As we approach the 80th anniversary of VE Day, I think of those I knew who lived and died in that conflict. My dad started in the pits aged 14 in 1935. When he wanted to join up, they wouldn’t let him. Britain needed coal. It still needs it, but it lies wasted and unmined, energy security squandered. My mother started work as a 14-year-old daily maid the day after war broke out. Her brother, my uncle, Cyril Holt, joined the RAF and became batman to one Arthur Harris who, when he got the top job in Bomber Command in 1942, took Cyril with him to High Wycombe. My uncle married a local girl and stayed there after the war, working at the local furniture manufacturer, E. Gomme Ltd, the originators of G-Plan furniture.
On my dad’s side of the family, his mother’s sister – my great aunt Doris, married a Pole, Stanislaw Olender, who’d escaped the Nazis and Russians with his brother, Roman. My uncle Stan served as ground crew, an instrument repairer, with 300 Squadron, Bomber Command. Roman became a fighter pilot with 302 Squadron credited with one-and-a-half Focke-Wulf 190 kills. Here he’s pictured with his Mk IX Spitfire and ground crew.
On holidays as a child at Hornsea on the Yorkshire east coast in the 1960s and 1970s, I’d sit in the pavilion and listen to the stories the old salts would tell of sinkings in the Battle of the Atlantic. My first foreign holiday was a Wallace Arnold coach trip in 1975. We stayed, amongst other venues, in the Walram Germania Hotel in Valkenburg, Holland. In the restaurant one night a waiter had tried to persuade a man in his fifties to remove his jacket, but he refused. His wife later explained that he was embarrassed to remove it because he had badly scarred arms with skin so thin and tender, he couldn’t stand anything tight against them. He solved the problem by cutting his shirt sleeves short, wearing his jacket loose over them. Serving with the Guards Armoured Division trying to relieve the Airborne at Arnhem, he’d got his scars escaping from a burning Sherman ‘Tommy Cooker.’
My first job at age 16 in 1980 was at Hill Samuel Life Assurance Ltd in Tower House, Merrion Way, Leeds. Back then the Corps of Commissionaires ran office blocks with an iron hand. Their members were almost exclusively ex-armed forces, mainly army, who carried their last ranks into the job with them. The head commissionaire at Tower House was Sergeant Major Arthur, who excelled at extracting bribes for parking spaces and sundry other privileges. So venal was Arthur that the running joke was that he had gipsy blood, because if you ever asked him for anything, he would say, “Cross my palm with silver!” His deputy was Sergeant Eddie. Taken prisoner on the retreat to Dunkirk, Eddie had spent the rest of the war in a succession of prison camps, first in Poland, later in Germany itself. Eddie loved the Germans and had not a bad word to say about them. They’d always treated him well and he’d had a wonderful war. Working at another Leeds financial services firm in the early 1990s, one of our clients had flown on Operation Jericho, the Mosquito raid that bombed Amiens prison in France in 1944.
On the other side of the estate from us in our village, on Valley Drive, Great Preston, lived blind old John Hargreaves. John had also served in Bomber Command. One night in the Miners’ Welfare Club at the top of our street, he showed me his membership card for the Caterpillar Club, the informal association founded by parachute inventor Leslie Irvin in 1922. He’d qualified for the club by parachuting from a burning Lancaster over Germany.
Another member of the Miners’ Welfare was a smart old guy whose name I can’t remember, he always wore a suit. He’d flown off Victorious in a Fairey Swordfish against Bismarck on 26 May 1941, in the Battle of the Denmark Strait, two days after Bismarck sunk Hood.
In 1995 I got to know a new work colleague at the Huddersfield financial services firm I’d joined, one Peter Taylor. An absolute gentleman in the truest meaning of the word, Peter had landed on one of the British beaches on D-Day, 1944. My dad’s cousin Arthur had also fought in Normandy, and was a great admirer of the Canadians who refused to take prisoners. “They were buggers,” he’d laugh, when he told us the story at him home in East Leeds in the 1970s. “They wouldn’t take prisoners; they just shot the lot!” He told me the story several times when I was seven or eight years old, and I never tired of hearing it.
Then I think of those I never knew. My great uncle Herbert, fought with the Fourteenth Army in Burma. His Kukri was meant to stay in the family, but a relative looted it from my grandmother’s house on her death and sold it to a collector. My mother’s school friend, Stoker 1st Class Cyril Capper, Royal Navy, went to the bottom of the South China Sea on 10 December 1941, aged 20, with Repulse. Commemorated on a family grave in Kippax near Leeds is another of the friends of her youth, Vernon Monks, lost in the Mediterranean aboard HMS Kelly. My paternal grandmother’s brother, Corporal Charles Powell, 7th Battalion the Duke of Wellington’s (West Riding) Regiment, killed on 30th October 1944 in Belgium, has his grave at Bergen-op-Zoom in the Netherlands. In the same war cemetery while looking for my uncle Charlie’s grave in 2000, I noticed that Ottawa-born Pilot Officer Lewis J Burpee DFM was killed aged 25 with all six of his crew in Lancaster S-Sugar of 617 Squadron on the night of 16/17 May 1943, on the Dams raid.
The great regret of my life is that I never recorded their stories while they lived, and now it is too late. They are all dead.
Neil F. Liversidge is an Independent Financial Adviser running his own firm in Castleford, West Riding Personal Financial Solutions Ltd, www.wrpfs.com. For 39 years until 2017 he was a member of the Labour Party. A Brexiteer, he voted Conservative in 2019 and is now a member of Reform UK, the New Culture Forum, and the Free Speech Union.
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Interesting stuff, ironically the best wartime oral histories tended to come from those who didn’t really want to talk about it (and needed coaxing) whilst those who revelled in their often imaginary exploits frequently wouldn’t let it drop. This isn’t a criticism, as today we can’t really imagine the deprivations of total war either on the battlefield or home front except as though it were a film and a short term entertainment and not a daily reality for years.