Veteran’s two-mile charity walk

A 98-year-old RAF veteran who has spent his life tending to graves of the fallen will undertake a two-mile walk on VE Day in aid of a soldiers’ club in Belgium.

George Sutherland, then 17, began working with his Scottish father Walter Sutherland at Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery when the Second World War broke out in September 1939.

They fled Belgium and George joined the RAF in January 1941, serving as a leading aircraftman before returning to his wife and children in Poperinge at the end of the war. He went straight back to work at Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, and was later joined there by son Alex Sutherland in 1962 - the third generation of his family to care for the graves.

Leading Aircraftman Sutherland

will mark VE Day by walking from the cemetery to Talbot House, which was founded by British army chaplains in 1915 as a homefrom-home for soldiers.

He was inspired to undertake the 2.2-mile walk to raise money for the club after seeing the fundraising efforts of Captain Tom Moore. A Gofundme page for Talbot House, which is facing closure for financial reasons due to the coronavirus pandemic, is aiming to raise €100,000. “I wanted to do it out of respect for all those boys who lost their lives,” LAC Sutherland said.

He was born in 1921 after the marriage between his mother, who lived across the road from the Lijssenthoek field hospitals, and his Scottish father who served there during the First World War.