Courage

[Carruthers]

I tend not to read the obituary columns of national newspapers as, although not yet in my dotage, I find myself further down life’s road than I would wish; a point brutally rammed home when I made a will earlier this year.

However, my gaze is occasionally drawn to an account of someone of my dad’s generation who served in WW2 with great distinction, returning to civilian life and seemingly just picking up where he left off.

I’m at the herbivorous end of the spectrum so I don’t have any real interest in war, its prosecution or the political motivations behind it, but what I do find interesting is how ordinary men and women acquitted themselves in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

Two lives which may be of interest are those Vernon Coles and Bill Sparks.

Coles was an engineer on midget submarines which attacked German battleships sheltering in Norwegian fjords, returning to civilian life with the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works.

Sparks was a member of a Royal Marines mission to sink a number of cargo ships at Bordeaux. Canoes, each crewed by two Marines, were paddled over eighty miles up the Gironde Estuary under cover of darkness to attach limpet mines to the ships.

Of the ten men who embarked on the mission, only two survived, Sparks being one of them. After the war, he eventually returned to London Transport where he worked as a bus inspector.

Those men displayed enormous courage and each knew what was expected of him and would been thoroughly prepared for his mission.

What I find absolutely astonishing, is the bravery shown by individuals who suddenly find themselves in the most dire of circumstances and act without concern for their own safety.

One such is Joel Halliwell VC, who in WW1 captured a stray German horse and rescued ten wounded men while under heavy fire. I mean him no disservice when I describe him as an ordinary man who, like millions of others, served in WW1.

Earlier this year, The Antiques Roadshow recorded two episodes to commemorate the start of WW1. One sequence was recorded at a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in France where three generations of the Halliwell family were represented.

You can see the relevant section here:

Antiques Roadshow - France.

Bill Harriman, the presenter, is visibly moved at the account of Lance Corporal Halliwell’s bravery.

Surely nobody can endure experiences like those above without being deeply affected in some way or another but, as I said, they returned to civilian life and picked up where they left off.

None of us knows how we’d behave in extremis. Few would willingly volunteer to find out.