Notes from Janet Robinson

A company clerk swapped jobs so that instead of the clerk being called up, Herbert was.  He was called up & set off to fight in the 2nd World War (1940) with the Royal Irish Fusiliers stationed in Ireland at Ballykinlar.  As a driver he joined the R.A.O.C. based at Bury. He was then driving the High Commander around M/cr. Later he set sail to Singapore stopping at Cape Town, but was torpedoed near Singapore.  He was ‘missing presumed dead’ but had been rescued by another ship & taken to Singapore.   At this time the British Army were in retreat to Burma and he was captured in Singapore, and taken to a P.O.W. camp.  He was put to work building the BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER QUAI. 

Whilst he was ‘missing presumed dead’, sadly his wife was killed in 1941when she took a lift in an truck which was involved in an accident.  This meant that the children were ‘orphaned’ and the ‘estate’ & his children were split up amongst family.  Upon his return after the war, weighing only 6st and possessing only a loin cloth, he found that he had lost everything.

Despite this, he survived and married again in 1956.  He lived a reasonably healthy life suffering from recurrent ‘rice belly’ and malaria.  He died suddenly in 1996, aged 86.