RIP

Albert Marshall
First World War cavalryman and last survivor of the Battle of the Somme
24 May 2005

Albert Marshall, groom and wartime soldier: born Elmstead Market, Essex 15 March 1897; married 1921 Florence Day (died 1984; one son, and two sons and two daughters deceased); died Ashtead, Surrey 16 May 2005.

Albert Marshall, who has died at the age of 108, was the last survivor of the Battle of the Somme. A dyed-in-the-wool countryman, he epitomised the Great War volunteer. A natural horseman, he was still riding in his early nineties.

Smiler, as he was affectionately known, was born in 1897 in a small village outside Colchester. When he was two his father put him on to a wooden cart drawn by a goat. He later put him on the goat's back - it bucked him off. His father put him back on facing the goat's tail and taught him how to hold on. From there he progressed to a pony and then to his great love, the horse. On Sundays his father would take him to the garrison town of Colchester to see the soldiers parade for church. He was excited by their red coats and that each regiment had their own march. He learned words of many of the marches and over a hundred years later in a robust voice would sing them and the songs he learned in the Great War.

When he was four his mother died. His brothers and sisters looked after him and pulled him to school on an orange box on wheels. He was happy at school and liked to recall that the teaching staff were a bit "fishy" - there was a Miss Herring and a Miss Salmon and the headmaster was Mr Whiting. After school he, along with other boys, would collect manure for the garden. The horse or pony was still the main form of transport - he did not see a motor car in the village until 1908.

A bit of a fighter at school, he recalled Mr Whiting asking him to give a good beating to a boy who was bullying the smaller ones. In those days the whole school took a day's holiday to lift potatoes or pick pears and the reward was sometimes a stick of liquorice, which cost a farthing. Every Boxing Day the villagers assembled with their pets for an unusual race - pigs, goats, ferrets, donkeys, cats, dogs, tame mice and even a cockerel - all wearing collars on a lead. The winning owner then had to climb a greasy pole to reach his prize, a dead duck.

On leaving school he became an apprentice carpenter in a shipyard for a wage of 2s 4d (12p). Trudging home one afternoon he was given a lift by the local milkman, who offered him a job. At the age of 14 he was delivering milk to the entire village.

His life changed when Lord Kitchener, accompanied by the world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, came to Colchester to recruit young men on the outbreak of the First World War. He volunteered for the Essex Yeomanry in Christmas week 1914. Asked his name and date of birth, he told the sergeant major he was born in 1897. He replied, "Too young. Go outside and think about it." He returned and when asked when he was born replied 1896. "That's perfect" came the reply. His military training began in the January snow of 1915. Doing physical jerks he bent down and made a quick snowball, which he threw at the man ahead of him. The drill sergeant spotted this and rebuked him, but Albert feigned innocence. "Yes, son, I'm talking to you, Smiler," roared the sergeant. From that moment on he was nicknamed Smiler.

He went to France in November 1915. He worked in a four-man section that would advance, then dig in to await the enemy, while one man looked after the horses. They would attempt to hold their position until the pioneers or engineers came to dig proper trenches. He experienced gas twice and recalled:

You couldn't stop crying - tears were running from my eyes. When we had the first lot, we had a piece of muslin, which we tied round the nose and mouth. But that gas is still with me today. My skin is all dry, it feels like a needle pricking you.

Marshall was to lose many friends during the war but it was the death of his best friend Lennie Passiful that deeply moved him. Passiful had his rifle through the smallest of holes aiming to kill a sniper when he was hit:

I saw him fall. I was in the trench close by him and put my arm out and caught him. His rifle stuck in the hole - but the sniper had got him, right through that tiny little hole. He later died of his wounds.

Marshall deeply resented that £1 was deducted from his final pay for the blanket in which Passiful was buried. Over 80 years later he was to return to France, where he laid a wreath on his grave. He was to recall, "I now know exactly where Lennie is. He was so very young."

On one occasion he witnessed a cavalry attack against a German patrol about 100 strong. They were surprised and quickly scattered but were cut down by sword. He also saw the Bengal Lancers charge:

They didn't hang about, they never bothered with saddles - they just jumped on and galloped off. It was the only time I saw a lance used. They were born horsemen - magnificent.

His worst experience was what he witnessed at the battle of the Somme at Mametz Wood, where the Essex Yeomanry had been held in the rear ready to exploit the advance of the infantry. After a two-day bombardment the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry fresh from England were ordered forward to capture the wood - few returned. That night Marshall and a burial party dug shallow graves into which they rolled the bodies and covered them with a little mud. They then had to walk back over the graves.

Marshall was wounded in the hand in this action and after his recovery the Army considered he would not be able to handle a horse, so he volunteered for the Machine Gun Corps and was posted to the Leicestershire Yeomanry. His 21st birthday was spent in a derelict farmhouse being shelled while his gun crew melted ice for tea. He was there on 21 March 1918 when the Germans launched their "Big Push":

Had that first day of their advance been a success, the war would have been over before - but it wasn't. We were up and down, along the side of the woods - in the woods, out of the woods - on the move all the time. Had a shell burst then you'd have been done for. The pieces that flew off were red-hot when they exploded and they cut your arm or your head off - take your face off, your nose or your ear - anything.

At one point a shell landed close to him and he found himself sinking in thick mud. He managed to attract a search party by singing "Nearer, My God, to Thee".

The night before the Armistice he was in a factory in Lille and recalled how those around him were angry as they felt they had the Germans on the run. However after the Armistice they moved off and had only gone a few hundred yards when the factory, which had been booby-trapped, blew up. As Marshall recalled with a wry grin, "That would have been bloody ironic being blown up on Armistice Day."

With the war over Marshall received £50 for signing on for one year in the army of occupation. But after eight months, because of the increasing trouble in Ireland, he was sent to Dublin.

On leaving the Army he married his sweetheart Florence and both worked together for the Essex and Suffolk Hunt at Great Bromley Hall. This was to be a full-time job either hunting or caring for the horses. In 1926 during the General Strike, as the local policeman had been sent to the North, he worked as a special constable for the village. On the death of his employer he joined the staff of a Captain Mumford and worked again with horses.

In 1939 while he was clipping a mare a hair pierced his eye, complications set in and his eye was removed. During the Second World War he was in the local Home Guard and in 1940 he went to work in Ashtead, Surrey, for the Maples family, who had lost two sons in the First World War. He moved into the cottage that was to be his for the remainder of his life. He worked as a general maintenance man and again with horses. A Victorian at heart, he described his occupation as "Private Servant".

All his life he was involved with horses. He seldom called a vet because he made all his own medicines. In his early life he rarely spoke of the war or of the impact it had upon him, but in his nineties he joined the World War One Veterans' Association and, with its chairman Dennis Goodwin and a party of 16 other veterans, returned to Passchendaele for the 80th anniversary of the battle. In the next year he was presented with the Légion d'honneur by the French government.

In fine voice, in 2000 he sang trench songs at a concert in Rochester Cathedral and received a three-minute standing ovation. A few months ago he appeared in the Channel 4 documentary Britain's Boy Soldiers and was delighted when it won an award for the best factual documentary of 2004.

Max Arthur

Alfred Finnigan
September 18, 1896 - May 11, 2005
First World War veteran who saw action with the field artillery in France and northern Italy



AT HIS death on May 11 at the age of 108, Alfred Benjamin Finnigan was one of only 14 known British survivors of the First World War.
Although he reached the age of 18 within six weeks of the outbreak of war on August 4, 1914, he encountered some difficulty in joining up. He was only 5ft 3in tall and had a slight weakness in one eye. Nevertheless, he persisted and was accepted as a trainee driver in a six-horse gun-towing team by 2nd Battery the 6th (London) Royal Field Artillery Brigade. This was fortunate, because he was already devoted to horses, having gained some experience of them after emigrating as a boy with his family to Australia.



Despite his lack of height, he was wellbuilt and responded readily to military training. By the time he joined the 5th Infantry Division in France in September 1916 he had become the lead driver of a team of six, or occasionally eight, horses pulling an 18-pounder gun and ammunition limber with A Battery, 15 Brigade Royal Field Artillery.

After experiencing the rigours of the Somme offensive of 1916, the 5th Division had by the time he joined it moved north to new positions near Béthune and the La Bassée Canal. Movement of the artillery was frequently made by night to avoid detection by enemy observation aircraft or balloons; on one such occasion only a sudden glint of light on the water prevented Finnigan from leading his gun team into the canal.

The winter of 1916-17 brought exceptionally cold weather, making the acquisition of a pair of Canadian knee-high leather boots the ambition of Finnigan and his fellow gunners. If they were two or three sizes too large for the wearer, straw could be stuffed into the soles below two pairs of army socks and wrapped round the calves to keep out the cold. Straw stowed in the recess of their steel helmets also helped to retain body heat.

German counter-battery measures had proved remarkably effective since the beginning of the war on the Western Front, and British field artillery units had to move from one gun position to another, shortly after firing, so as not to be subjected to an almost immediate retaliatory bombardment.

Finnigan’s battery was caught on a curve of the Arras-Lens road near Neuville-St Vast and suffered serious casualties. Dead and gravely injured men and horses lay in front and behind him, yet his own gun team escaped unscathed, apart from his being struck on the helmet by a clod of earth thrown up by an exploding shell.

Together with the whole of the 5th Division, Finnigan’s battery was withdrawn from the Western Front to go to the assistance of the Italians, who fought on the side of Britain and France in the First World War. The journey by train through southern France and into northern Italy was a delight after the horrors of the mud and blood of Picardy.

The 5th Division’s destination, as with other British and French divisions sent to strengthen the Italian front, was the line of the River Piave running into the Adriatic northeast of Venice. Six German and nine Austrian divisions under General Otto von Below had inflicted a reverse on the Italians at Caporetto, but the front stabilised after the arrival of reinforcements.

In the period of comparative quiet which followed, Finnigan’s battery was ordered from GHQ not to tether their horses near acacia trees, abundant in the region, in the belief that acacia leaves were poisonous to horses. In reminiscences which cover his period of service in France and Italy, Finnigan recalled — seemingly with amusement — a number of orders from higher headquarters in response to complaints from troops at the front. One warned against disappointment on opening tins marked “pork and beans” and finding no pork apparent, “as the pork had been absorbed into the beans”.

The principal enemy action on the Italian front during the 5th Division’s service was by aerial bombardment. Finnigan’s battery was subjected to this on several occasions, but he was unharmed. After a move to Padua in March 1918, news was received of the impending German “spring offensive” in France, which was unleashed on March 21. The 5th Division was sent back to the cold and rain of northern France to play its part in stemming the enemy tide. The British Expeditionary Force, by then comprising five armies, held, but only at the cost of much ground particularly in the 5th Army sector. Finnigan’s battery was hotly engaged in halting the German advance on Hazebrouck northwest of Béthune.

After demobilisation, Finnigan was unable to find civilian employment and decided to return to Australia, but found conditions little better there. After seven years in various forms of short-term employment, he signed on as a deck hand aboard a three-masted sailing ship to work his passage home. While crossing the South Pacific for the Panama Canal, he was swept off the deck during a typhoon but managed to scramble back again by catching one of the lines running the length of the ship. He docked at Ostend on November 27, 1927, having qualified for his seaman’s ticket.

Together with other surviving First World War veterans, he was awarded the French Légion d’Honneur in 1998 and, both before and since then, appeared in a number of local and national TV interviews about his wartime service.

He married after his return from Australia but decided against having any children, declaring: “I am not prepared to produce cannon fodder for the army or for industry.”

His wife, Mary, predeceased him at the age of 97. www.timesonline.co.uk/...11,00.html

www.timesonline.co.uk/...33,00.html

May 26, 2005

Squadron Leader James Wagland
November 4, 1913 - April 2, 2005
Navigator whose pinpoint accuracy was crucial to landing and retrieving secret agents in Nazi-occupied Europe



AS A navigator involved in the operations of the RAF’s special duties squadrons from November 1942 until the end of the Second World War, James Wagland both planned and took part in dropping agents and supplies to resistance movements in German-occupied Europe. He was also involved in retrieving Resistance fighters and Special Operations Executive officers who were to be brought back to England for training or debriefing.
This type of flying required pinpoint accuracy from the navigators involved. There could be no “near misses” of the type inevitable in bomber operations. For both drops and pick-ups the aircraft had to locate discreet torch signals flashed up from hastily prepared landing sites in fields, by agents or Resistance fighters who had been informed by coded signals from London of the estimated time of arrival.



But even if their aircraft took off on time there were innumerable obstacles which might frustrate the mission: bad weather; enemy fighters; flak; or the inability of enemy agents to shake loose a Gestapo tail and make the rendezvous. In any of these cases the mission would have to be re-planned and rescheduled for another night.

Nevertheless, for three years the assorted aircraft of two squadrons — Nos 138 and 161, based at Tempsford, Bedforshire — rendered invaluable service in supporting the French Maquis’ sabotage and harassment operations, continuing until well after D-Day as the battle for Normandy increased in intensity. Wagland, whose qualities as a navigator had been marked while he was serving on a regular bomber squadron, played a crucial role with 138 and 161 throughout this period. For his services he was awarded two DFCs.

James Leslie William Wagland was born in West Ham in 1913 and went to school in Essex. On leaving school he joined a bank, but in the summer of 1939 he volunteered for the RAF. He completed his navigation training by August 1940 and was posted to a squadron of twin-engined Whitleys, No 78.

Wagland was soon honing his night navigation skills in early raids on Berlin and on a heroic attempt against the Fiat works in Turin. He had been awarded the DFC at the end of his tour of ops with 78 Squadron.

His exceptional capabilities as a bomber navigator had been gratefully remarked by experienced pilots. When two “special duties” squadrons were established at Tempsford, with the aim of furthering Churchill’s injunction to the SOE to “set Europe ablaze”, he was a natural candidate for the planning and navigation staff, which he joined in 1942 after a spell at Bomber Command HQ, soon to become senior navigator.

The squadrons’ aircraft were a mixed bag: Whitleys originally carried out the drops — later to be replaced by the four-engined Halifax. For pickups the single-engined high-wing army co-operation Lysander — short of a role since the defeat of the BEF in France — really came into its own, with its remarkable short take-off and landing performance. (It was later joined by the Hudson.) Since the Lysander’s navigation was done by the pilot, Wagland put a lot of effort into planning the courses to be flown, making the map reading as simple as possible.

He also flew as specialist navigator on numerous sorties, ranging from drops in Halifaxes as far afield as Norway and Poland, to landings in occupied France in Hudsons. There were plenty of nailbiting close shaves, with the ever-present fear of the Hudsons being ambushed by Gestapo or SS, as it waited in a clearing with engines running for its Resistance contacts to make their appearance.

One one occasion Wagland and his pilot were able to retrieve a member of their own squadron who had been a guest of the Maquis for a month after his Lysander had become enmired on landing. Among distinguished Frenchmen whom he brought over to England were two future Presidents of France, Vincent Auriol and François Mitterrand. Wagland was awarded a Bar to his DFC in September 1943.

At the end of the war, by which time he had also been twice mentioned in dispatches, Wagland was awarded the Dutch Flying Cross by the Queen of the Netherlands. He also received the Polish War Cross.

After the war he resumed his career in banking, becoming an assistant manager of Martin’s Bank in London and, after its takeover by Barclays in 1969, a member of the management of the Manufacturers Hanover Bank. He retired in 1974.

His wife Molly, who he married as a WAAF at Tempsford, died in 1919. He is survived by a son and daughter.



Squadron Leader James Wagland, DFC and Bar, wartime special duties navigator, was born on November 4, 1913. He died on April 2, 2005, aged 91.

From the Daily Telegraph of 24th May.

Major Tommy Pitman

Major Tommy Pitman, who has died aged 90, won an MC in Palestine in 1936 while serving with the 11th Hussars.

In September that year, the 11th Hussars were rushed to Palestine to help suppress the First Arab Revolt, and C Squadron was deployed in the northern area along the border with Lebanon. One afternoon, Pitman's troop was called out to support a platoon of the York and Lancashire Regiment that had been ambushed on the Acre-Safad road by an Arab force many times their number.

On arriving at the scene, Pitman found that three members of the platoon were dead, four were wounded and there was a man lying out in the open whom no one had been able to reach because of the intense Arab fire. Pitman ordered his armoured cars to give him maximum covering fire while he and a comrade tried to rescue the man.

The pair ran forward while bullets hummed around them like angry wasps and ricocheted off the boulders. They found the casualty, dressed his wounds and carried him back to safety. Pitman was awarded the MC and received the decoration from King George VI, who was Colonel-in-Chief of his regiment.

Thomas Islay Pitman was born on February 11 1915 in Edinburgh and educated at Eton before joining the 11th Hussars as a supplementary reserve officer. An excellent golfer, in 1934 he won the Southern Command and Army Championships.

After passing out of Sandhurst, Pitman was commissioned into the 11th Hussars and joined his regiment in Egypt. In July 1940, soon after the start of the Desert campaign, he was dropped behind the Italian lines to carry out a hazardous reconnaissance of the Tobruk-Bardia road.

His troop hid up during the day, but they were observed by Italian fighter-bombers and knocked out. Another troop was sent to look for him, but without success, and he was captured by the Italians while trying to walk back to the British lines. Pitman was incarcerated in a succession of PoW camps, the last of which was Fontanellato, near Parma.

In September 1943, after the Italians declared an Armistice, the prisoners were allowed to escape and scattered into the mountains. Pitman hid in a charcoal-burner's hut until the snow melted, but he was then recaptured by the Italian fascists and imprisoned at Perugia. He was in civilian clothes and had no identification. Many of his fellow prisoners were under sentence of death, and the fact that a few were taken out each day and never reappeared was a source of no little anxiety.

In May 1944, Pitman was moved to Camp VIB at Warburg, near Kassel. Despite ill treatment and spells in solitary confinement, he never missed an opportunity to remind his captors that they were losing the war. A fellow prisoner said afterwards that, but for Pitman's humour and fortitude, many of them would have perished in the bitterly cold winter.
Pitman was liberated by the Americans in April the following year and rejoined his regiment in Berlin to take command of C Squadron.

In April 1948 a Russian MiG fighter shot down a BEA plane bringing service families from London. The aircraft fell in the Russian Zone, and there were no survivors. C Squadron was ordered to surround the plane and deny the Russian forces access to it. After a stand-off lasting two days, the Russians retired.

Pitman was posted to RMA Sandhurst as an instructor. He subsequently took over Blenheim Company, which became Sovereign's Company, before he left in 1953 to return to his regiment. He commanded C Squadron in Malaya for a year. The Governor, Sir Henry Gurney, had recently been assassinated, and Pitman had the task of protecting visiting VIPs.

After a spell in Seremban as second-in-command, in 1958 Pitman retired from the Army and set up a malting business in North Yorkshire. He bred cattle and sheep and for many years enjoyed golf and shooting. For 10 years, he was chairman of the Northern Horse Show and raised substantial sums for paraplegic charities and for Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

Tommy Pitman died on March 26. He married, in 1948, Sheilah Westropp, the daughter of Major-General Victor Westropp; she survives him with their four daughters.

http://www.news.mod.uk

Great Boss, brilliant Officer and a pleasure to work for.

RIP Dave.

www.timesonline.co.uk/...58,00.html

Sydney Hudson
August 1, 1910 - April 7, 2005
Special Operations Executive Agent who worked with the French Resistance and later established de-Nazification programmes



SYDNEY HUDSON’s first mission into wartime France for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) might have been his last, for he was betrayed and then arrested by the Vichy police — the despised Milice — and imprisoned. He escaped and later returned by parachute to France. As the war in Europe was drawing to a close he volunteered for operations of uncertain outcome in Japanese-held Thailand. A man of laconic humour, insatiable curiosity and intense interest in human relations, he turned his talents after the war to business and to politics, becoming involved in establishing the Social Democratic Party in Scotland.
Charles Sydney Hudson was the son of Theodore and Ella Hudson. Brought up near Montreux, Switzerland, where his father was a businessman, Hudson was a member of the British ski team at the 1936 Winter Olympics and took first place at the Swiss Amateur Open Golf Championships in 1939. At the outbreak of war, he came to England to enlist and was commissioned into the Royal Fusiliers.



By then France had fallen and when he found military life more regimental than he had expected in wartime, he answered a discreet invitation to fluent French speakers to undergo training for operations of a hazardous nature. He was parachuted into the Puy-de-Dôme, west of ClermontFerrand, in charge of a three-man team of agents code-named “Headmaster”. His task was to make contact with the local Resistance movement and guide its sabotage work, but he was arrested by the French police only two weeks after arrival.

Counting himself fortunate not to be handed over to the Gestapo, he was sent to a prison camp at Essye, near Toulouse, for dissidents actively opposed to the Vichy regime, where he remained until he and Baron Jean de Vomécourt — of the Resistance — organised a mass escape on January 3, 1944. Largely through the co-operation of one of the warders whom de Vomécourt had been able to compromise, about 50 prisoners got out. After making contact with the SOE circuit operating northeast of the Pyrenees, the party was led, in atrocious weather, into Spain. Once there it was relatively easy to go on to Gibraltar and England.

Hudson returned to France in May 1944 with a mission to re-establish the “Headmaster” circuit around Le Mans. Given the day-to-day expectation of the Allied landings in northern France, he and his 20-year-old colleague Sonya d’Artois were welcomed by the local Resistance and blew up the Le Mans telephone exchange, forcing the German Army to transmit by radio with its inevitable security risks. When the American 3rd Army under General George Patton reached Le Mans in August, the “Headmaster” circuit was on hand with local intelligence.

Recalled to England, Hudson volunteered for service with Force 136, the SOE arm in South-East Asia. In May 1945 he made his third parachute drop into enemy-held territory, this time into northern Thailand.

By then a lieutenant-colonel, he was in charge of a group — including Thais — with instructions to arm and train resistance fighters for operations against the Japanese but hold them in check until the time was right. His team trained selected local volunteers and, with the aid of 1,400 villagers, built a runway to receive Allied troops. But Japan’s surrender after the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rendered this unnecessary.

He was later involved in a second operation with Force 136 concerned with repatriation of Allied PoWs from Thailand. He thought that South-East Asia Command had been too hesitant about using Thai irregulars against the Japanese. A Foreign Office perception that the Siamese must work their passage — having been forced by the Japanese to side with them, at least ostensibly — was cited by Hudson as inhibiting Force 136 activity in Thailand.

He received the Croix de Guerre for his work in France and was awarded the DSO in 1945. He stayed on in South-East Asia, practically governing a province of Laos, until he was offered a post with the Allied Control Commission in Germany in 1947, where he helped to establish de-Nazification programmes in the mining areas of the Ruhr. This developed his fascination with industrial relations and in 1953 he joined the human resources division of Shell International, subsequently working in Israel, Gabon, Trinidad and the United States.

When faced with a Shell appointment to Vietnam in 1969, he opted instead for a post with the Bank of Scotland’s training and development department. This provided him with all the stimulus he needed up to retirement in 1980 in the East Lothian town of North Berwick. That is until the formation of the Social Democratic Party by the “Gang of Four” the following spring. He immediately threw himself into establishing the SDP in Scotland. As a former representative on the Scottish Council of the CBI and later chairman of CBI Scotland, his clout was considerable.

He was twice married and is survived by his German-born second wife, Ruth, and by a daughter of his first marriage.




Sydney Hudson, DSO, member of the wartime Special Operations Executive and businessman, was born on August 1, 1910. He died on April 7, 2005, aged 94.

Interesting jusposition in today's obi's. The first, an air hero of some renown and the second, an old lady who is a traitor of the highest order. The one who will be morned the most and sorely missed is below:


What a lad!

What a damn shame. There will be a dig on the Aircraft Ray shot down next month , as a follow up to his Hurricane recovery , paid for by Channel 5 again. A pity he won't see it.

RIP Sergeant Holmes.

Ray Holmes
August 20, 1914 - June 27, 2005
Intrepid airman who rammed a German bomber over London to ensure it did not attack Buckingham Palace

IN ONE of the celebrated episodes of the Battle of Britain, sergeant pilot Ray Holmes became something of an overnight hero when he rammed a Dornier bomber over London to prevent it, as he had reason to believe, from dropping its bombs on Buckingham Palace. On the morning of September 15, 1940, Holmes had taken off from Hendon with other Hurricane pilots of 504 Squadron, to intercept a formation of 36 Dornier Do17s which had been reported to be closing in on Central London.

Acting as tail-end Charlie for his squadron, Holmes was keeping a weather eye open for German fighters as the aircraft approached the German bombers. He attacked two Dorniers, seriously damaging the first and causing its crew to bale out. The second sheered off as he fired at it. A third Dornier appeared to Holmes to be making directly for Buckingham Palace, but as he lined up on it — aiming to shoot through its cockpit window in a head-on attack — and pressed his gun button, the hiss from his breechblocks told him that he had run out of ammunition.

Holmes made the split second decision to prevent the enemy reaching its objective by ramming the Dornier, aiming to clip the left hand edge of its twin-rudder tailplane with his left wing. In fact he sliced the whole tailplane off and the Dornier, with its outer wings also ripped off by the violence of the impact, plunged to earth in the forecourt of Victoria station. As Holmes later recalled of the impact: “There was a bit of a bump but nothing much. I thought I had got away with it. But immediately the plane went into a spiral dive and I couldn’t pull out of it.”

Holmes took to his parachute at a desperately low 350ft and came down by the side of a house on Ebury Bridge Road, ending up with his parachute lines snagged on a drainpipe, suspended comically over a dustbin in the back garden. “I undid the parachute and stepped out. There were two girls in the next garden, so I vaulted over the fence and kissed them both,” he recalled.

Meanwhile, his Hurricane had crashed in Buckingham Palace Road at 400mph, burying itself many feet below the surface. The Dornier pilot had managed to bale out but subsequently died in hospital from his injuries. Mercifully, there were no casualties on the ground from either the Dornier or the Hurricane crash.

Holmes was taken by rescuers to the Orange Brewery in Pimlico Road, where he was steadied with a fortifying brandy before being taken to Chelsea Barracks, where he was checked over by an army medical officer. Thereafter, he was returned by taxi to RAF Hendon, where it was “business as usual” .

Raymond T. Holmes (always known as “Arty” because of his initials), was born and raised on the Wirral, where he was educated at Wallasey and Calday Grange grammar schools.

After leaving school he went into journalism, beginning work as a reporter on the Birkenhead Advertiser. He was also one of the early recruits to the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, joining it in 1936 as its 55th volunteer and completing his aircrew training. By the time the Second World War broke out he was already an experienced pilot, and he joined 504 (City of Nottingham) Squadron, flying Hurricanes.

As it happened, the intense airfighting over London on September 15, 1940, marked the virtual culmination of the Battle of Britain. Thereafter the German bomber offensive continued at night.

When Fighter Command went on to the offensive in the spring of 1941, Holmes flew fighter sweeps over occupied France. Subsequently he was sent to Murmansk to instruct Soviet airmen in the Hurricanes that were being delivered to them via the Arctic convoys, also escorting Soviet bombers on air raids over German occupied territory. On his return from Russia, he qualified as an instructor and spent two years at the Central Flying School.

Later in the war he specialised in photographic reconnaissance, joining 541 Squadron and flying high-altitude Spitfires over Germany to get high resolution pictures of targets. Such missions took him to the Ruhr, Berlin and Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden. Towards the end of the war he was flying dispatches for Winston Churchill as King’s Messenger. He had in the meantime been commissioned, and he ended the war with the rank of flight lieutenant.

Demobilised in October 1945, he resumed his prewar career in journalism, specialising in agricultural photography and developing colour photographs in his own lab. He also had his own news agency which concentrated on covering Liverpool law courts for local and national newspapers.

As it happened, Holmes had not seen the last of his trusty Hurricane. After many years of research to pinpoint the remains of the aircraft, an excavation was carried out in Buckingham Palace Road in May last year, and parts of the Hurricane were recovered, the latter part of the operation being shown live on television. The remnants were given on loan to the Imperial War Museum, but parts of the engine casing that had been shattered beyond effective restoration were used to cast some miniature Hurricane sculptures, one of which was presented to its pilot.

A supremely modest man, Holmes lived life to the full, and was playing tennis well into his eighties. He was granted the freedom of the Wirral last year.

Holmes is survived by his wife, Anne, by their son and daughter, and by two daughters of his first marriage to Elizabeth, who died in 1964.

Ray Holmes, Battle of Britain fighter pilot, was born on August 20, 1914. He died on June 27, 2005, aged 90.

particularly liked the part where he vaulted the garden fence to kiss the girls an old school hero

From the Daily Telegraph of 25th June:

Brigadier Leslie Marsh

'Commando who rallied his men to repel repeated Chinese attacks during the Korean War.'

Brigadier Leslie Marsh, who has died aged 86, won an MC during the Korean War for fighting his way along a single-track dirt road to relieve a base, and then helping to hold it against repeated attacks by the Chinese Communists.

In 1950 Marsh was a section commander in 41 Independent Commando Royal Marines, comprising British and American marines as well as other troops; on November 29 it was ordered to advance "at all costs" from Koto-ri to relieve the UN base at Hagaru-ri.

They made their way through such heavy fire that an American tank company refused a request to spread out through the column, leaving Marsh and the convoy unprotected. The marines took two hills, but resistance stiffened, and at nightfall in "Hell Fire Valley" the Chinese blocked the road and split the convoy in two, destroying all the force's radios and soft-skinned vehicles.

Marsh fought on with the remainder of the column as the thermometer fell to minus 24 degrees Fahrenheit, but he was eventually stopped by intense mortar and small arms fire when he was within three miles of the Americans at the UN garrison. Despite a serious thigh wound, Marsh refused all offers of first aid, rallied his remaining men by the light of his section's burning trucks and led them on foot across rough frozen ground to Hagaru-ri.

There were some 321 British and Americans casualties; others were captured; and some retreated back to Koto-ri. Marsh was one of only 100 survivors of 41 Commando who entered the beleaguered base, where his seasoned marines were crucial to its survival.

Over the next few nights they formed a mobile reserve within the base as the Chinese 58th and 59th divisions attacked in waves: 41 Commando lost a quarter of its remaining strength, but the enemy lost an estimated 8,000 killed and wounded until their ammunition was exhausted.

Marsh was awarded a Military Cross for his selfless conduct, outstanding leadership and determination to succeed.

Leslie George Marsh was born on October 5 1918 at Handsworth, Staffordshire, and educated at Clifton before joining the Royal Marines in 1938. He served in the battleship Iron Duke and in the cruiser Birmingham, before volunteering for commando training in Wales before the Normandy landings. While leading an attack by 40 Commando on German positions on the River Reno, during the Commachio campaign in 1945, he was shot in the shoulder at close range by a burst from a machine pistol.

After Korea, and instructing at the Commando School in Devon, he was appointed to the Army's school of infantry at Warminster and then to the Royal Marines non-commissioned officers' school at Plymouth. There he became one of that distinct band of bachelor officers who shared a love of literature, poetry and fine wine. Years later, if given a line of a Housman poem, Marsh could recite the entire work from memory.

At Suez in 1956, Marsh was the senior troop commander of 45 Commando which landed in the first wave of a helicopter-borne assault from the sea; it was the first time such a tactic had been employed against a defended beachhead. He was pulled back to take over as operations officer after his CO was wounded, but frequently returned to his beloved marines "at the sharp end, where leaders should always be". Much to his chagrin, the Egyptians surrendered within 48 hours.

In 1960 Marsh commanded 45 Commando in Aden. The protectorate was reasonably quiet and stable, but there was the risk of a sudden uprising, and Marsh needed all his powers of leadership and independence of mind to keep his men fit, trained and happy.

The next year he flew his men to the Iraqi border as part of a larger British force, which included 42 Commando in the carrier Bulwark, to deter an invasion of Kuwait. This successful operation stands as an object lesson in the value of timely deterrence.

Marsh commanded 3 Commando Brigade during the Borneo campaign in 1962-64, and his final appointment was as commandant of the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone, where he took the greatest pleasure in the training of young officers, NCOs and marines.

A typical official report spoke of Marsh's power of leadership and his sense of duty.

In retirement Marsh worked happily as personnel manager for Wiggins Teape at Basingstoke, before marrying and retiring to France.

Leslie Marsh died on June 9. He married, in 1972, Annie Watts (née Lescher), who survives him with her four children, with whom Marsh shared a loving friendship and affection. He is buried a few yards from his home at St Sulpice d'Eymet in the Dordogne, where he lived for a quarter of a century.

www.timesonline.co.uk/...93,00.html

Obituaries



July 11, 2005

Allan Beckett
March 4, 1914 - June 19, 2005
Designer whose floating roadway was crucial to the Mulberry harbour of the Normandy landings



BEGINNING his war as a sapper digging trenches on the South Coast at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, Allan Beckett came to play a significant role in the success of the Mulberry harbours used during and after the Normandy landings of June 1944.
The notion of the Mulberry had come from Churchill, determined never to repeat the 1915 debacle of the Gallipoli landings over open beaches. As early as 1942, with an invasion of the German-occupied Continent only a distant dream, he had prepared a minute for the chief of combined operations, headed: “Piers for use on beaches”.



“They must float up and down with the tide,” he noted. “The anchor problem must be mastered. Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.” These injunctions set down the essentials of the floating piers, protected by a breakwater of blockships and caissons, which enabled the vast tonnage of vehicles and stores to be got ashore to support the forces in the field.

Beckett’s contribution to the Mulberry was to design the floating roadway which connected the pierhead to the shore, and a system of anchors. The roadway had to be strong enough to withstand constant wave action which, as it happened in the appalling weather of June 1944, was much more severe than anticipated. Beckett’s design, which had been tested in the severe conditions of Scotland in winter, survived the storm which struck on June 19, 1944, and raged for three days.

Allan Harry Beckett was born in 1914 in East Ham, London. He read civil engineering at London University and before the war worked with the consulting engineers A. J. Bridie. When war came he was called up into the Royal Engineers in January 1940, and after basic sapper training was, at the time of Dunkirk, engaged in trench digging, watch duties and manning a searchlight at Folkestone. Commissioned in 1941, he was sent to King’s Newton, near Derby, to work under Lieutenant-Colonel W. T. Everall, a specialist on the rapid construction of railway bridges for battlefield use. As such he gained valuable experience in assembling light steel trestling.

In the wake of the Churchill minute Everall was charged by the War Office with designing a series of mile-long pontoons for use on shelving beaches under tidal conditions. When he showed his (top-secret) sketch of his arrangement to Beckett, his junior suggested various simplifications, which made the scheme more robust and flexible. Everall’s design for ther pontoons envisaged each having four legs. Beckett pointed out that the system would be more flexible without the legs, and Everall took his modifications back to the War Office, which liked them, and commissioned six bridge spans on pontoons.

In a week Beckett produced the works drawings and the pontoon bridge was constructed. It and two competing schemes (the Hamilton Swiss Roll and the Hughes Caisson Scheme) were tested at Cairn Head, Galloway, where, over a period, they were subjected to severe weather.

Summoned to Scotland to check his system after a particularly fierce storm, Beckett imagined that he was being called ruefully to inspect a mass of twisted and fractured metal. To his immense gratification the floating roadway had survived intact under the severest of torsion, while the Hamilton Swiss Roll had been washed away, and the Hughes Caisson, too, had failed. As Beckett later observed: “After several more days of rough weather it was not difficult for the chiefs of staff to make a choice.”

Beckett was next charged with designing a light anchor, but one of great holding power, to prevent the piers (by now called “Whales”) moving sideways. Naval opinion was sceptical of his ability to come up with a solution, but the Kite anchor as it became known, proved a great success on the beaches.

On D+1 (June 7, 1944), as technical adviser in the field to Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, Beckett set out for Arromanches, the site of the British Mulberry. There, after an anxious day and night at sea, he supervised the installation of the anchors, and over the next few days gave technical advice on constructing the Whales.

In the event the Americans at Mulberry A were first to have a pier in operation, on D+5. But the more methodical British approach to construction was vindicated in the violent storm of D+13, which damaged Mulberry A beyond repair, whereas Mulberry B functioned for four months, until the capture of Antwerp in October rendered it redundant. After the storm Beckett acted as liaison officer to the Americans for the transfer of such undamaged equipment at Mulberry A as could be used by the British on their harbour.

After his part in the Mulberry project was finished, Beckett carried out various tasks in the wake of the Allied advance. He showed how a stock of abandoned German bridging equipment, located near Brussels, could be put to use; he oversaw the installation of much of the Everall bridging equipment which came into its own as the Allied advance took it over river after river; and he instructed Dutch engineers in repairing gaps in the dykes made by RAF bombers at Walcheren Island. For this, surplus Mulberry units came in useful for plugging the breaches.

Beckett was appointed MBE for his work at Arromanches. He also received inventors’ awards for the design of the floating piers and for the Kite anchor. With the £3,000 he received for the latter, he built himself a house in Farnborough, Kent, where he settled.

After being demobbed Beckett joined Sir Bruce White, Wolfe Barry and Partners as chief engineer. There he was responsible for projects in India including the Tata locomotive works, the Bombay Marine oil terminal and a self-scouring lock gate to cope with heavily silt-laden waters at Bhavnagar. In the UK he built factories for Bibby. In 1959 he became a partner in the firm, and developed techniques for mini-hydraulic model studies for designing and building new ports in Brunei, Saudi Arabia and Libya, as well as Harwich and Cardiff.

As senior partner from 1983 he oversaw all the engineering aspects of a huge contract to build a port at Dammam, Saudi Arabia. Closer to home there were the design and construction of complex flood defences for London, including the Dartford Creek flood barrier.


Obituaries


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In official retirement from 1989, he acted as a consultant to Beckett Rankine Partnership, his son Tim’s firm, for its port development and tidal defences projects all over the world. A keen and adventurous yachtsman from boyhood, he also designed and had built a new yacht made of copper- nickel alloy, one of the few in the world.
He married in 1949 Ida James. She survives him, with two sons and a daughter.






Allan Beckett, MBE, engineer, was born on March 4, 1914. He died on June 19, 2005, aged 91.

Sadly, we seem to be losing these guys on an almost daily basis.



Charles Hargreaves
(Filed: 08/07/2005)

Charles Hargreaves, who has died aged 87, was parachuted into Yugoslavia by the Special Operations Executive to make himself "useful" to the Chetnik Royalist forces in 1943.

Microsoft

Speaking no Serbo-Croat but impeccably turned out in service dress, Sam Browne and riding boots, he narrowly missed landing on top of the signal bonfire. He then marched up to the waiting Chetniks, came to attention and saluted. An eyewitness said: "In the silence which succeeded the gasp of admiration, you could almost hear the prestige of the British Empire rising".

Changing into battledress and beret, Hargreaves was soon leading a group in Eastern Serbia, south of the Danube. It had a threefold mission: to sabotage the North-South railway communications by which German troops might be sent to Italy; to disrupt the Danube traffic, the main route for transporting Romanian oil to the Reich; and to attack the copper mines at Bor. The task was further complicated by the bitter fighting between Tito's Communists and the royalist General Mihailovic's Chetniks.

It was a cut-throat war with no quarter asked or given, but there were some Homeric touches. A beautiful Serbian girl took off Hargreaves's boots and socks after one hard march to wash his feet and dry them with her hair. His men buried a hoard of treasure - gold, diamonds and paper money dropped by canister - in a remote cave along with six Germans they had shot dead.

Operations were hampered by Mihailovic's reluctance to draw German reprisals onto the heads of the civilian population, as when one attack on Danube traffic led to the shooting of 150 Serbian hostages. The future President Tito's Communist Partisans had fewer scruples, and Hargreaves's group received an order to join the nearest Partisan unit; no further drops of supplies were to be made to Mihailovic.

A few months later all SOE operatives attached to Mihailovic were evacuated, but by then Hargreaves had been captured in a mountain hut by 25 Afrika Korps veterans while he was incapacitated by a kick from a horse. His Chetnik cap badge, with the white rose of Serbia, marked him out as a terrorist in German eyes, and he was taken to Belgrade where he was tortured by the Gestapo for many months.

While held in solitary confinement with the sounds of torture and executions around him, he was sustained by a message slipped into his cell by a fellow prisoner. Written in Polish in the prisoner's own blood, the note, which came wrapped round a rusty nail, was for long Hargreaves's only possession. Although he could not understand the words he sensed their meaning which turned out to be: "There is not enough darkness in the world to put out the light of one small candle."

When he was moved to Berlin Hargreaves feared that he would be shot, "while trying to escape" on the long train journey, but he was delivered straight to the sick-bay of Colditz Castle. The PoW camp was hardly the best place to be in the winter of 1944, but although conditions were hard, they seemed "sheer bliss" after his earlier experiences.

Edgar Charles Stewart Hargreaves was born at Christchurch, New Zealand, on September 7 1917. Educated at St Andrew's College, where he was pipe major in the school band, he started to participate in air shows at the age of 15, standing on the wings of a biplane and finishing off the performance by parachuting into the crowd.

Meanwhile he had qualified for a pilot's certificate of competence - the nearest thing to a pilot's licence for a youth not yet 18.

With a contingent of young New Zealanders, Hargreaves travelled to Britain to volunteer for the RAF. But on failing the eye test for aircrew, he opted instead to join the Army, and was commissioned into the 8th King's Royal Irish Hussars. He was on leave in New Zealand at the declaration of war, and was posted to Northern Ireland with the North Irish Horse.

When he saw the film Waterloo Bridge, he particularly admired a Mauser pistol with a wooden holster that could be used as a stock. On telling his troop sergeant, he was driven into the hills where the sergeant dug up a box of German munitions, which included an identical pistol; he presented it to Hargreaves, who took it to Yugoslavia.

Finding conventional soldiering dull, Hargreaves volunteered for the Parachute regiment which was forming in Cheshire, and qualified as an instructor. Since he was shortsighted a local paper did a story with the headline "Monocled Man Leads Skytroops". Hargreaves kept a cutting of this, and would produce it when his comrades' spirits were low.

On being posted to the Middle East, Hargreaves was recruited to SOE by James Klugmann, the former Communist Party secretary at Cambridge, who is thought to have played an important part in the British switch to Tito.

Emerging from Colditz in 1945, Hargreaves was brought to England and assigned to another compound at Brize Norton where he met his fellow New Zealander the double VC-winner Charles Upham. The two men took one look at the barbed wire, and walked out. They went to the Ritz, where lack of ready cash was no problem.

After serving for another year with SOE in the Far East, Hargreaves became comptroller to the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey, which was being opened to the public. The job enabled him to indulge his love of animals, and the 200 wild animals roaming the grounds were soon joined by his pet chimpanzee, which had proved too boisterous for a London flat.

He was a keen supporter of the new sport of hot-air ballooning but was less enthused about collecting rent from the many nudist conventions at Woburn - a duty he always performed immaculately dressed. Hargreaves then became a Queen's Messenger and later Bursar at Heathfield School, where he met and married the young headmistress Dawn Mackay. They moved to Hatchlands, in Surrey, to open a college providing courses for girls of many nationalities who had just left school.

When Hatchlands was no longer available they moved to Aultmore in Speyside where they continued to provide an enriching experience to a wide variety of pupils before finally retiring. In later years he took up bungee-jumping.

Charles Hargreaves is survived by his widow and two sons from a previous marriage.

www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...db0802.xml

Op Telic: In Memorium.

Respect to Scottie. Never knew he was a D Day veteran.


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www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...db2101.xml

Major-General R.C. Macdonald
Inspired infantry leader who won two DSOs in the fierce battles of the Normandy and Rhineland campaigns

(From The Times, 29 July 2005 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1712334,00.html))

“Mac Macdonald commanded three different infantry battalions in the battles from the Normandy beachhead to the crossing of the Rhine and beyond. In a period when the casualty rate might result in a unit having three commanding officers within so many weeks, it was remarkable that he survived unscathed, winning two DSOs in the process.

He was an officer of unusual calm and good humour. These qualities served him well when he became Military Assistant to Field Marshal Montgomery after the war.

Ronald Clarence Macdonald was a sixth-generation grandson of Flora Macdonald, who helped Bonnie Prince Charlie to escape capture after his defeat at the battle of Culloden in 1746. He was born in 1911 in Quetta where his father, Colonel C. R. Macdonald, was serving with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment before the First World War. He was educated at Rugby and RMC Sandhurst, from where he was commissioned into the Royal Warwickshires in 1931.

The early years of the war were spent in a variety of regimental and staff appointments in England but he landed in Normandy in June 1944 as second-in-command of the 1st/6th South Staffordshires with the 59th Infantry Division, which played a key role in taking Caen in early July. A month later he was in command of the battalion during the battle for the ridge overlooking Thury-Harcourt, in the centre of the line held by the Fifth Panzer Army, after the German withdrawal to the line of the Orne south of Caen.

The ridge was under close enemy observation, and two of Macdonald’s companies were subjected to intense mortar fire as they formed up for the attack. He went forward at once to effect an immediate reorganisation to take account of the casualties, and he led his battalion forward to seize all their objectives. The enemy counter-attacked several times with increasing ferocity next day. But Macdonald was everywhere on the hill, urging his men to hang on, which they did until the enemy withdrew at nightfall. He received an immediate DSO for his outstanding leadership and determination.

He continued in command of 1st/6th South Staffordshires until they were disbanded to provide reinforcements for other battalions in November 1944, when he was appointed CO of the 1st Kings Own Scottish Borderers in the 3rd Division, leading them from the Maas through the gruelling battles for the Rhineland. Then, in March 1945 when the British and American Armies were poised for the Rhine crossing, he took over the 2nd Battalion of his own regiment, also in the 3rd Division.

His battalion crossed the Rhine on March 29 and, having passed through the town of Rees, fought their way forward through Lingen against the determined and highly professional troops of the Grossdeutschland Brandenburg Regiment. A further series of actions, fiercely fought by both sides, eventually saw Macdonald’s battalion on the outskirts of Bremen by April 16. He was awarded a Bar to his DSO for his skilled and highly successful third period in command.

At the end of the war in Europe Macdonald took the 2nd Royal Warwickshires to Palestine, where the situation was becoming increasingly difficult with immigration of Jewish refugees from Europe, which the Arab population bitterly opposed. After spending the winter in Jerusalem, he was recalled to London to become Military Assistant to the new CIGS, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, who was Colonel of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He not only survived this exacting duty but continued in the post with Sir William Slim when he succeded Montgomery in 1948.

After service on the staff in the Gold Coast, soon to become Ghana, he was appointed to his fourth battalion command — the 1st Battalion of his own regiment about to embark for Korea. Active operations in this bitterly fought war ceased on July 27, 1953, just before they reached Pusan, but the battalion remained to help to garrison the ceasefire line for the following year.

Macdonald subsequently commanded 10th Infantry Brigade Group in Lüneburg with the Army of the Rhine and in 1960 became Chief of Staff British Forces Arabian Peninsula. He was promoted major- general in 1962 and appointed Deputy Chief of Staff Allied Land Forces Central Europe in Fontainebleau, from which he retired from the Army in 1965.

In 1967 he became farm manager for Griffin Farms, a leading egg-producing concern and remained a non- executive director of the company after giving up active participation in 1974.

He was Colonel of the Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers, which his regiment had been retitled, from 1963 to 1968, and, from 1968 to 1974, Deputy Colonel (Warwicks) of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.

He married in 1939 Jessie Ross Anderson, who died in 1986. He married in 1986 Constance Margaret Davies, the widow of Air Commodore Wilfred Owen Davies. He is survived by his second wife, by a son of his first marriage and by a stepson. A daughter of his first marriage predeceased him.

Major-General R. C. Macdonald, CB, DSO and Bar, OBE, Deputy Chief of Staff Allied Land Forces Central Europe, 1962-65, was born on August 1, 1911. He died on July 28, 2005, aged 93.

www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...db1103.xml

Brian Calvert
(Filed: 11/08/2005)

Brian Calvert, who has died aged 72, was interned in China by the Japanese in the Second World War, and later played an important role in introducing the supersonic airliner Concorde, with which he fell deeply in love.

For him, Concorde was a lady, climbing like a lovesick angel. Pilots wanted to fly and to see her at the same time, he declared. She expanded and contracted, flexed like a fly-fishing rod, and flew at Mach 2. Calvert carried out the plane's acceptance trial, and went on to develop the pilot operating procedures. As the flight manager with specific responsibility for technical matters, he was involved in the complicated and protracted negotiations with foreign governments for landing rights. In due course, he carried out acceptance trials and inaugurated several new routes, thus successfully bringing the new aircraft into service.

But he was philosophical when news broke that the plane was to be taken out of service, recognising that its existence depended upon results, and that the Paris crash in July 2000 and the New York terrorist attacks in September 2001 made the aircraft no longer commercially viable.

Brian James Calvert was born on June 15 1933 at Hankow on the Yangste. His father worked for Vestey's, and the family was living in the British concession at Tientsin when the Japanese interned some 1,800 civilians of various nationalities at Weihsin in Shantung province. Some of his fellow internees were expatriates who had been teaching at Peking University, and young Brian received such a sound education that, after returning to England in 1945, he won a place to Stowe.

When he earned praise for his performance as Hamlet in a school play from Laurence Olivier, who was in the audience, he thought of becoming an actor. But he undertook his national service in the Royal Navy. Selected for upperyardman, he was one of the last ratings to be trained as a pilot, flying the Mark 17 Seafire, the Firefly and the ungainly Gannet, whose round contours would contrast with the sharper Concorde.

As an RNVR pilot in the Channel Air Division, based at Ford, Sussex, he indulged his love of flying in considerably less restrained style than he was to do as a civil pilot. Flying in 1840 Naval Air Squadron, he helped to win the Kemsley trophy for the top anti-submarine air squadron.

After national service, Calvert joined P&O as an assistant purser, undertaking two voyages to Australia and one to the North West Pacific; but he was bored keeping passengers entertained and finding their luggage. When he tried high-street banking and announced to his branch manager that he was not cut out for the job, "there was a mutual sigh of relief".

Then, in 1957, Calvert joined the airline industry after seeing an advertisement by BOAC for aircrew. For the first two years he was a navigator until qualifying as a pilot again to fly the Stratocruiser, Britannia, Comet IV, VC-10 and the Boeing 747. He first became involved in the introduction into service of new aircraft and avionics when, in 1966, he joined BOAC's flight development unit, where he had a significant influence on aircraft design. Calvert was the author of Flying Concorde: the Full Story (1981).

In 1985 he retired from British Airways to work for Hunting Aviation. There he accepted the challenge of transferring new technology from the defence industry to the calibration of airfield navigational aids. He eventually produced a remarkably efficient and competitively priced solution in the shape of a fully equipped small twin-engine aircraft, able to meet very stringent CAA requirements; it delighted many airfield operators intent on reducing airfield operating costs.

Calvert settled into village life at Ashhampstead, Berks, under Concorde's flight path. An idyllic day for him would be to take family and friends to the Beetle and Wedge at Moulsford in his dinghy, which he called "the Berkshire navy". When charter flights for Concorde were mooted, Calvert ensured the first passengers were his local's regulars.

He won the Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators' Brackley Trophy in 1977 for his outstanding contribution to commercial flying, and served as president of the Royal Institute of Navigation from 1981 to 1984.

Brian Calvert, who died on July 16, married, in 1958, Elizabeth Russell Dodd. After their divorce, he married, secondly, the novelist, anthologist and toy designer Mary Danby, who survives him with his two sons and a daughter.

www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...db1001.xml

Air Commodore 'Rex' Boxer
(Filed: 10/08/2005)

RIP Tom , Sapiens Qui Prospicit in arc sitam qvis occutablit

Major 'Jim' Almonds MM & bar

A founder member of the Special Air Service.

www.timesonline.co.uk/...26,00.html

August 6, 1914 - August 20, 2005
Founder member of the SAS who blew up enemy aircraft in North Africa and sabotaged supply lines after D-Day
AS A sergeant with a troop of No 8 Commando in besieged Tobruk in 1941 “Gentleman Jim” Almonds was recruited by David Stirling with three companions to join “L” Detachment of the Special Air Service Brigade. Thus they became part of that elite group “the originals” of the SAS, as the brigade to which they supposedly belonged existed on paper only — a phantom to deceive Rommel about the 8th Army’s strength. L Detachment was to experiment with a new form of attack on his airfields and lines of communication — from the rear.

Stirling’s first operation against enemy airfields, by parachute, was a total failure, chiefly because atrocious weather resulted in the would-be saboteurs being dropped wide of their targets. Almonds did not take part as he was ordered by Stirling to remain at Kabrit, the SAS base near the Suez Canal, to complete construction of the parachute training towers. But when Stirling met the Long Range Desert Group on the way back from the failed operation he became convinced that parachuting into the desert was an inaccurate procedure and wasteful of his precious resources. He therefore joined up with the LRDG at Jalo, off the northwestern tip of the desert’s Great Sand Sea, for his next operation.

Almonds was accompanied by Captain Jock Lewes, formerly his troop leader in No 8 Commando, on the first operation the SAS undertook with the LRDG. The aim was to attack the enemy airfield at El Agheila, some 200 miles from Jalo on the Mediterranean coast. They found the airfield deserted but blew up a concentration of enemy ammunition vehicles at Mersa Brega, further west.

On Christmas Day 1941, Almonds again accompanied Lewes, this time in an attack on Nofilia airfield on the border between Libya and Tripolitania. The Luftwaffe foiled them again by flying all but two of a squadron of Ju87 Stukas off the strip before dark. The two Stukas were destroyed, but Lewes was killed in an enemy air attack as they set out for Jalo. Four of their five vehicles were burnt out and the fifth damaged.

Almonds took command, picked up two LRDG survivors who had become separated and set out for Jalo in the remaining truck. They covered most of the 200 miles by night, aided by a good moon and the vehicle headlights when negotiating the innumerable gullies. After an exhausting 48-hour drive they reached Jalo on New Year’s Day 1942.

Almonds received an immediate Military Medal for his part in the raid on Nofilia airfield and for his resourcefulness in getting his group of survivors back to Jalo. The citation had “Not to be published” scrawled across it to preserve the secrecy of the SAS operations. It was undated but the note “missing” below Almonds’s name indicates that Stirling submitted it after the subsequent successful attack on Sidi Haneish and the failed operation against Benghazi harbour.

In the Sidi Haneish raid 40 Ju52 transport aircraft were destroyed on the ground at the cost of only one SAS man killed, and the loss of two Jeeps.

In September Almonds was captured on the outskirts of Benghazi when his Jeep was hit in the petrol tank and burnt out at a roadblock on the approach to the town. As Rommel was shipping supplies through the port it was a key target, but Stirling had argued strongly against the SAS being used for such a large-scale operation.

After being driven round Benghazi in the back of a truck by his captors for the entertainment of the populace, Almonds was shipped to Italy and put in a camp near Taranto.

In a carefully rehearsed plan, he and three other prisoners working in the Red Cross food parcels store overcame, bound and gagged their three Italian guards and escaped from the camp through an upper window of the store. They remained free for two weeks but felt compelled to give themselves up when one of the group became so ill with pneumonia that they feared he would die. Sent back to the camp from which they had escaped, the four were informed that they would be tried by court martial for assaulting an Italian officer — for which the sentence was death.

Almonds was sent to a separate camp and held in solitary confinement for several months, during which time he occupied himself by designing and building a boat entirely in his mind. Allied landings on the toe of Italy in July 1943 brought an end to talk of a court martial, when all the prisoners were sent by train to a camp 300 miles north at Monturano.

On September 8 the Italian camp commander, who had also travelled north, informed Almonds that Italy was about to change to the Allied side and asked him to make a reconnaissance in civilian clothes of German positions around the nearby harbour. Almonds did so but, after reporting to the commandant by telephone, decided not to return.

He walked inland to the foothills of the Apennines before turning south towards the slowly advancing Allied forces. Having walked 300km, scavenging food as he went, he reached a US army forward patrol on October 14. In January 1944 he joined 1st SAS in Scotland, preparing for the invasion of Normandy. He was awarded a bar to his MM in recognition of his escape.

He went to Normandy as squadron sergeant-major of D Squadron 1st SAS to co-operate with the French resistance in sabotaging the German supply lines. After receiving their Jeeps and heavy weapons by airdrop, D Squadron wreaked havoc on enemy lines of communication through the Forest of Orleans. Almonds was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his part in this and was commissioned in September 1944. His final contribution to the Allied cause was to go with 1st SAS to Norway to assist in the apprehension of Quisling collaborators.

John Edward Almonds was born in Stixwould, Lincolnshire, the son of George Almonds, a smallholder. He became “Jim” after joining the Coldstream Guards, as there were too many Johns in his squad at Pirbright. The nickname “Gentleman Jim” originated at Tobruk because he never swore and his dugout was always immaculate — he liked to cite the old military maxim: “Any fool can be uncomfortable.”

His life after 1945 included secondment to the British Military Mission to Ethiopia, 1949-51, service with the Eritrean Police Field Force and a return to the SAS when it was reformed from the Malayan Scouts in 1952. He completed his military service in West Africa where he built the ketch he had half-designed in solitary confinement and sailed it home with two companions. He retired to the house where he was born in Stixwould.

His wife Iris May Lock, whom he married in 1939, predeceased him. He is survived by a son, who followed him into the SAS, and twin daughters who both served in the Army.

Major J. E. Almonds, MM and Bar, SAS officer, was born on August 6, 1914. He died on August 20, 2005, aged 91.