19 Facts About Ronald Skirth

John Ronald Skirth was a British soldier who served in the Royal Garrison Artillery during the First World War.

Ronald Skirth became a Battery Commander's Assistant in the Royal Garrison Artillery, responsible for making the calculations necessary to target the large guns of a field battery.

Ronald Skirth saw action in the Battle of Messines, in which two of his closest friends, Bill and Geordie, were killed.

Ronald Skirth was knocked out by a shell which killed Shiels, and subsequently suffered from shell-shock and amnesia.

Ronald Skirth felt that the "just war" he had signed up for was anything but just, and was disillusioned with the army and the conduct of the war.

Ronald Skirth wrote to his future wife, Ella Christian, claiming that he had become a pacifist and a conscientious objector.

Ronald Skirth began a campaign of small acts of sabotage, introducing minor errors into his trajectory calculations so as to mistarget the guns, such that they "never once hit an inhabited target" on the first attempt, giving the enemy a chance to evacuate.

Ronald Skirth received the British War Medal and Victory Medal for his war service but declined the Military Medal, which he felt was offered as part of an attempt to whitewash a fatal accident he had tried to prevent.

In September 1919 Ronald Skirth returned to England, to commence teacher training, for which he had signed up before leaving to serve in the army.

Ronald Skirth trained in London, and after graduating taught briefly at a school in Bexhill-on-Sea, before transferring in 1922 to a post at a school in Uxbridge.

In 1923 he and Ella Christian became engaged and the following year, after Ronald Skirth secured a job at the Little Ealing Senior Boys' School and found a flat they could share in Ealing, they married, on 29 December 1924, at the Church of St Barnabus in Bexhill.

Ronald Skirth had an intense love of beauty, which he found all around him in music, architecture and the natural world.

Ronald Skirth attributed this to a combination of his sensitive character, his Christian upbringing and sense of right and wrong, and, most significantly, the horror of his war experiences.

Ronald Skirth believed that Britain should not have declared war on Germany in 1939 and claimed that he would rather surrender and face occupation than take up arms against a hostile force.

In January 1971, having retired from his teaching career, Ronald Skirth began work on a handwritten memoir which described his conduct and experiences during the First World War, and in particular his experience of disillusionment.

Ronald Skirth worked on the memoir for over a year, eventually filling five green ring binders with many hundreds of pages, and over the next few years, despite suffering two strokes, he repeatedly went back to the material, editing, amending and adding to what he had written.

Ronald Skirth gave the memoir to his daughter Jean in 1975, two years before his death in 1977.

Once it was made available to researchers and academics, Ronald Skirth's memoir began to attract attention, and his story was featured in Richard Schweitzer's The Cross and the Trenches, Michele Barrett's Casualty Figures, and in Ian Hislop's documentary Not Forgotten: The Men Who Wouldn't Fight, in which Hislop interviewed Jean Ronald Skirth about her father's war experiences.

Ronald Skirth recognised that there were discrepancies between Skirth's account and historical sources which made his book an unreliable history, but still considered the book a valuable memoir of one man's personal experiences.