John Laverty was born Henry Jarvis Laverty in Londonderry on 8 October 1900 to a prominent family in the building trade. His father Henry built the Protestant cathedral of St Anne’s in Belfast and had a large brickyard in Carrickfergus, which one employee reckoned had ‘made the mortar for half the houses in Carrick in those days’. He went to school at Foyle College, which numbered a Lord Chancellor of Ireland, numerous rugby internationals and a Viceroy of India among its alumni. A month before the end of the First World War, John Laverty applied to Sandhurst, from where he was commissioned into the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1921. These were bad years in his home country. Ireland was convulsed by war between the IRA and the forces of the crown. As a member of a prominent Protestant family who had decided to join the British army, it is safe to surmise that John Laverty would have had little sympathy with Irish rebels.
What Laverty retained of that Ulster Protestant upbringing was the flinty outward manner of a man raised among righteous but unyielding citizens. His son Patrick, who saw his father only once during the war, thought him a soldier to the core. ‘Pure and simple he was a warrior. That is what he was good at … He was pretty tough. They called him bloody-minded and I think he probably was. You didn’t get anywhere. I mean once he made up his mind he couldn’t be varied at all. He was absolutely pig-headed in that regard.’
After three years in the Inniskilling Fusiliers, Laverty joined the Essex Regiment, where his index card referred to him as ‘Mad Jack’, possibly a reflection of the bloody-minded personality described by his son and some of his junior officers. His war-fighting experience was gained in the small colonial police actions of the inter-war period, firstly in Kurdistan and later in Sudan. He was awarded a Military Cross during the suppression of the Kurds in 1932 and was later promoted to be Inspector of Signals for the British-controlled Iraqi army. By the time the Second World War broke out John Laverty was back with the Essex Regiment, with the rank of major, and had married Renee Stagg, a doctor’s daughter from Southend, whom he had met while playing golf. Within a few months of their wedding she was pregnant with the first of three children. On the outbreak of war Laverty was posted to the East End of London on ‘anti-panic’ duty, while Renee and her baby were sent to Shropshire to escape the Blitz. ‘There was a big parting of the ways. Everybody was going through those kind of separations,’ Renee recalled. John Laverty was eventually posted to serve with the Essex Regiment in India in 1942. By the following year he had been promoted from major to the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel and sent to lead 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, into battle.
Captain Donald Easten remembered his arrival. ‘I thought to myself, “Thank God, at last we have someone who knows what he is talking about.” He was not the kind of person you would say, “I would do anything for this chap,” but at least he was competent. You knew his decisions would be properly thought out. I didn’t love him. I don’t think any of us did. We respected him.’ Respect would have been enough for John Laverty.
The men were coming to the end of their training period and could properly call themselves ‘jungle wallahs’. Ray Street was one of the smaller men in the battalion and weighed only eight and a half stone, but he was quick on his feet and brave, ideal material for a battlefield messenger who would have to run quickly between positions under fire. He had started the war as a soldier in the Worcester Regiment but after undergoing his jungle training in India was sent off to 4th battalion to help bring them up to full strength for the fighting ahead. Street had not seen combat yet, but had heard his father’s stories of the fighting at Gallipoli and the throat wound that had nearly ended his life. His experience of war on the home front had been eventful. Having enlisted first into the Home Guard, Street was allocated to Birmingham city centre and found himself there during a German bombing raid. A stick of bombs hit the street next to where he was standing. Running to the scene he saw that a cinema had been hit and the street was full of screaming, wounded people. He rushed inside to help evacuate the survivors. A woman sat with her arms folded serenely in the seat where she had been watching the film. But her head had been sliced cleanly off by a piece of flying metal.
By now the old Kentish character of 4th battalion had changed. There was still a core of men like John Winstanley, Ivan Daunt and Donald Easten who had been through France and North Africa together, and who came from within a few miles of each other at home in England. But Ray Street was a Brummie and his mate Dennis Wykes came from Coventry; the new CO was an Irishman; and there were Welsh and Scottish voices to be heard too. The Kentish component had gradually come to accept Dennis Wykes and the other replacements, although he was still some way from being able to call any of them his friends. ‘They looked at us warily as if to say “you haven’t seen any action and we wonder what you’re going to be like.”’
The oddest of the newcomers to join them in India was the posh boy. Of all the men in the ranks of 4th battalion, John Harman was the most enigmatic, not only because of the extraordinary nature of what he would do, but also because his background was so different and his personality so resistant to easy definition. He must have been one of the most unlikely candidates to win the Victoria Cross of the whole war. John Pennington Harman, known to his friends as plain ‘Jack’, was the eldest son of a millionaire. His sister Diana, one of three siblings, said, ‘Although he seemed to disregard society right through his life he wasn’t at all insensitive. It’s just that he didn’t play by the same rules. He found that they led you up blank ways. He didn’t find that he was pursuing the things he was interested in if he conformed.’ At prep school in Bristol he was unhappy; it was not just the normal pain of a child removed to a boarding school at seven years of age, but also the sense of being forced into a straitjacket of discipline and expectation for which he had no sympathy. There was an added complication. John’s dormitory was close to the Bristol Zoo in Clifton and at nights he was distressed by the sounds of animals. They represented, according to his sister, ‘unwelcome captivity and restraint’. He ran away from school twice before his parents brought him home.
He was then sent to the famous Bedales School in rural Hampshire. Founded by J. H. Badley in 1893, Bedales was a revolutionary establishment by the standards of its day. Stressing that each child needed to be treated as an individual human being, Badley saw the era after the First World War as ‘a great opportunity, one of the greatest in our history, if only it can be realised and utilised to the full’. The school was a haven for nonconformists and while John never focused on his academic work, lacking ‘concentration in things which did not interest him’, he was allowed to indulge his love of nature in the school’s ample grounds. As his sister Diana saw it, ‘he seldom wanted to finish something he had embarked upon – it didn’t seem quite important enough to engage him’.
John’s father, Martin Coles Harman, owned Lundy Island, a craggy and beautiful piece of land off the Devon coast. Harman senior was prone to eccentricity. He liked to consider Lundy his private fiefdom, even going so far as to mint his own coins, a presumption of sovereignty that saw him prosecuted and fined. Lundy became for his son the one place where he could live according to his own designs. The cliffs and coves, the old granite quarry, were places where dreams could be fashioned without disturbance from the mundane demands of everyday life. John dreamt of finding precious metals on Lundy and engaged in a prolonged correspondence with a Spanish mineral ‘diviner’ who claimed extraordinary powers of underground perception. Boreholes were drilled but nothing was found. The family’s retainer on Lundy, Felix Gade, wrote that John ‘seemed to feel that it only needed a stroke of genius for him to be provided with a fortune, without grinding work!’ The two shared an interest in the island’s bees and worked together on the hives, with occasional advice from John’s father. John’s friends from Bedales would visit Lundy in the summer holidays and were, according to his sister, ‘all oddities, people like himself, who didn’t quite conform’. There was a chaste romance with a girl called Denny, one of six children who formed a large gang with the Harmans. They swam, fished and chased all over the island, and in the evenings read Dickens by lamplight. His sister remembered John’s body shaking with laughter.
His diaries of life on Lundy reveal a boy who was a careful observer of weather, wildlife and landscapes, but not remotely sentimental about the harsher aspects of the natural world. Entries for February 1932 describe shooting a cock sparrow with his