‘Dad always had a huge guilt that he was spared’
Head of the RAF Benevolent Fund, David Murray, tells Luke Mintz of D-Day’s lifelong effect on his father
When David Murray’s parents took him to the seaside as a child, his father never dared to go into the water. Splashing around in the waves with his mother, brother, and two sisters at Waltonon-the-Naze, on the Essex coast, Murray remembers his father, Lord Lionel Murray, watching from the safety of dry land. Murray had always assumed that his dad, who was raised penniless, had never learnt to swim, and he avoided asking any embarrassing questions. But he later discovered that his father’s fear of the water stemmed from the events of June 6 1944 – D-Day – when he had led a platoon up a Normandy beach, witnessing dozens of his fellow soldiers cut down before they had even emerged from the water.
“He never talked to me about it,” Murray says, sliding a black-andwhite photograph of his father, taken in 1944, across the table to show me. Dressed in a stiff military jacket and tie, he looks off to the right of the camera, his stern expression failing to hide his youthfulness. Known as “Len”, Murray’s father later became a prominent trade unionist, receiving a peerage in 1985. “It was only after he died [in 2004] that I started discovering what had happened. Most servicemen don’t talk to their families about bad things that happened to them, because they’re trying to protect them.”
It is a topic with which Murray, 59, is well acquainted. After serving in the RAF for 33 years and reaching the rank of air vice-marshal, he has worked since 2016 as the head of the RAF’s Benevolent Fund, a charity that aims to help veterans adjust to civilian life. Formed at the end of the First World War, the charity now assists 55,000 veterans each year, many of whom suffer from serious physical, psychological and financial problems. Every week, Murray speaks to men and women who have been permanently affected by what
they witnessed on the battlefield – in much the same way that his own father was. Some have fallen into homelessness, drug addiction and bankruptcy, and many have seen their marriages disintegrate. Last year, a study of 9,000 soldiers by King’s College London found that rates of post-traumatic stress disorder have increased in the last decade, with 17 per cent of active combatants reporting symptoms.
Now, in the run-up to the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings this week, the charity has launched a fresh appeal encouraging struggling veterans to seek help. To push things along, g, he has decided to share his own father’s story in full for the first time. Born out of wedlock in Hadley, Shropshire, in 1922, Len was raised in poverty by a local nurse. At the age of 19, two years after Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany, he signed up to his local regiment, the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry “to fight the fascists”, , says y Murray. y Impressing his superiors, he w was soon commissioned a as an officer. The Normand Normandy landings, in which 24,000 British, American, and C Canadian troops launched their long-awaited liberation of Europe, Eu was the first time Len saw active combat, and a his regiment was told tol to secure Sword Beach, one of the tw two assigned to British Britis forces (the other was Gold). Charging Cha out of the waves, dozens of his fellow soldiers so were hit by machinegun fire – on that first day, 115 of his battalion’s 450 members died. After fighting his way up the beach, Len did not sleep for four days as he led his men inland towards the town of Cairn, where they battled more German troops.
It was on the fourth day, Murray says, that his father suffered a “complete mental and physical breakdown”. He woke up in Guy’s Hospital, London, but the details of how he arrived there remain foggy. His “treatment” was electric shock therapy, administered straight to the brain. “That’s how it was in those days,” Murray sighs.
He was discharged from the army and returned to his “normal life”, Murray says, but for a psychologically wounded veteran in 1944, “normal life” was not such an attractive prospect. He began selling The Daily Worker on street corners in Wolverhampton, and briefly joined the Communist Party. One day, his old headmaster from Wellington Grammar School bumped into him and – remembering a brilliantly intelligent young boy – told him “you’re wasting your life, Murray”.
The headmaster wrote to his friend, an Oxford University don, and landed him a place studying politics, philosophy and economics at New College, from which he graduated with a first. Len became involved in the Trades Union Congress, becoming their general secretary in 1973, and raised four children with his wife, Heather, in Loughton, Essex.
Murray remembers his childhood warmly: “Dad was a firm but fair man – a tough old bugger, actually. We were always encouraged to debate politics, and my wife got a real shock when she first came to Sunday lunch with the huge rows across the table. We were taught to debate, but not to argue, and [my father] would referee. He thought it was healthy for his kids to know their own views.”
Despite their rumbustious family conversations, however, the children knew that Len’s involvement in the war was off-limits.
“One day he was going to church and he said, ‘Can you get me a handkerchief from the sock drawer?’ So I opened it and found all these medals in there. And when I asked, ‘What is this, Dad?’, he said, ‘You have those, I don’t want them.’ He had a huge sense of survivor’s guilt… A real guilt that he’d been spared, others hadn’t, therefore he had to do something with his life.
“He would work very late at night, and every weekend, for the benefit of others, for his whole life… He would never forgive someone who hadn’t fulfilled their potential or been lazy.”
This attitude was so ingrained into his family’s psyche that Murray didn’t tell his parents when he applied for the RAF after leaving school, in case he failed. He opened his letter six weeks later to discover that he had been offered a commission. “My dad was very supportive, and said: ‘You know what you’re doing, you know what you’re getting up to, boy.’”
Murray went on to serve in Bosnia, Sierra Leone and the Falklands, later working at Buckingham Palace as the Queen’s liaison with the Armed Forces.
It was just 75 years ago, Murray remarks, that his father was given electric shock therapy to “treat” battlefield trauma, and he is impressed with how far attitudes have shifted. “We’ve gone from the shot at dawn stuff right through to some quite sophisticated support,” he says, mentioning his charity’s new partnership with Headspace, a meditation app. But he talks of a “stoicism” that continues to prevent veterans from seeking help.
“When things go wrong in [their] life, whether it’s mental, physical, financial or housing, they’re not willing to put their hand out and ask for help. They’re just people that have done their duty, and it’s only right that we should be there for them.”
‘He would work for the benefit of others, for his whole life’