Lest We Forget: County Durham

In 1939 we lived in the mining village of Tanfield Lea in County Durham. During World War 1 my father had been a Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Naval Division - which despite its naval origins and traditions was an infantry formation and became the Army's 63rd (RN) Division - and had won the Distinguished Conduct Medal in 1918 [London Gazette 5th December 1918 page 144487]. He was a coal miner, and mining was a reserved occupation so that he was not eligible for military service. But when one of his younger brothers, serving in the Territorial Army with the Durham Light Infantry, came back in June 1940 among those evacuated from the Dunkirk beaches, father left the pits and worked for about six months as a labourer until he was able to volunteer, aged 46, for the Army.

He too went into the Durhams and, because of his experience in World War 1, was given Sergeant rank, but only as an instructor to local Home Guard units. An occasional feature of his duties was to present public displays of weaponry, and one Sunday morning while demonstrating the destructive effect of hand grenades one exploded as he was about to throw it, and he was critically wounded. Treated first in the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle-on-Tyne, then in hospital at Whickham, he spent a long time recovering, but had lost one eye and was left with barely half the sight of the other, as well as multiple other injuries.

During that period, with my older brother overseas in the Forces as well, I was no doubt feeling pretty vulnerable and when a little band of neighbours' youngsters started picking on me, to my great relief they were sent packing by Elliott Strong, a young man probably still in his teens who lived a few doors from us, on leave from the Royal Air Force. However, not long after my father's discharge from hospital, Elliott's parents were to receive the heartbreaking news that he, their eldest, had failed to return from bomber operations over Germany and was missing in action.

Soon after war's end we moved from the village and I heard nothing more of him until about five years ago when, at an air display at RAF Duxford, I came across a publication of Bomber Command Losses for 1943. Glancing at random through just a few of very nearly 500 pages the name of Sergeant E E Strong, RAFVR, leapt out at me. Flying as a wireless operator with No.427 Squadron from Leeming, in North Yorkshire, he had died with the rest of the crew of their Halifax bomber on the night of 6th-7th Septamber 1943. Elliott's is the only British grave in the churchyard at Epeautrolles, 20 kms south-west of Chartres, in France; his six fellow crew-members are buried in St Desir War Cemetery near Lisieux, in Normandy. (According to the Larousse encyclopaedia, Lisieux was two-thirds destroyed in 1944.)

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