Norman Jones

Arnhem veteran

NORMAN JONES, the only surviving veteran of the Army Physical Training Corps to parachute into Arnhem during the Second World War as part of Operation Market Garden, died on the anniversary of VE Day aged 99.

In 1944, he was with the 10th Battalion The Parachute Regiment as their senior PTI and jumped near the Dutch town of Arnhem in September, 1944, as part of the biggest airborne operation in history.

The drop zones were in enemy hands and many men were killed as they descended. Later, as his unit came under German fire while trying to capture the bridge at Arnhem in the final part of one of the most audacious plans to bring an early end to the Second World War, Sergeant Major Instructor Jones took cover in a shop doorway but was caught by a white phosphorous smoke grenade and his hands were badly burned. The field hospital where he was treated was then captured by the Germans.

He spent eight months as a PoW before being marched east towards Poland under brutal escort, then marched back west during one of the coldest winters in living memory short of food, water and clothing.

But Sgt Major Jones pestered the German guards for rations for his fellow prisoners and was savagely beaten for his trouble. They were eventually liberated by advancing US Army troops.

In 2004 he returned to Holland for the 60th anniversary commemorations, and relived his experience to The Yorkshire Post. Until then he had never talked about the war, only doing so after the death a year earlier of Elsie, his wife of 64 years.

“People were being shot alongside me as we came down. It was the ones who were last out of the plane who came off worst. I was the second one out,” he said.

“The sky was absolutely black with parachutes, and I thought at the time, ‘There is no way that this is going to go wrong’, because the sky was choc-a-bloc. But the Germans were just waiting for us.”

Norman Jones was born in Bradford, the only son in the family of seven of Peter and Louisa Jones. His father, a Great War veteran, worked as a welder of railway and tram lines. They moved to Holbeck, Leeds, where Mr Jones attended Ingram Road School, before doing a catering course at Bradford College. But he wanted to be a clock and watch repairer so became a scientific instrument repairer with Leeds Corporation, mending clocks on street lamps.

In 1936, he joined the TA Royal Signals becoming a regular soldier three years later. Being very fit he won the Northern Command Unit Physical Training Competition, and was promptly sent on a number of PT Instructors’ courses which led to him being transferred to the Army Physical Training Staff (APTS) in late 1939. He was posted to Northern Ireland and became an unarmed combat

The sky was black with parachutes...but the Germans were waiting

for us.

specialist and also a Royal Life Saving Society instructor.

In September 1940, he became a member of the Army Physical Training Corps (APTC) when the APTS was upgraded to a combatant Corps. In 1941, he was posted as a ships’ APTC Instructor on the North Atlantic convoys serving on SS Duchess of York on the Liverpool to Freetown route.

He also gained his Para Wings and was a PT Instructor at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, where all para trainees were put through rigorous training.

He was one of 10 APTC instructors, who formed a club called The Squanderbugs based in the Golden Fleece pub in Chesterfield, whose mission statement was “to achieve charitable enterprises through weekly drinking contests and spending money”. They did a great deal for charity and maintained the old tradition of “work hard, play hard”.

After the war he returned to clock and watch repairs in a shop in Holbeck, but when it was pulled down he worked from home in Swarcliffe, Leeds. He never really retired as people were still knocking on his door with work when he was 90. He was a member of the British Horological Institute.

In 1960 Swarcliffe was one of Leeds’s new estates and there was little to do, so Mr Jones and three friends formed a Working Men’s Club of which he was variously secretary then president for 17 years and a life member. He was also chairman of the over-60s section for 15 years, and was still running their Christmas dinner when he was 85.

In July 2005 Mr Jones joined the APTC team’s stand at the Ministry of Defence’s Living Museum in London as part of the 60th anniversary celebrations marking the end of the war. It brought together three generations of the Corps with probationers, staff of ASPT and veterans.

In 2006 he achieved an ambition to do his last parachute jump, which was a tandem from 12,000ft at the Joint Services Para Centre, near Salisbury.

He was awarded The Atlantic Star, The France Germany Star, The Defence Medal, The War Medal (1939-45), The Arnhem Commemorative Medal (1944) and The TA Long Service and Good Conduct Medal

Mr Jones is survived by his daughters Pauline, who was born on the day he jumped at Arnhem, and Jean, son Michael, eight grandchildren and 23 great grandchildren. A funeral service with military honours will be held at St James’s Church, Seacroft, Leeds, on May 21, at 11.30am.