They are Privates John Jennings and Griffith Lewis of the 2nd Battalion South Lancashire Regiment and were executed for desertion.
Both had served in France in 1914 as Reservists but had left Lancashire on 25th October 1915.
In London the party left their kit at Waterloo Station before marching to the Union Jack Club where they were allowed to fall out.
When the draft was re-assembled Jennings and Lewis were absent. Nothing further was seen of the duo until they were arrested by the Shoreditch Police on 18 May 1916 and handed over to military escort and shipped out to the Battalion billeted in a back area of the Somme. Their Court Martial took place on 20 June 1916.
The timing of Jennings and Lewis' execution sounds very like a measure to send a message to any other soldiers thinking of deserting before facing the horror of going 'Over the Top'.
The use of capital punishment by the British Army was only finally abandoned in 1998 when Tony Blair’s assent to the European Community’s Amsterdam Accords outlawed the death penalty.
Until 1916 the families of those ‘Shot at Dawn’ were routinely informed when and why their men had been executed and the War Office discontinued payment of the dependent’s allowances.
Often with insufficient money to pay rent or buy food, emotionally traumatised families were evicted from their homes and in at least one case, the desperate wife of an executed soldier resorted to prostitution to feed their children.
Public protests and adverse publicity forced a change and by 1917 executed men’s families were not financially punished by the War Office.
However, for families the stigma of association with cowardice and deep sense of shame has persisted long after the men’s children were abused as ‘coward’s bastards’ by their schoolmates during the First World War.
In August 2006 the 306 soldiers of the First World War who were shot at dawn for cowardice or desertion were finally granted posthumous pardons. This pardon does not extend to the 40 men convicted of murder or mutiny.
It's hard to imagine today what being 'Shot at Dawn' really meant. Try this recreation...
