‘THANK YOU’ TO CHARITY
Plastered in mud, bodies all around...
a friend volunteered for the Navy three times but they wouldn’t accept us. I don’t know why.”
But Roy got his wish when he was conscripted to the Royal Engineers in 1942, going on to join the invasion forces in Normandy two years later, building and repairing railway lines. He added: “Of course Mum worried, especially after losing our father, but she was stoic.
“We kept in touch by letter. She was very relieved when Basil and I came home safe.”
It was after the liberation of the Port of Caen that Roy came faceto-face with General Charles de Gaulle, later to become French President. “He was brisk. Friendly, but on a flying visit,” Roy recalled. After Normandy, he joined the Allied advance through France and the low countries helping repair transport lines, before crossing into Germany for the final assault on Hitler’s crumbling Nazi empire.
After post-war service in Palestine, Roy left the Army in 1947. He returned to engineering, met his wife Mary at work and had three children.
He has eight grandkids and seven great-grandkids.
Roy said: “Who knows how different life would have been without those five shillings from the Legion? Perhaps we would have split up and I’d never have become an engineer or had the life I’ve had. I am eternally grateful.”
Roy worked in textiles and only retired at 90 when a broken hip forced him to call it a day.
Since the 1960s he has been a huge supporter of the Legion and three years ago was in a team that raised over £8,500 in poppy sales. Last year Roy helped
collect more than ROY’S dad signed up with his brother Harold, who kept a haunting diary of life in WW1.
Bombardier Harold Marren, who also served in the 3rd Staffs Battery, Royal Field Artillery, told how troops had to drink water dyed red with their colleagues’ blood.
Harold arrived during the Battle of the Somme in 2016. But his most chilling entries came later, from other battlegrounds. Four grim entries would reveal the utter horror on the front line.
He wrote: “Bitterly cold, still without clothes, am sleeping on a stretcher in a bell tent...
“My God, what a place. It’s up to the neck in dead bodies and horses are littered about in hundreds...
“Was up all last night and have been firing again all night. We are saturated to the skin and are plastered from head to foot with mud. We are in a state, nowhere to sleep, everything wet through...
“Heaps of dead bodies lie about the ground, our drinking water up to a few days ago was from the shell holes and was almost blood red.”
And at Christmas, after a 12-mile trek, Harold wrote: “Fritz gave us rather a nasty shock by sending a shell right on our path. We had to lie down then run for it.”
£10,000 at his local Morrisons. Now he hopes to inspire a new generation of poppy sellers.
He added: “It’s so important to remember every Forces member from every conflict.
“I worked with some of the men who were in the First World War... they sacrificed so much. The Legion helps so many families and I hope that future generations will continue to honour them.”