Prime minister’s absence criticised by onlookers

The eight soldiers killed in the most deadly 24 hours of British operations in Afghanistan were repatriated today amid emotional scenes before hundreds of onlookers in a Wiltshire market town.

The bodies of the men, including three 18-year-olds, were driven in a cortege along a packed high street in Wootton Bassett, whose residents have borne witness over the last two years to the increasing bloodshed in Afghanistan.

The bodies were brought home in front of a guard of honour formed by colleagues and veterans as the government announced said 140 troops from the 2nd Battalion Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, currently based in Cyprus, would be deployed to Helmand province to join the Operation Panther’s Claw offensive under way against the Taliban. A 700-strong battalion deployed to Afghanistan as reinforcements to bolster security before the presidential elections next month is also expected to remain there longer as part of the government’s review of the British military presence in the country.

As the tenor bell of St Bartholomew’s church tolled to mark their return, the assembled townspeople fell silent to witness the human cost of the recent hand-to-hand combat in Helmand, which the defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth, has said is unavoidable if the British military are to rout the Taliban.

The hearses passed one by one, each with a coffin tightly bound in a union flag. At one point, the silence was broken by the family of Corporal Jonathan Horne, 28, who was killed by a roadside bomb near Sangin as he tried to rescue his comrades from an earlier blast. Horne’s brother, Andy Lowe, 25, ran out with members of his family and friends to the hearse. They threw red roses on top and one said: “Love you, man.” “At the back of my mind, I always feared it could be JJ, but I didn’t want to think about it,” Lowe said. “All I was thinking about was when he was due to come home in a few weeks and going down town for a couple of drinks.”

Flowers were tossed from rooftops and the roadside and a football shirt was thrown on to another hearse as a ripple of applause spread through the crowd. When the cortege moved on, the tears came. Group after group were huddled together, eyes filled with tears, saying very little, only to comfort the most grief stricken.

Eight families were grieving and many more friends too.

Rifleman James Backhouse, 18, had been due to return home on leave today to his family in West Yorkshire. The family of Rifleman William Aldridge, 18, who died in a roadside blast, sat beneath homemade bunting carrying his picture and the words “Our lad”.

Rifleman Joseph Murphy, 18, was killed carrying Rifleman Daniel Simpson, 20, away from a blast. Corporal Lee Scott, 26, died in an explosion on the same day just north of Nad-e-Ali. Private John Brackpool, 27, was shot at Char-e-Anjir, near Lashkar Gah, while on sentry duty and Rifleman Daniel Hume, 22, was killed in an explosion while on foot patrol.

The day had begun at noon, when the C17 cargo plane bearing the coffins flew low over the cemetery of St Michael and the Angels at Lyneham, home of the RAF base, before banking to complete a flypast above Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, where country pubs flew flags at half-mast.

Waiting in the VIP area of the base were the families. There was time for a moment of private grief in the chapel of rest before a more public repatriation in Wootton Bassett.

The hearses that today crawled down the high street brought to 184 the number of British troops killed, more than the death toll in Iraq. Veterans, uniformed soldiers, leather-clad bikers and the general public were touched by anger and pride. There was anger at the age of the soldiers dying and the absence of a government minister to see them return, and pride at the servicemen’s role in a war to tackle terrorism.

David Sinclair, 20, a shopworker from Maidenhead, came to see his schoolfriend, Rifleman Dan Hume, be repatriated.

“The age of the soldiers dying is sickening,” he said. “This shouldn’t be about money. They have not been given the proper equipment. We shouldn’t be in this war in the first place, but now we are there, we have to sort out what we are doing.”

“Gordon Brown has never met a coffin off a plane,” said John Lawton, 42, a former corporal in the Royal Green Jackets.

“It is his lot that sent us there and he couldn’t even be bothered to come to see them back. Bush has met coffins, Obama has met coffins, but this has become an embarrassment for the government.”

Helena Tym, 48, the mother of Cyrus Thatcher, a 19-year-old rifleman who was killed by a roadside bomb in Helmand six weeks ago, said she felt pride as well as grief in her loss.

“This turnout shows it’s not just us as families that feel that, but also the whole nation,” she said.

“As soon as you hear that awful sentence on the TV news ‘the family has been informed’, you know how they feel. It just hurts all over again.”

Thatcher’s father, Robin, 49, said he believed in the war, but the increasing numbers of dead should force a rethink of tactics. “It may take these eight deaths for Gordon Brown to think something should be done,” he said.