Jonathan Ives is assisting Pont Saint Martin, near Nantes in France, trace living relatives of the 6 aircrew of Wellington R1374, which crashed on the 8th May 1941. He raised the subject of Peter Verral Read, gunner of that crew. He tells us that he has “traced relatives of all 6 men, though in a number of cases, including Peter, the relations are very distant cousins, with little knowledge of the men.This is predicatable as these 6 men were all young, few had even married and none had children”. In correspondence with the Dorking Advertiser, he had a reply from a cousin in Dorset who put him in contact with another cousin in Australia. Things are hampered by the high number of only children or men with only a single sibling. One of our members, Alan Fox, remembers that when he joined the Wolf Cubs of the 10th Dorking Scout Group in 1941 there was a plaque, commemorating a Peter Verral Read, together with a clock appearing on the end wall inside the Scout Hut which was situated between the Fire Station and St. Martin’s School off West Street. The 10th Dorking no longer exists but the 1st Dorking took over the Hut. Alan’s own uncle Sidney Horace Fox was killed later that year at the start of the Second Battle of El Alamein when his Halifax was shot down near Bar-le-Duc on a bombing raid from Elshingham Wolds to Milan.
Maybe some of our members have recollections of or been told tales of others of the Old Dorkinians who fell in WW2. We would be happy to gather together all such information and place it together in our memorials section. There you may find all the information we currently know about them, when they were killed, where buried etc.
Mike Nicholson – webmaster