Patrick Stewart Who Do You Think You Are?

Sir Patrick Stewart was born in Yorkshire in 1940.

He is one of Britain's best loved actors.

He's achieved worldwide fame in film, on stage and in television.

But it was in 2007, while playing Macbeth,

that Patrick began to understand what lay behind many of his finest performances.

I would make my first entrance in military gear, fatigues,

a cap, great...Army greatcoat and an AK-47 under my arm,

playing this tyrant murderer.

The second or third preview, looking in the mirror,

with my gun under my arm,

I realise that looking right back at me was my father.

And it was shocking.

And then that led me to look back over years of work

and to realise that I had been, in a sense,

channelling my father for years and years and years.

And I want to understand that.

Patrick divides his time between London and Oxfordshire,

but was born in the Yorkshire town of Mirfield.

I was born in what is called, in the West Riding of Yorkshire,

a one up, one down.

We had one room on the ground floor,

and the door came in off the yard, straight into the room.

No bathroom, no toilet. There was a cellar downstairs.

This is a photograph of my mother and her sister-in-law, Dolly.

My eldest brother, Geoffrey. The little boy is my brother, Trevor,

and I suspect that wrapped up in that shawl might be me.

Patrick's mother, Gladys, lived in Mirfield all her life.

My mother was quite a timid woman, and very sweet,

but with little ambition.

My mother had never been anywhere, ever.

You know, a trip to Huddersfield was a major outing for her.

Here are photographs of my mother's stage career.

She performed with the Old Bank Methodists Drama Group,

which was an all-female group.

Here she is, I guess, playing a butler,

and here she is again playing a maid.

Now, the name of this maid might have been Mary,

because one night I went to see her in a play,

and my mother entered with a tray,

and when she came on, I heard her say,

"Enter Mary with kippers."

Now that's very Brechtian, you know, as a stylised entrance,

and clearly what she'd done, she'd seen her character's name

and then the stage direction, "Enter Mary with kippers,"

so she said that as if it were her line.

This is my young father.

This must have been during the time of his military service

in the '20s.

Patrick's father, Alfred Stewart, who died in 1980,

was in the Army for many years. He was posted overseas

around the time of his first son Geoffrey's birth

and didn't marry Gladys until Geoffrey was eight.

He was posted abroad again in 1940, just months before Patrick was born.

And here he is again in what would have been

his Second World War uniform.

I was five when I first got to know him,

when he came back after the war ended.

While Alfred was away fighting in France,

Patrick and his brother, Trevor, lived at home with their mother.

I do remember that I had a cot which was alongside her bed,

and the sides of the cot could slide down,

and I have a distinct memory of rolling from my cot into her bed

and then rolling back again and thinking that was good fun.

And so I think that I was indulged and spoiled

and petted and loved during those five years.

All of that changed dramatically when this man appeared in the house.

Um, in many respects... not for the better, either.

At weekends, when he had been drinking, he could get very angry.

I don't ever recall being hit by him, even when at times

I would intervene in rows between my mother and my father.

I would put my body between them at what I thought were critical moments.

And I don't remember him ever being, even pushing me hard

or being violent with me. But he was to my mother. He hit her.

He threw things at her.

Sometimes we had to call an ambulance, or a doctor would come.

Certainly, on a couple of occasions, the police too would come.

I think of my mother often

and the loneliness she must have felt at times.

But she adored my father.

I mean, later on, my brother and I discussed with her,

you know, leaving him, but there was no question of it.

I think she really loved him.

Patrick remembers his father as a violent husband,

but he knows there was another side of Alfred's life

which he wants to find out more about.

His war service... found him a superstar,

and I'm told he was very, very good at his job.

Patrick picked up scraps of information about Alfred's Army life

from the stories his father told him as a child.

They were adventure stories, and he was a very good raconteur.

I would have him repeat some of the stories over and over again,

because I enjoyed them so much.

Now Patrick wants to reconcile the conflicting sides of his father's character

and to understand why Army life had such a powerful impact on him.

Whatever I find out about his time in the Army

is going to be illuminating.

Because it was having left all that behind him that made him,

at times, a pretty unhappy individual.

To find out more about his father's Army life,

Patrick's come to the Imperial War Museum in London.

-Patrick Stewart.

-Very nice to meet you.

And you too. Thanks so much for doing this.

He's meeting military historian Joshua Levine,

who's found a copy of Alfred's military service record.

If you have a look here, what you'll see at the top,

his age on enlistment.

So he's 19 years, 325 days.

And you'll see the date the engagement begins there,

-which was...

-1925.

-13th February, 1925.

-I'm doing a lot of quick calculations.

-Yeah.

Because, um, my eldest brother was born out of wedlock

or, as he loved to tell people, he was a bastard.

Um, and my father not only didn't marry my mother,

but the family's suspicion was that he immediately joined the Army

the moment that he knew he had got this young woman pregnant.

Well, I think you might be interested to have a look at this.

This is a later sheet from the service record, but what it shows

is the date of birth of his children, including Geoffrey.

28th January, 1925.

So, actually two weeks before he joined the Army.

One has to assume there was a connection.

A lot of people did join the Army to escape something or other.

Yes.

Maybe the actor in me is inclined to see that

as a dramatic and perhaps desperate gesture.

Whether he intended to escape or not,

Alfred did eventually return to Mirfield and married Gladys in 1933.

By this time, he'd been promoted to the rank of Lance Corporal

in the Regimental Police.

The job of a Regimental Policeman is a very interesting one,

a very unusual one as well. What he would have been doing

was working actually within the Regiment,

within the battalion, making sure that people were properly dressed,

that they weren't drunk, they weren't playing cards for money.

You were then the prison guard as well.

You had a great deal of power.

And one of the by-products of having this power

was that very often the Regimental Police were very, very unpopular.

Ah.

Would they be feared at all by the ordinary soldier?

Yes, they would. They would.

Mm.

You'd probably only get that role

if you were quite an intimidating person.

Well, all of that merges with a picture

that I'm, by first-hand experience, very familiar with.

When his seven-year term of service was over,

Alfred returned to civilian life.

But at the beginning of World War Two, he was recalled to the Army.

He joined a territorial battalion

of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, known as the KOYLI.

Now aged 34, he was one of the most experienced soldiers in the unit.

Your father's battalion, the 2nd/4th,

was raised just about the time of the outbreak of war.

The fact is that they never even got to know each other,

the members of the battalion,

because almost as soon as they were raised,

they were all sent all over the place to do guard duty,

and it meant that they never received any training.

-No military training?

-Very, very little.

And this is one reason why your father would have been essential,

because, you know, at least he could have given

-some ad hoc training here and there.

-Ah.

You know, basically told people how to march,

told people how to drill, because they weren't receiving very much.

Despite their lack of training, Alfred's battalion received orders

to go to join the British Expeditionary Force in France.

Norway and Denmark had been occupied by the Nazis.

Now, the British Expeditionary Force,

along with the French, Belgian and Dutch,

were preparing for a German invasion of France and the Low Countries.

The plan was for the KOYLI to play a support role

far behind the frontline.

Your father's battalion weren't going to go into battle,

they were going to effectively be pioneers

and they were going to do a lot of digging,

they were going to build railways, that was the sort of thing

they were going to be doing. They're not well equipped -

for example, they had about a third of the number of Bren guns

they were supposed to have - but it was going to be all right

-because they weren't supposed to be fighting.

-Right.

On the 27th April, 1940,

Alfred and the rest of the battalion arrived in France by boat.

Their task was to help build a vast transport network

for moving stores and ammunition around France.

Patrick is following his father's footsteps to northern France.

He wants to find out about a period in Alfred's life

which didn't feature in his war stories.

I'm puzzled as to why he never once said, "I was there."

Why didn't he tell me?

Was there something about this particular experience with the BEF

that he never ever wanted to talk about?

Hello.

What a very warm day today, isn't it?

Historian Tim Lynch has brought Patrick

to the town library in Abbeville in Picardy.

I hope to find out some details about Lance Corporal Alfred Stewart.

-Can you tell me what the next stage was?

-OK.

Basically, they were building the railway sidings during the day,

going out to the pubs at night, having a few beers,

and basically treating it as a summer holiday.

They weren't in construction, they were working almost as navvies.

-They were navvies, exactly, yeah.

-OK.

Then, when we get to May of 1940, everything kicks off.

The Germans invade.

Anticipating a German invasion in the north,

the majority of Allied troops had been positioned

around the Franco-Belgian border.

When the Nazis attacked on May 10th,

the British Expeditionary Force met them around Antwerp and Brussels.

But the Allies had left the Ardennes Forest virtually undefended.

They'd assumed it was impassable

but hadn't bargained for the Nazi Panzer Divisions

who swept into France at lightning speed facing little opposition.

With most of the Allied troops tied down in Belgium,

Alfred Stewart and the Pioneer Divisions were called into action.

They were hastily put on a train heading for the front.

So the KOYLI were called forward with the idea

that they would try and act as some sort of barrier to the Germans.

We're talking about speed bumps, basically.

They had no hope whatsoever.

This is a diary that was kept by one of the men on the train,

and if you'd like to read from here.

"All day we pass train after train full of Belgian troops

"with artillery and machine guns

"travelling in opposite direction to us.

"They grinned at us and made gestures of throat cutting,

"pointing in the direction we were going.

"Everyone wondered what it all meant."

The KOYLI headed north-east,

expecting to engage with the enemy near the Belgian border.

They had no idea that a German Panzer Division

was heading straight towards them.

Your father was heading for Abbeville

at the same time as the Germans arrived just outside of Abbeville.

And just tell us,

what kind of German divisions were these that were swinging round here?

Well, several Panzer Divisions with up-to-date tanks, radios,

fully equipped with air support from the Stuka dive bombers.

-Motorised?

-Motorised infantry.

-So you got just about the best that...

-Yeah. We have...

..the German military machine could throw at France.

One of the German generals said,

"You don't just tickle with the fingers, you smash with the fist."

On the outskirts of Abbeville,

Alfred's train came to a sudden halt.

The town was being bombed.

This is what happened to Abbeville.

There's nothing that is undamaged, it would seem.

There are simply... completely smashed buildings,

piles of rubble and nothing else.

It was devastated.

Using contemporary war diaries, Tim has established where Alfred was

when he witnessed the bombing of Abbeville.

Let's go this way. Along this line here.

He's brought Patrick to the spot where the KOYLI train pulled up.

The KOYLI were travelling along this line here,

and if you read this,

this paragraph here, it will give you some idea of where we are.

"As the train neared Abbeville about 3pm,

"the town was seen to be in flames beneath a heavy cloud of smoke.

"Half a mile from the town, the train stopped,

"and the battalion detrained while a heavy air attack took place.

"It was a nasty spot with the railway line bounded on the south side

"by a wide marsh, and on the north, by the Somme Canal.

"So leaving a party to guard the train,

"the battalion crossed the canal by a bridge

"and disappeared in the fields,

"from where they had an excellent view of modern war at its foulest."

It's the only safe place they could get to where

they could actually keep the battalion together.

People like your father basically just trying to guide the battalion

into safety over that side.

What they could see was the bombing right ahead.

Bombs started to fall alongside the railway line.

And one man describes bombs landing in the fields next to them,

and bits of tree and bits of cow raining down onto the train.

While the KOYLI took cover in the fields,

they saw hundreds of refugees fleeing from Abbeville.

This is a diary that was kept by one of the men in the KOYLI.

"During the raids,

"refugees fled along the banks of the Somme from Abbeville.

"It was pitiful to see them.

"Old men, women of all ages and young children with a few belongings.

"One girl about 18 years of age passed through our ranks

"laughing wildly. She was alone and had a mad expression on her face."

By now, there were around eight million refugees in France,

fleeing from the fighting.

They were regarded as legitimate targets by the Germans,

who deliberately bombed refugee columns to create fear and panic,

choke up the roads and hinder Allied movements.

Looking down the line, you'd see the smoke,

you'd see the refugees coming down the line here, this stream.

It must have seemed like a nightmare,

-a nightmare of bloody chaos.

-Yeah.

During a break in the bombing,

the driver of the train drove off and never returned.

Now with no means of transport, Alfred and the troops

had no choice but to retreat.

They set off down the railway track on foot, away from the burning town.

The KOYLI and your father had set off, but on the way,

they came across damaged trains, including a hospital train.

And it was wrecked, and one man describes

walking along the train and seeing two children laid in the grass

and realised they were both dead,

killed by the blast. Not a mark on them.

And these were men

-who had never seen sights like this before?

-No.

My father told me a story of coming upon a train

that had been strafed and bombed,

and he noticed as he went by one shattered window,

that there was a hand hanging out,

a woman's hand with a ring on her finger.

He noticed it as he went by.

And then some time later, coming back up the train,

he saw that the hand was still there

but the finger that had the ring on it was gone.

Well, I was a child when he told me this story, and of course it...

it both fascinated and horrified me.

But I do remember...

..something in my father's voice and face when he told me that story.

There was a sense of disgust and shame and even fury.

Maybe that story was about here. If so, so far as I'm aware,

it's the only tale he told about this period of his life.

By now, the KOYLI were cut off from the Allies in the north

who were surrounded by the Nazis in a small patch of land by the coast.

In late May, 1940,

the evacuation of over 300,000 Allied troops from Dunkirk began.

But Alfred and the rest of the KOYLI stayed in France

for one last desperate attempt to delay the German advance to Paris.

However, they were no match for the Panzer Divisions

and were soon forced into retreat.

The Germans entered Paris on June 14th.

Three days later,

Alfred was amongst the last British troops to leave France.

He was evacuated from Cherbourg just hours before it fell to the enemy.

-They'd had a pretty ghastly experience.

-Yeah.

And one that had come upon them so unexpectedly,

that the impact of it must have been that much greater.

I think so, and perhaps this will give you some idea

of what that impact was.

"Mirfield Sergeant back from France."

I would imagine this cutting came from

-the Mirfield & District Reporter.

-That's right.

A newspaper on which, some 50 years later,

I was to be a very insignificant junior reporter.

Same newspaper.

"Among the KOYLIs who have returned safely from France..."

"..is Sergeant Alfred Stewart of Cam Lane, Mirfield."

Sergeant?! When did that happen?

At some point, between here and him getting home,

he was made a sergeant.

"He has been in France three months

"and seen a great deal of the recent hard fighting

"coming through many bombing and machine-gunning attacks.

"The brutality of the Germans against civilian refugee children

"has left a deeper impression than anything else of his experiences.

"Sergeant Stewart says he had no rest for three weeks

"and little substantial food but did fine work in leading his men.

"He was promoted Sergeant at the front.

"He escaped from Cherbourg before the German advance troops arrived,

"but in an aerial attack, a nearby bomb explosion

"gave him shell-shock from which he still suffers."

Um, I never heard him speak of shell-shock.

"From which he still suffers."

We know now that it builds up a level of stress and anger.

And, of course, what I experienced from 1945 onwards

-was an angry man.

-Yeah.

-Who maybe hadn't been angry before.

-No.

I am seeing a story here now.

Not only a narrative of this happened then that happened and that happened,

but perhaps far more importantly, a psychological story developing.

Despite witnessing the horrors of the fall of France,

Alfred made an unusual decision.

In 1943, he volunteered for one of the Army's most elite units.

He signed up for the newly created Parachute Regiment.

He was a little on the old side to be shifting his life

so much into what was a much more physically demanding job.

I'm puzzled about that

and I am hungry for more information.

When Alfred Stewart joined the Parachute Regiment,

it was still in its infancy.

The unit had started in 1940

in response to the success of German airborne operations.

The Germans had seen the potential of parachute technology as far back

as 1935, when they witnessed a spectacular airborne demonstration

by the Soviet Army near Kiev.

Their first airborne units were in operation by 1936.

Unfortunately, this enthusiasm wasn't shared by the British,

whose observer in Kiev had advised his staff to forget all about it.

But despite their slow start,

the British Parachute Regiment soon became a formidable fighting unit,

highly trained, self-reliant and aggressive.

Here's the instructor picking out a victim. Hey, you!

There's no gentleness about this, even in training.

And when these boys get going against a real enemy,

it's going to be rough for the enemy.

The next step of Patrick's journey takes him to the south of France.

My father talked about southern France, but how he got there,

I don't know.

I do remember he told me that, more than once, he jumped into action.

That is, jumped out of a plane when people on the ground were firing.

-Hi. I'm Patrick.

-Hi.

Historian and ex-Para Bob Hilton

has brought Patrick to the village of La Motte in Provence

to tell him more about Alfred's time in the Parachute Regiment.

-This is a beautiful old place.

-Yes, it is.

Just give me a little bit of background, Bob.

My father's rank at that time was sergeant?

Sergeant major. He's actually been promoted quite quickly.

From 1940 to 1942, he's gone from a corporal to a sergeant major.

I've always had the understanding, Bob,

that my father was a little unusually old.

I believe he was 38 when he volunteered.

Quite a lot of blokes reaching sergeant major at the age of 38

are starting to look towards their retirement,

not volunteering for a high-risk job.

This location has special significance in the story

of Alfred Stewart.

Well, this area here, we're about 20 to 25 miles in

from the southern coast of France.

This is where your dad parachuted in

with the 2nd British Parachute Brigade on Operation Dragoon.

-When was this?

-In August of 1944.

Your father dropped just a little bit beyond those trees.

-We're that close?

-Yeah.

-To the spot?

-Yeah.

Operation Dragoon was part of the Allied plan

to recapture German-occupied France.

The first phase was the Normandy landings,

which took place on June 6th, 1944.

Operation Dragoon was the second phase,

beginning in the south of France on August 15th.

The operation began with an airborne assault by paratroops and gliders.

Their task was to secure a pocket of land by the coast

ahead of a massive naval invasion later that day.

Alfred Stewart, one of the last men leaving France

when it fell to the Germans in 1940,

was one of 9,000 British and American paratroops

on the mission to win it back four years later.

Your father had a key job on Operation Dragoon.

He was in the Brigade Defence Platoon.

He was the sergeant major of the Brigade Defence Platoon.

He's got about 30 men to protect the brigade headquarters.

It is a tough job.

There were about 180 men in this headquarters,

plus General Frederick, the American Commander, and his headquarters.

I'm not sure whether you will have seen this photo ever before,

but we've been told that is the Brigade Defence Platoon.

That's got to be him.

I believe that he is the man standing centre back

with his hands in his pockets

-and his beret pulled at...

-At a rakish angle.

..at a very rakish angle. What is the plane? Is that a Dakota?

That's the Dakota.

I think we called it the DC-3, but everybody knew it

as the Dak, the Dakota.

Were these American or were they...?

They were American aircraft flown by Americans.

He looks great.

Bob has organised for Patrick to meet 92-year-old Dick Hargreaves

who served with Alfred on Operation Dragoon.

Dick is taking Patrick by helicopter over the very area

where he and Alfred jumped in August of 1944.

We left Rome at one o'clock in the morning

and flew for four hours in the dark.

And were you able to distinguish the terrain?

No, because there was a ground mist when we came in over the sea,

but we had some light ack-ack from the German coastal batteries,

and there was a ground mist here,

and we all thought we were jumping in the sea.

But, I mean, your father, and brigade headquarters,

all landed in the proper dropping zone.

Alfred and the Defence Platoon landed near the town of Le Muy

shortly after 4am.

My father and the headquarters group were all landing right here?

Yes.

-All around this area here?

-Yeah, yeah.

Um, sheer luck really with American pilots, you know -

they weren't too hot.

-And you see that rocky hill over there?

-Yes.

Well, we had people dropped onto that in the dark,

hitting the rocks, and breaking legs and arms and worse.

But when the green light comes on, you've got to jump.

-This is about the height we jumped.

-It seems very low.

Yeah, well, the lower the better, because you get shot at.

You don't want to float about with the Germans having a pot at you.

Alfred's objective was the hamlet of Le Mitan,

where he was to secure the buildings

earmarked for the Allied headquarters.

I set off to capture that high ground running into Germans.

We had to kill them and clean them out,

but they were in 10s and 20s, you know.

And we sent the German prisoners all back to Le Mitan

where your father eventually was.

There was a German prisoner of war cage.

-I'm sure your father would have been involved.

-I'm sure he would.

He'd be keeping an eye on them.

The thing that amazed me about your father is his age, you know.

To volunteer at 38 to become a parachutist.

I did it when I was 21, you know, when you feel a bit more like it.

Patrick wants to find the buildings where his father was based.

Having seen the location from the air,

he's searching for the Allied headquarters on foot.

-Madame, bonjour.

-Monsieur.

Je m'appelle Patrick Stewart.

Um, my father, mon pere, parachuted...

-Parachutist!

-..Here.

-Ah, bon.

-Into this very location.

-Il est tombe au Le Mitan.

-Oui, oui.

-Vous voulez entrer?

-Do you want to come in?

Oui, merci. Merci.

Entrez, entrez.

-Ah, mangez. Voila. Tres bien.

-Vous etes ici.

-Alors.

My father was one of those British soldiers

whose duty was to protect the headquarters.

HE TRANSLATES INTO FRENCH

Ah, voila. Ah, bien.

Right here, or rather, can you show us

the house where the headquarters were?

Oui, oui.

Are you sure? Merci, madame.

Josette Matan was 12 years old during Operation Dragoon

and remembers it well.

Oui, oui.

Her father owned the buildings commandeered by the Allies

for their field hospital and administrative headquarters.

SHE SPEAKS IN FRENCH

The headquarters was just right here.

Just in front, that was a chicken park,

and they put the prisoners in the park where the chicken were.

Ah!

-Here is the headquarters.

-Ah, yes.

Now, were there both American and British soldiers right here?

More the British than the Americans.

And the first who came here was the British paratroop.

As head of the Defence Platoon,

Alfred had responsibility for German prisoners of war,

who were kept in a chicken run by the headquarters building.

That was the only way going to the place,

and they were parked just right here.

All the Germans were in this place.

-Nothing changed. Nothing changed.

-Really?

-Yeah.

Really? So they were sitting on the ground...

Very close together.

-They were close together, they're still standing.

-Ah, I see.

And so you were no longer occupied?

Yeah, the war was ended for us, for this place.

We talk about that day every day and all the time.

The airborne troops overcame resistance, and destroyed roads

and bridges to prevent the arrival of German reinforcements.

They were so effective that when the seaborne invasion began

soon afterwards, it was virtually unopposed.

The Germans were forced into retreat,

and within a month, most of France had been liberated.

Operation Dragoon, the forgotten D-Day,

has been overshadowed by the landings in Normandy,

but it was one of the most successful combat operations of the war.

When I think about

his responsibilities to the Parachute Regiment,

I don't think they would have happened to him

unless he had been recognised as being a man of some determination,

some strength of character.

All those things are what go to make a man of courage.

But I think he loved what he was doing, you see.

And I know that my ambition

comes from the same gene pool as my father's.

And I'm grateful for it.

Alfred still had one last job to do, and it was a vital one.

In 1945, just five months after Operation Dragoon,

he was appointed Regimental Sergeant Major

of the 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment.

It was during the final months of the war,

a critical time in the history of this legendary unit.

Patrick's returned to England,

to the battalion's headquarters in Colchester.

He's meeting Captain Nick Muys.

This document that I have here,

which is an excerpt from our war records,

shows your father, who was appointed RSM of the 2nd Battalion,

the Parachute Regiment, in January, 1945.

Now, that date's particularly important,

because it's right after Arnhem, the battle where the 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment,

-took particularly heavy casualties.

-What does that stand for?

Is that an A before the dash?

The A is for Acting, so it's not a formalised appointment.

So from that you can probably deduce

that he's been drafted in at short notice.

The 2nd Battalion, or 2 Para, were among the 10,000 airborne troops

sent into the Netherlands in September, 1944.

They had faced heavy German opposition.

2 Para were cut off from reinforcements at Arnhem.

They'd sheltered in houses that were pulverised

by enemy tank guns and artillery.

The regiment suffered the worst losses in its history.

Three-quarters of troops on the operation were killed, missing or captured.

Events at Arnhem enhanced the regiment's reputation for fearlessness

and inspired the book and the film A Bridge Too Far.

But Alfred arrived in a unit that had been decimated.

His job as RSM was to help to rebuild it.

He would have been the guy

that was essentially hand-picked for that job.

The most important aspect is the mentor, it's the development

and it's the fostering of the team spirit.

And that would have been why he was brought into this unit

at such an important time,

when morale would inevitably have been low,

to essentially kind of look after them in almost a fatherly way,

-dare I say it.

-So you're saying that there is a pastoral aspect?

Absolutely.

Particularly important in a battalion that's essentially new,

it's got to be someone that people look up to,

and in order to do that, they've got to respect him,

and, in many ways, for his character as well as his professional ability.

It hit me strongly that my father,

who up till then had not been much of a father figure to his children,

he was taking on the responsibility

of being a father figure to hundreds of men.

I came to regard him, as the years went by, as complex.

I wonder if perhaps, during this period of life,

he was really quite simple.

The picture I am beginning to get is of someone very focused

and not, um, chaotic, as sometimes he could be in later life.

And I like what I hear and I like how that makes me feel.

I have a history for him

which is richer than any history I'd had before.

And right at the heart of that history is a human being,

and I don't think he had been a human being for me before.

Now he has the full story of his father's military career,

Patrick wants to uncover the truth

about Alfred's troubled domestic life.

He wants to look back at his family's formative years

and find out what lay behind the lifelong tensions

that existed between Alfred and his eldest son, Geoffrey.

Things went bad with Geoffrey and my father very quickly.

There was a sourness in Geoffrey towards my father.

And all my adult life before my father died,

there was tension between them.

My brother, Geoffrey, believed my father was not his father.

That was his own personal suspicion.

So if there was any indication of something there,

that would be interesting. Upsetting but interesting.

To find out if there's any truth behind Geoffrey's suspicions,

Patrick's come to Yorkshire to look into the circumstances

of Geoffrey's birth.

He's meeting archivist Jenny Kiff at the Wakefield Registry of Deeds.

And this is a register from the Dewsbury Petty Sessions,

and if we turn to the page here, look under the 15th of May...

"Gladys Barrowclough." That's my mother.

I'm getting uneasy now. "Name of defendant - Alfred Stewart.

"Nature of offence or of matter of complaint...

"bastardy application."

Can you tell me what a bastardy application was?

A bastardy application, what it means

is that a woman has come to the court looking for some maintenance,

if you like, an early form of the Child Support Agency as was.

-Tell me the dates again. And what...

-This is May 15th, 1925.

OK. Yes.

That's about three or four months after my brother was born.

Yeah. So this normally means that the father is absent

and that the mother has no income or no support from him

via a private agreement or anything mutually consented to.

We know why he was absent, because he joined the Army.

Yeah. This entry tells us very little.

But I have something here that will actually tell us quite a bit more.

"Before the Petty Sessional Court sitting at Dewsbury,

"complaints have been made by Gladys Barrowclough," my mother,

"single woman, that on the 27th day of January, 1925,

"she was delivered of a bastard child

"of which she alleged that Alfred Stewart was the father.

"On the appearance of the Defendant, and on hearing the said Complaint,

"it is adjudged that the Defendant is the putative father

"of the said child, and it is ordered

"that the Defendant do pay the sum of 10 shillings

"and no pence per week..."

-A lot of money.

-Quite a bit, yes.

"..until the said child shall attain the age of 16 years."

To take this step was quite drastic.

It says something quite significant about Gladys, though.

It wouldn't have been an easy thing to do this.

She would have to have stood in court,

she would have had to face him and she would have had to say

why he was the father of her child.

This would have been public knowledge.

Everyone would have known.

The pressure to go away and have the child adopted

-would have been very overwhelming.

-Really?

A lot of women were sent to the coast,

to Scarborough and places like that, to have children.

The 1920s were a difficult time to be a single mother.

Although the Bastardy Bill of 1920

had granted some rights to unmarried mothers and their children,

they still faced huge social stigma.

Many employers wouldn't hire unmarried women with children,

and some landlords refused to rent them homes.

The legal status of illegitimate children was problematic.

They weren't recognised in law as next of kin

and couldn't automatically inherit on their mother's death.

Well, it raises a lot of questions.

On what basis did the court determine

that Alfred was the father?

The fact that they brought him to court and he acknowledged.

He acknowledged it.

And this was one of the good reasons for trying to go through the courts.

Once he'd acknowledged this child, which he does,

legally and financially, he is responsible.

Had he not been the father, or had there been any question

in his mind that he was not the father, he might not.

I think he was very well aware that he was.

Well, that's a very important piece of information, for my family,

because it lays one particular ghost, which was that,

perhaps, Alfred Stewart was not my brother Geoffrey's father.

I think there's very little doubt that he actually was.

Having found out the truth about his brother's parentage,

Patrick now has one last question about his father to follow up.

I am very interested in understanding more

about what the newspaper report called shell-shock,

or post-traumatic stress disorder, as we call it today, what it means.

Patrick is wondering if the condition may have continued

to affect Alfred when he returned to civilian life after the war.

I want to know how that could have been affecting

the man I met when I was five years old, when he came back,

when the war was over and his military service was done.

Patrick's arranged to meet Robert Bieber, Vice Chairman

of the veterans' mental health charity, Combat Stress.

A little while ago, a few days ago, I was shown a newspaper report

which recounted how my father had returned home from France

suffering from shell-shock as a result of aerial bombardment.

I'm curious to know about what the lasting impact

of shell-shock might be

and especially how it might be associated with domestic violence.

I don't think it was probably just the solitary event of the bombardment.

The likelihood is, soldiers who were retreating with the French

saw some pretty nasty elements

of the way that the Nazis treated the French civilians.

There's a lot of evidence to show that treatment of them

had a greater impact, in some ways, on soldiers

than actual warfare as we know it.

Obviously, I can only offer you probabilities

rather than anything more than that, because it's a long time ago.

But when your father came home,

he would have experienced issues of isolation, inability to communicate,

nightmares, flashbacks and perhaps domestic violence.

I think the other thing is, your dad was an old-time soldier,

he knew how soldiers had been treated after the First World War.

Those who couldn't be cured

effectively were locked up in lunatic asylums

and called service lunatics.

The problems caused by battlefield trauma

were first identified in World War I.

80,000 soldiers were diagnosed with shell-shock.

Treatment, varying from electroshock therapy to hypnosis,

was largely ineffective.

Some men were diagnosed as incurable

and remained institutionalised for life.

In the inter-war period, when Alfred joined up,

shell-shock was seen as a source of shame and weakness,

and this attitude persisted through the next war and beyond.

Although rehabilitation programmes gradually became available,

by the end of World War II, there were still 22,000 ex-servicemen in psychiatric hospitals.

There are lots of tragic stories in which soldiers' families

tried to extract their loved ones from mental hospitals

and they were turned away, because this man is slow,

incapable of recovery and effectively died there.

So those are one of the sort of many tragedies that happened.

How capable would such a person be of asking for help?

They would be capable of doing it, but because of the experiences

that they've had, as I've described, about isolation

and not wanting to ask for charity,

they'd be far less likely to do so.

Even today, we don't see servicemen in combat stress very often

until between 12 and 14 years after their service has elapsed,

by which time their condition has become entrenched.

They become... I mean, I'm taking an extreme case,

they are drink-sodden, very often they've been in prison,

their lives are very often disintegrated,

and then comes the domestic violence.

Was there anything, Robert,

that our family might have done

that might have made things easier for my father?

I doubt it, because hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Had your father been prosecuted for domestic violence,

which itself is unlikely,

because it was domestic as opposed to anything else, it's just possible

he might have got a referral to a psychiatrist

who might have then seen there's a different kind of problem.

And he never talked to you about his experiences?

In the war? Yes, he did,

but did he ever sit down and say,

"I need you to know what it felt like"?

No.

And he probably never told anybody that. This is surmised,

but everything you're describing to me does sound as if he was

a very poorly man. And that, er,

he's one of those who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yes, yes. I can see that.

I'm immensely grateful to you for all that you've told me.

You can't be aware, but your words are helping me to create

and make significant readjustments about this man I knew.

Patrick's keen to share some of his findings with his family.

He's returned to Mirfield to meet his brother, Trevor, in the pub

where their father used to drink.

-How are you?

-I'm good, Trevor.

-Ah, good.

-Cheers, Trevor. It's good to see you.

-Good to see you in here as well.

You're sitting right here, almost exactly in a place

where Dad might have sat many, many times.

Ah, that's good.

I've learnt a lot about Dad's military service,

and we've come across a newspaper report.

It says that Sergeant Alfred Stewart has returned from Cherbourg,

a little bit about the action, but to my astonishment,

toward the end of the report, it says,

"And Sergeant Stewart is suffering from shell-shock."

Oh.

And this has a profound effect on how somebody develops,

particularly when they come back into civilian life.

Certainly didn't know he'd been shell-shocked, that is...

that's fascinating. But of course, it mustn't have affected his...

the rest of his military career, because, as we now know,

he transferred to a Parachute Regiment,

did all sorts of derring-do things, you know.

So there should be a sort of subconscious effect on him,

wouldn't it, something hidden deep within him.

-Suppressed.

-That's right, that would come out on occasions,

and that answers a lot of questions you and I have had over the years.

-Doesn't it?

-Yeah, it really does.

Life wasn't all that much fun with him, was it?

No. No, it wasn't.

But we didn't know any of this and so we...

we couldn't qualify his treatment of us, really,

by any of the things that we now know, could we?

We just took it for what he was, kind of thing.

-Yes. A man who got angry and...

-Yes.

Really angry with all of us, particularly with Mum, of course,

which was sad.

What are your feelings at this moment with regard to our dad?

I mean, I need to go away and think about this,

but it certainly is something that will influence

my memories of father, and one just wishes, in this situation,

that he was back and you could talk to him about it, doesn't it?

It might have eased life for us, had he been able to talk about this

-and given us some understanding of what he had been through.

-Yes.

Patrick's journey has helped him reassess his father.

Increasingly, day by day,

I found that I was warming to this man, Alfred Stewart.

Now, it doesn't, in any way, affect my feelings about domestic violence

or that what he did was wrong,

but now there are other elements in it,

and it's those other elements that have emerged during these days

that I found so compelling...

..and beautiful.

We all adored my mother.

She was modest, attractive and very, very timid.

And yet, as we know, she stood up in Dewsbury Magistrates Court

and testified about her illegitimate child.

I suspect that she knew these things about my father

that I have only just discovered,

and that's why she loved him.

And never stopped loving him.

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