‘Brilliant role model' and veteran ‘never imagined' being honoured at 106

South Wales Guardian

14-06-2025

Norman Irwin, described by his friends as inspirational and a brilliant role model, served in north Africa during the Second World War before going on to make a difference in his home town of Coleraine.
He helped to form the Coleraine Winemakers Club, recalling initially using nettles and dandelions, as well as becoming one of the founders of the town's Rotary Club and the Agivey Anglers Association.
Mr Irwin is the oldest person to be recognised in this year's Kings Birthday Honours, and is just one of three recipients over the last 10 years aged 106, as well as being Northern Ireland's oldest man.
He said he was very proud to be recognised with a British Empire Medal (BEM), adding it had come as a big surprise, joking he was 'getting on a bit'.
Born just a few days after the end of the First World War in 1918, Mr Irwin went on to serve in the Second World War, volunteering in April 1939 to join the Coleraine Battery of the Royal Artillery as a gunner.
He described the battlefield in north Africa as stretching thousands of miles and getting chased across the desert by German troops in tanks.
The sand presented a major challenge, he described, in terms of logistics, and he even engineered his own guns when they lost the tools to maintain them.
'We lost the tools for them in the sand, so we made our own – you learned to adapt to it very very quickly, you just had to get on with it,' he said.
'You do what you have to do in times of need.
'We were all volunteers here (in Northern Ireland), we weren't conscripted, so we all just went off en masse as our own decision. We never imagined what it was going to be like.
'People talk about the desert rats, but it didn't really get the same coverage as France.
'The First World War took a lot, and the Second World War took even more, terrible times.'
Mr Irwin said the sheer distances involved in the conflict in north Africa is often what surprises people the most.
'People just didn't understand the distances when they talk about the Germans when they chased us back across north Africa, it was about 1,500 miles,' he said.
'They all think it's a small localised battle, but it wasn't, it was over a 1,500- 2,000-mile stretch.
'When they chased us back across the desert, they had tanks and we didn't have any, we couldn't cope with those, couldn't fight them, the only thing to do was to leave.
'Then we got reorganised and prepared, and we chased them back across again. The armoured divisions arrived once they realised what we were up against.'
He went on to become one of the founding members of the new Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) in October 1942 and he was soon promoted to sergeant.
'I was demobbed at the end of the war and came back home to Northern Ireland, and got a job as an engineer in a local factory and it all went from there,' he said.
'Everything that we did in the forces had an application in industry.'
Back home, Mr Irwin helped form the Coleraine Winemakers club in the early 1960s.
'It was beer and wine, home hobbies at the time were quite the thing, and of course people would say to others, 'what do you think of my wine', so we formed a wine club had competitions for people who made wine out of nettles and dandelions, and all sorts of things we could find in the fields,' he said.
'It was quite potent.
'It moved on from that to a higher level, using grapes.'
Asked about the held esteem he is held in, Mr Irwin responded: 'People say these things, I wouldn't put myself in that category.
'I enjoyed all those things as well, of course.'