family's only loss either. Two of Highgate's brothers, Robert and Joseph, were later killed in the war themselves, Robert in January 1915 and Joseph of his wounds in June 1916.
Erased from Shoreham, remembered somewhere else
For decades, Highgate's name didn't appear on Shoreham's war memorial, a common fate for men executed for desertion or cowardice. In the 1990s, a local vicar named Reverend Barry Simmons led a campaign to change that, arguing Highgate deserved recognition as a victim of a brutal system rather than a stain on the village's record. A 2000 local referendum backed him decisively, with residents voting roughly 170 to 46 in favor, but the parish council held off, and by one contemporary account a Royal British Legion representative personally overruled the result even after the vote. Simmons eventually left his position amid the fallout. It later emerged that Highgate's name had actually been on a war memorial in Sidcup since 1921, listed alongside his brothers Robert and Joseph the whole time. He received his official government pardon in 2006 along with the other 305 men, but the space reserved for him on the Shoreham memorial never became his. A 2020 update on the long-running local campaign found that spot had instead been filled with a different soldier entirely, one who'd been missed off the original plaque, rather than with Highgate's name. His great-nephew Terence has continued pushing for a different kind of recognition in the years since.
The memorial that isn't quite about him
Highgate is one of 306 men named on the Shot at Dawn Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, each represented by an individual wooden stake carrying their name, age, rank and regiment. It's a common assumption that the memorial's central figure, a blindfolded man tied to a post facing a semicircle of trees standing in for a firing squad, is meant to represent Highgate specifically, given that he was first. It isn't. The sculptor Andy DeComyn actually modeled the figure on Private Herbert Burden, who lied about his age to enlist at sixteen and was executed at seventeen. Highgate's own stake stands among the rest, a small, specific marker in a field of them.
Why his case still matters
Highgate's case became a template almost immediately. Over the rest of the war, more than 3,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers would be sentenced to death for desertion or cowardice, though the vast majority had their sentences commuted. What makes his case worth returning to more than a century later isn't unique to him. It's the same story that shows up whenever an institution outruns its ability to understand the people caught inside it. Set Highgate's fate next to a soldier like Adrian Carton de Wiart, who survived that same war and several more after it with an eye patch and an empty sleeve to show for it, and the sheer randomness of who this war chose to break becomes obvious. Compare him to Henry Gunther, killed by his own decision to charge a German position one minute before the armistice took effect, and you get two entirely different young men destroyed by the same institutional indifference to timing and judgment. Even Britain's later, uneasy relationship with state execution, laid out in the story of the country's most prolific civilian executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, shows how slowly the country's appetite for this kind of finality actually changed. Highgate didn't get the benefit of that shift. He got thirty-five days, less than an hour's warning and a firing squad made up of men following orders every bit as broken as the ones that had been handed to him.
