D-Day veteran from Basingstoke celebrates 100th birthday

The centenarian, who celebrated his special day on Wednesday, was born in Suffolk before moving to Nottinghamshire where he grew up, and moved to the Basingstoke area in the 1990s, where he has lived ever since.

Corporal Ken Mellor served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, having been conscripted in 1942.

Kenneth Mellor trained for D-Day in Scotland.

A lifelong plumber, Kenneth started learning the tricks of the trade at the age of nine in Mansfield before being conscripted at the age of 20.

He was part of one of final companies to be evacuated off the beach in Dunkirk.

On June 6, 1944, Kenneth sailed back towards the Normandy coast with his comrades for the D-Day landings, after two months of training in Scotland.

Kenneth Mellor trained for D-Day in Scotland.

“We watched the shelling and the smoke rising from the beaches when a German fighter plane machine gunned our ship.

“We didn’t know what we were going in to,” he said, describing how he was part of the second wave of soldiers to land on the beaches.

Though the war ended some 76 years ago, Kenneth’s recount of his six years of service immediately brings him to tears.

Kenneth and Joan in an army jeep, similar to the one he would have driven during the war.

After this scrape, his infantry rerouted to land on Sword Beach at La Breche where they charged into machine-gun fire.

“We managed to get under the ambulance, but there were many casualties.”

He re-joined the remainder of his company in Hermanville, Normandy where Kenneth was in charge of the Advanced Dressing Station to treat the wounded.

Kenneth and Joan were married in 1942.

He was continuously moved to different places throughout Northern France, treating people with truly horrific injuries, before making his way through Belgium, the Netherlands and into Germany.

On VE Day, when Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies, he was in Bremen. But Kenneth clearly does not see his time spent on the front line as one of glory: “It was horrible, horrible, horrible.”

After the war, he spent time in what was then British Mandatory Palestine.

Kenneth returned to France with the Normandy Veterans Association many times, including here when he visited Hermanville cemetery in 1999.

“It was beautiful, but a bit too hot for me.”

He found comfort in the Normandy Veterans’ Association, who would organise annual trips over to France for the next forty years after the war.

His scrap books from his time in the war are a treasure trove, with one page containing a signed letter from Bernard Montgomery, the wily general who outfoxed Rommel during the North Africa campaign.

Kenneth married his wife Joan in 1942. They met when Kenneth was a bell ringer in churches around Mansfield.

Kenneth proudly tells of his wife’s remarkable ancestry, she is related to John Bradshaw, one of the signatories of the execution of King Charles I.

“She was beautiful. She was a machinist, she made curtain and that sort of thing.”

Joan sadly passed away last year, aged 97.

He has two children, Grahame and Michael, three grandchildren and four greatgrandchildren.

When asked to sum up his experience of the war, Kenneth puts it simply and movingly: “I hope we never see anything like that again.”